From the Mir to Now
The story of one family across two catastrophes — and why it led to JDF.
Rav Yeruchom Levovitz
In the annals of Torah scholarship, few titles have become so completely identified with one person as the title The Mashgiach. Among the hundreds of students who passed through the Mir Yeshiva in the interwar years, and among the thousands who inherited their tradition, one did not need to specify which mashgiach was meant. "The Mashgiach" meant one man: Rav Yeruchom Levovitz.
Born in 1873 in Lyuban, Belarus, Rav Yeruchom served as the Mashgiach Ruchani — spiritual supervisor — of the Mir Yeshiva from 1910 until his death in 1936. Under his guidance, the Mir became not merely a center of Talmudic learning but a school of character. His approach was rooted in the mussar tradition — the rigorous discipline of self-examination, ethical refinement, and personal responsibility. He gave regular discourses twice a week in the yeshiva, and private talks in his home on Friday nights. Students recalled that no matter how large the audience, he always seemed to be speaking only to himself.
He is buried in the town of Mir, Belarus. His teachings survive in Da'as Chochma U'Mussar and Da'as Torah — works that remain a staple of yeshiva libraries and Orthodox households to this day. His students went on to become the leading Torah figures of the post-war generation. Rav Shlomo Wolbe, one of the foremost mussar masters of the twentieth century, testified that a single discourse of the Mashgiach had given him the strength to withstand everything the years ahead would demand.
Rav Yeruchom died in June 1936 — three years before the world changed forever.
The Only Yeshiva to Survive the Holocaust Intact
In 1940, as Nazi forces swept through Eastern Europe, the Mir Yeshiva — by then 300 students and faculty — faced annihilation. What followed was one of the most extraordinary rescue operations of the Holocaust.
A Dutch consul in Kaunas, Jan Zwartendijk, quietly issued destination permits to the Caribbean island of Curaçao — a Dutch territory that required no entry visa. Armed with these permits, a young yeshiva student named Moshe Zupnik walked into the office of the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, and asked for transit visas — not just for himself, but for the entire Mir Yeshiva. Sugihara's superiors in Tokyo had rejected the request. Sugihara issued the visas anyway, spending sixteen to eighteen hours a day handwriting them, even stamping blank sheets of paper for those who had no proper documents. He continued writing visas from his hotel window as he was being escorted out of the country.
In groups of forty to fifty, the students traveled by Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, then by ship to Kobe, Japan, and eventually to Shanghai, where they waited out the war studying Torah in a synagogue built by a Jewish merchant on the other side of the world. They arrived in Shanghai with nothing. They left as the Mir Yeshiva — intact, unbroken, and carrying everything that mattered.
The Mir Yeshiva was the only European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact.
In 1984, Yad Vashem awarded Chiune Sugihara the title Righteous Among the Nations for his actions. His son was later received at the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem with a standing ovation.
Among those saved was Rav Avraham Levovitz — son of the Mashgiach — who carried his father's legacy to America.
Batya Reich
Batya Reich was born in 1923 in Sighet, in the Carpathian region of Romania. She was deported during the Holocaust and survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She was liberated in 1945 and recorded in the survivor registries of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Sighet was also the hometown of Elie Wiesel. In his memoir Night, Wiesel writes of a family member in the household — Batia Reich — present on the night the warning came that went unheeded. She survived. He survived. Most of Sighet did not.
She came to America, settled in Brooklyn, and built a life. She married Rav Avraham Levovitz. Together, they raised a family whose descendants became part of the generation that rebuilt Orthodox Jewish life in the United States.
By the time Batya Reich passed away in Jerusalem a few years ago, she had produced over one hundred grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
That number is its own answer to the Holocaust.
Two Streams of Survival
Two streams of survival — one that escaped through a miracle of rescue, one that endured through a miracle of will — converged in the marriage of Rav Avraham Levovitz and Batya Reich.
The family that emerged from that union helped rebuild Torah institutions in America, publishing the Mashgiach's writings so that his teachings would not be lost, establishing yeshivas, and ensuring that what had survived the fire would not merely endure but flourish.
One generation later, their grandchild founded the Jewish Defense Fund.
Not Just History — A Mandate
JDF was not built by someone who read about antisemitism in a book. It was built by someone who carries it in their family memory — and who decided that the appropriate response to that inheritance is not grief, but action.
The mussar tradition that Rav Yeruchom Levovitz embodied teaches that character is built through difficulty, that responsibility cannot be delegated, and that the welfare of the community falls on every individual. JDF is that teaching applied to the present moment.
Antisemitic incidents in the United States reached a record high in 2024 — 9,354 documented incidents, a 344% increase over five years, according to the ADL Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2024. The organizations the community relied on in the past are often not rising to meet this moment. Someone who knows what it costs when no one steps up has decided to step up.
עם ישראל חי — The Jewish people live.