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Jewish History.org presents Rabbi Baruch Wines: 5,000 years of Jewish history, one video clip at a time. Clip number 55: The Volozhin Yeshiva.
One of the ideas of the Gaon of Vilna had to do with Jewish education. Under the influence of the Enlightenment and under the yoke of Russian oppression, the study of Torah began to decline in the eighteenth century, and certainly at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At that time the Haskalah, the Enlightenment, the rational and almost secular transformation of the Jewish world, took great root within the Jewish world. Secondly, the Chassidic movement emphasized spirit, prayer, community, ethics, social welfare, all of these wonderful Jewish ideas, but to a certain extent at the expense of Jewish scholarship. So the question was: what shall the scholars do in order to create a world of Jewish scholarship?
In 1803, the main disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner, in a small Belarusian village called Volozhin, opened a yeshiva. This yeshiva in Volozhin became the prototype for almost all later yeshivot that existed in the nineteenth, twentieth, and even twenty-first centuries. He wrote a letter to all the rabbis in Lithuania, and he said: "The situation is dire. I am going to do it. I am going to open a school to produce scholars, to produce great leaders, to produce the next generation of rabbis and the heads of yeshivot of spirit. But I need your help. Send me your best students. Send me money. Give me support."
This yeshiva, called the Tree of Life, built from 1803 to 1892, was the main source for all Jewish creativity throughout the Jewish world. Its influence reached far beyond Lithuania and even far beyond the Ashkenazic world. It was not for nothing that Naftali Herz Imber, who later became the poet laureate of the Zionist movement and who himself was at one time a student of the yeshiva, said it is the creative factory of the Jewish people.
Thanks for watching. I'm Baruch Wines. For more on Jewish history, go to jewishhistory.org.