In his second lecture for Torah in Motion on Rabbi Moses Kunitz, professor Marc B. Shapiro says: “Simcha says that naming the yeshiva Ohr Somayach is good marketing. Why? I can almost guarantee you that almost 100% of all the students who begin studying at the yeshiva have never heard of Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk. These people are baalei teshuva (penitents). They don’t know anything.”
“If you know the kiruv world, Ohr Somayach is more of a dour place than Aish HaTorah, which is all about fun and rejoicing and happiness. All you have to do is to look at their nonsensical videos, which annoy me to no end. If you’ve seen the Rosh Hashanah video, as though any shul in the world you go to you’re going to find people dancing like that guy on the motorcycle.
“It annoys me to no end because you have to be honest and tell people that Rosh Hashanah can be boring. It’s a long service. We sit there but that’s part of the struggle. We don’t do this often, just twice a year, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. To try to bring in the non-religious by making it seem that if you go to shul you’ll find people dancing like Purim, like that guy on the motorcycle. I think that video is disgraceful. You’ll never find Ohr Somayach something like that. Ohr Somayach is a standard Lithuanian yeshiva. They have limits beyond which they don’t believe in going. They don’t honor inter-married people. It’s much more serious.”
