Episode 225 - The Tzemach Tzedek's War Against the Kidnappers and the Maskilim

00:01 Continuing the story of the Tzemach Tzedek, the... the Tzemach Tzedek’s fight against the maskilim was also a fight against the kidnappers, known in Yiddish as the “khapers.” These kidnappers would simply come to Jewish families and abduct their children, whether secretly or openly. They would tie the children up with ropes and do one of two things: either bring them and sell them to the Russian army, or sell them to Jewish communities that were required to supply a certain quota of children. Those communities would then buy the abducted children and hand them over to... um, the Russian army. The Tzemach Tzedek fought the kidnappers. We have already told this story from another angle; now we will tell it from this one. When the government of Nicholas I imposed the Cantonist decree on Jews as well, and there was great turmoil among the Jewish people, the Tzemach Tzedek organized a special committee with three divisions. One division looked into the situation of the communities and helped them reduce the number of people they had to supply to the army. A second division worked to redeem the children and founded the Chevras Techiyas Hameisim, the “Society for the Revival of the Dead.” A third sent special people to the gathering places of Jewish children who had been abducted and conscripted into the army, to encourage and strengthen them to remain faithful Jews. In 5602, the governor of the city of Vitebsk learned, following a denunciation by a Jewish kidnapper named Yisroel Yehudah from the city of Bykhov, that the Tzemach Tzedek had sent the outstanding young man Aharon of Belinitch to all the communities in the provinces of Mogilev and Vitebsk. In those communities, most of the communal leaders were chassidim, and he was to have them put an end to the kidnappers’ wrongdoing and excommunicate them, because the kidnappings had started again after a two-year break. The governor of Vitebsk informed the minister of the interior. This was why the Tzemach Tzedek was summoned to Petersburg for the first time, in the summer of 5603: they wanted to bring charges against him and portray him as a rebel against the government. But so their intention would not be obvious, the government ministers devised a plan and summoned

02:54 three other Jews as well: the gaon Rabbi Yitzchok of Volozhin, Rabbi Halperin, and the maskil Betzalel Stern. That was the first rabbinical conference. What happened at that conference is known and recorded elsewhere. From then on, the government increased its surveillance of the Tzemach Tzedek and had him watched, but none of it helped. The Tzemach Tzedek paid them no attention and did what he thought was right. He sent people to strengthen those serving in the army so they would keep the Torah and mitzvos. He sent emissaries to redeem the Cantonists and corresponded about putting an end to the kidnappers. Then, in 5605, disaster struck: the chossid Chaim Yehoshua of Kletsk was caught in the village of Kastravan [?], near Kazan, deep inside Russia. Chaim Yehoshua was working there to redeem the Cantonists, paying full price for them. This was how Chaim Yehoshua worked: he stayed in Kazan for four months, and because his business dealings were with villagers, he knew their language well. He would travel from village to village to redeem the children. Some of the children would escape after being handed over, but there were others he had to take care of and find a place of refuge for. The chossid Reb Chaim Yehoshua carried out his work with great cunning. When he arrived in a village, he would first buy some of its produce—wool, flax, or the like—to make it appear that he was a merchant. Then, in passing, he would ask about the children there. One day, while he was in one of the villages, a Jew arrived who spoke Yiddish with a Volhynian accent. He, too, supposedly came to trade in the village’s wool and flax, and he befriended the chossid Chaim Yehoshua. In his innocence, Chaim Yehoshua trusted him. They spent about a month together, while that Jew lay in wait and followed Chaim Yehoshua’s movements until he learned everything about his work redeeming the Cantonists. At the time, Chaim Yehoshua had eight children with him whom he still did not know how or where to place, and they were with him in Kazan. Some stayed at his lodging,

