Monday 10 June 2013

How Lakewood, N.J., Is Redefining What It Means To Be Orthodox  in America

By David Landes
June 5, 2013--Tablet Magazine
«...The much-repeated theme of the many encomia to the yeshiva's late founder was that Kotler, a refugee from Eastern Europe, fundamentally changed what it meant to be an Orthodox Jew in America. Kotler insisted that it was possible to establish in the treife medina—a social environment inhospitable to the values of Torah study and Orthodox Judaism—a community of scholars whose purpose in life would be the study of Torah "for its own sake," without concern for livelihood, and at the level of the great yeshivas of Eastern Europe destroyed in the Holocaust. But for the arrival of Kotler, the narrative goes, serious Torah study could never have developed in America.

The small yeshiva Kotler founded with 14 students in 1942 is now a mega-yeshiva with 6,600 students and satellite institutions spread throughout North America and beyond. ...»
Tablet Magazine


Best Regards,
RRW

1 comment:

Avraham said...

Lakewood in Los Angeles seems to me to have an attitude problem. Though Reb Wasserman welcomed to LA, they turned out to be very destructive influence. Learning Torah is one thing but Lakewood is something completely different. It is cult plain and simple. Their gurus they call by a different name but that what he is anyway. It is not the same as a regular Litvak yeshiva.