Mir Yeshiva
It was founded in 1815, in Mir, Belarus, and remained in operation there until World War I, when it moved to Poltava, Ukraine, under the leadership of Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Finkel, son of the renowned Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel, the "Alter of Slobodka". In 1921, the yeshiva was moved back to its facilities in Mir, where it remained until the fall of Poland in 1939 (see Polish September Campaign).
Even from its earliest days, the Mir Yeshiva was well known as a center of Jewish scholarship. Although many of the foreign-born students left when the Soviet army invaded from the east, the yeshiva continued in operation, on a reduced scale, until the approaching Nazi armies caused the leaders of the yeshiva to uproot the yeshiva community and move to Keidan, Lithuania. As the Nazi armies continued to push to the east, the leaders of the yeshiva eventually fled across Siberia by train, going so far east as to set up two different academies in the Far East, first in Kobe, Japan, and eventually in (Japanese-controlled) Shanghai, China, from 1941 until the end of World War II. The heroism of the Japanese consul-general in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who issued several thousand travel visas to Jews, permitting them to flee to the east, has been the subject of several books.
Following the end of the war, the majority of the Jews living in Shanghai left for Palestine and the United States. Among them were the survivors from the Mir Yeshiva, who re-established the yeshiva, this time with two campuses, one in Jerusalem, Israel and the other as the Mirrer Yeshiva Central Institute in Brooklyn, New York City.
Reference
- Zinowitz, M. Hebrew: תולדות ישיבת מיר (Toldot Yeshivat Mir, Hebrew: The History of Mir Yeshiva). Tel Aviv, 1981.
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