05:39 and some wandered around the city asking for food. At the suggestion of his companion—that spy, who had also been helping him redeem and place the Cantonists—he found places for six of the children in Kazan. Chaim Yehoshua decided to take the other two with him. On the very day he intended to set off for home, three armed soldiers suddenly arrived with that Volhynian Jew and put Chaim Yehoshua in chains. When the children saw the soldiers, they fled for their lives and alerted their friends in the city. They all disappeared, and no one knew where they had gone. But Chaim Yehoshua was arrested and taken from prison to prison in shackles for seven months, until he was brought to Vitebsk. The Tzemach Tzedek then sent a special letter to the chossid Reb Ze’ev Wolf, asking him to take care of Chaim Yehoshua’s case and save him from imprisonment and, G-d forbid, the possibility of severe punishment. The first Jewish soldiers in Russia were the Cantonists. As we said, they were abducted as young children and trained to be soldiers. The kidnappings began early in the Tzemach Tzedek’s leadership. He was in contact with the leaders of the communities, who were required by the government to hand children over to the army. Among those communal leaders... some did it because they had no choice, while others were corrupt and dishonest. The wicked Nicholas deliberately ordered that the children be sent far away, to remote towns, so that they would forget their Jewishness. But the Tzemach Tzedek sent special emissaries to those remote places to redeem the abducted children. One way of redeeming them was to register them as missing—that is, as having died. In fact, many of the children did die because of the hardships of the long journey. That is why the Tzemach Tzedek’s effort was called the Chevras Techiyas Hameisim, the “Society for the Revival of the Dead.” Nachman, the Tzemach Tzedek’s attendant, had also been one of the Cantonists. He was abducted at the age of seven and a half and later redeemed in the way we described. In the days of the Tzemach Tzedek, there was a man named Elazar Moshe. When he

08:21 was seven or eight years old, he was abducted to serve among the Cantonists. He had very little education, but despite the terrible suffering he endured in the army, he remained a Jew. When he grew up, they made him a soldier. He lived in Babinovitch. He was sent to serve in Homel, and there he would occasionally enter the beis midrash and listen to the students’ lessons in Chumash, Nach, or Mishnayos. He would also hear teachings of Chassidus. Later, Elazar Moshe was assigned to guard a munitions depot. As he stood at his post, he would say, “The Shechinah is in exile—oy!” He was a simple man. The Tzemach Tzedek felt in his heart how Elazar Moshe said, while standing guard, “The Shechinah is in exile—oy!” The Tzemach Tzedek said of him: The Shpoler Zeide said of the holy Ruzhiner, when he dressed him on his way to cheder, that he was rolling up a Torah scroll. So, too, anyone who encountered Elazar Moshe encountered a Torah scroll, and the Tzemach Tzedek would rise before him. The work of redeeming these souls carried enormous responsibility. Besides being extremely costly, it involved great danger: one could be tried as a rebel against the government. Nevertheless, for twelve years no one other than those involved knew what was being done. When the spy Ginzburg visited Vitebsk, he was among those who came and went from the home of the gaon and chossid Reb Aizik and from his shul. Rabbi Yeshayahu, Reb Aizik’s son, was an exceptionally learned scholar in both the revealed and hidden parts of Torah and was familiar with most works of Jewish philosophy. Yet by nature he was foolish and gullible. Because he was Reb Aizik’s only son, he also knew about communal affairs, and it was from him that Ginzburg learned about several of them, including the Tzemach Tzedek’s work against the kidnappers, the rescue of the children, and the efforts to encourage those serving in the army. Now let us return to the fight against the maskilim and the Haskalah movement. The maskilim wanted to lead Jews away from the path of Judaism and sever their connection with Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and also with the Torah

