In a lecture on rabbinic biographies for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: It was two of my publications that brought this issue front and center in the Orthodox world… I wrote a doctorate on Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg (1884-1966). I was in Isadore Twersky‘s department. No one had ever written a biography about a figure who’d lived so recently…
Torah study at its highest is conducted in the haredi world. Every time I publish on the Sephorim blog, I get more emails from people in places in the haredi world like Bnai Brak…
Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg was friendly with Samuel Atlas, a Slobodka bochur (yeshiva student) who becomes a Torah sage and then left Orthodoxy and went to teach at Hebrew Union College. He was one of these lost souls. He didn’t know where to make his place. He was Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg‘s alter ego.
I wanted to see the letters. I called up Samuel Atlas’s widow. She was about 93 in about 1989. She told me that all the letters Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg sent her husband were kept in a closed section of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and no one is allowed to see them until after her passing.
I knew this material was going to be groundbreaking. We don’t have any other case in history where we have private correspondence in detail of a gadol Yisrael writing someone no longer in the rabbinic world. Perhaps the closest thing is Rabbi Yaakov Emden‘s memoir.
I go to JTS and go upstairs and I ask for the collection and he calls Professor Yaakov Shmeltzer (sp?) who tells him where it is. They bring it out to me. A thick manila folder. I sit down. I open it up. There’s a letter saying this is a gift from Mrs Atlas and is not to be seen without her permission. Was I to close it up and give it back? I read through them and was blown away.
The first thing I did when I left the library was to call Mrs Atlas. She gave me permission to use them. I have exclusive rights to use them.
