In his second lecture on R. Meir Simcha of Dvinsk for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: “I am in possession of a lengthy autobiography of an important rosh yeshiva who is no longer alive. This autobiography can never be published by any press in the haredi world because it is honest. The rosh yeshiva tells you about his dealings with various gadolim. It was given to me and I was told I could whatever I wanted with it. The rosh yeshiva wanted it to appear in print.”
“It will all come out. It needs to be edited.”
“The things people send me. They don’t want to publicize it but they want me to publicize it and for the most part I don’t mind.”
“I’ll say this now. I know it’s going to get picked up. There’s someone, a nice guy who I find interesting, who listens and for the last few years, he’s been excerpting Marc Shapiro’s greatest lines, or what he thinks are my greatest lines. He puts them all up on the internet.
“As those who listen to me know, we’ll have a whole hour shiur (Torah talk), and there will be all sorts of good history and stories and Torah, and there’ll be some strange and interesting stories, and he excerpts it.”
“There’s a main and there’s a secondary [in every class] and though the secondary is definitely interesting, the main part is the history. I think people who just see the excerpts think I’m sitting here and I just tell all sorts of stories because he’s only interested in excerpting the stories. Some of the stories are very good and I’m happy he does this. Someone created a Wikipedia page for me and there’s even a link there to all these stories. It’s an unbalanced thing.”
“I’m sure this is going to appear on his website. And that’s fine. Whatever I say, I know it can be put out there and I appreciate the effort he takes to put this online.”
“The only time I didn’t put something [online]. Someone sent me a picture of a great Hasidic rebbe [Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam] swimming and he said that in his Hasidic group, they tell stories of when this rebbe was young. They talk about this rebbe as though all he did was learn and here’s a wonderful picture… Although I’ll mention it, I won’t put the picture online because especially in that world it’s not tznious (modest) to see the rebbe without his shirt on.”
“It’s [a picture] of a young teenager swimming with an older hasid but it’s a violation of privacy. None of us want pictures of us [shown publicly] unless we’re in perfect shape.”
“The Chazon Ish loved going swimming.”
“I’m sure it will get out. In today’s day and age, everything gets out. There’s no more privacy unfortunately. Everything is put online eventually.”