11:19 Of course. At that gathering—the gathering of the maskilim we mentioned—they gave a detailed presentation on the state of the spread of enlightenment in Russia and the obstacles their propaganda was encountering. They spoke at length about Russian Jews’ simple faith in the beliefs instilled in them by their teachers, yeshiva heads, and rabbis, and also about the chassidim, the most steadfast of whom were the Chabad chassidim and their leader, the Rebbe of Lubavitch. They said that, knowing the situation on the ground as they did, they needed outside help to make their efforts to spread enlightenment in Petersburg succeed. Knowing the conventions of the German maskilim, the Russian maskilim could not ask them to inform on the Tzemach Tzedek. Instead, they devised a way to ask the German maskilim to persuade German Jewish newspapers to print the notices and articles they would send them. In other words, they did not count on the German maskilim to inform for them, but decided to publish their denunciations as notices in the newspapers. At that same gathering, the maskilim also drafted a denunciation to the Third Department—the secret police, what we would call the Shin Bet—in Petersburg. They wrote that the Tzemach Tzedek was sending undercover agents and a band of agitators to incite the Jewish cantonist soldiers to rebel against the government. They claimed that these agents were urging Jewish children not to obey the tsar’s wish that they attend Christian schools, and threatening those who studied alongside Christian children with the sword. The informers also recommended a thorough investigation by expert undercover agents to uncover the secrets of the Tzemach Tzedek and his associates, whom they accused of rebelling against the crown. There was a Jew called Hershele Choshech—that was what they called him in Vilna. He was a scribe: he made his living writing petitions in Polish and Russian. He was a corrupt informer who would do anything reprehensible for a silver coin. One of the Vilna maskilim approached Hershele Choshech and promised him money if he would inform on the Tzemach Tzedek. Just then, Hershele Choshech happened to be in the town of Krupki, in the Mohilev district. There he befriended two Jews of his own sort, and then they

14:17 wrote a denunciation of the Tzemach Tzedek. In it, they portrayed him as opposing Jews’ service in the army, warning the chassidim not to let their sons serve, and sending special emissaries to rebuke community leaders for handing Jewish children over for military service. Hershele Choshech sent the denunciation in three... three copies: one to the governor of the Mohilev district, one to the governor-general in Vitebsk, and one to the Third Department in Petersburg. For this deed he was paid by the maskil Nissan Rosenthal, who generously gave him twenty-five rubles. Well, after Hershele Choshech received his payment, he went to one of the chassidim and told him that he knew for certain that someone had informed on the Tzemach Tzedek. If they paid him enough, he said, he would bring a copy of the denunciation with all its details. That chossid paid Hershele Choshech the amount he demanded, and Hershele gave him a copy of the denunciation and told him it had been sent to the three places mentioned. The maskilim in Vilna wrote a detailed article in German about the great joy of Russian Jews over the goodness and kindness the Russian tsar was showing the country’s citizens, including the Jews. They wrote that the government was acting for the Jews’ benefit by establishing schools for Jewish children with expert, trained teachers, and went on at length about the Jews’ great joy on hearing this good news. They said that, by order of the mighty emperor, the benevolent government had already taken the first steps. But sadly, they claimed, all Jews were being harmed by the fierce opposition of those who clung to old ways and superstitions, led by the leader of the Chabad chassidim, Rebbe Schneersohn. He was conducting a major campaign, they said, to thwart the tsar’s kindness to the Jews. They sent their article to the editor of Der Israelit in Frankfurt for publication and asked the German maskilim to recommend that the newspaper print it,

16:55 so that it would serve as a foundation for their great work of bringing the light of enlightenment to the Jews of Russia. Later, when the Riga community was considering appointing a German-style rabbi and preacher, Shlomo, son of Dr. Avraham of Riga, informed Lubavitch about the proceedings of that meeting of the Riga community. So when Dr. Lilienthal arrived at their invitation, everything he intended to do to promote German-style practices in Riga was already known. Later, when it became known that he planned to visit Prince Lichtenburg[?], Tsar Nicholas’s son-in-law, about spreading enlightenment among the Jews, the committee of communal activists in Petersburg was instructed to follow Lilienthal when he came to Petersburg. In this way, the committee learned of everything Dr. Lilienthal said and proposed and reported it to Lubavitch. They also reported on the Society of Friends of Light and Enlightenment, founded by Dr. Rotenberg in Berdichev, his deputy the maskil Mapu in Kovno, and the maskil Shlomo Shvad in Brisk.