With tens of thousands of people and families evacuated from the south near Gaza from the north of Israel, in a severe dislocation, many people are interested to hear about traditional Judaism.

The direct meeting with the relocated families, a large number of them being far from Torah and mitzvos, shows them as feeling that the firm ground of their lives has become like a rug pulled out from under their feet. This situation has produced many moving stories and a tremendous return to roots. Now, they too realize "that we have no one upon whom to lean except for our Father in Heaven."

The awakening in the populace is an undeniable fact. This can verily be testified by the range of outreach people working in this field of drawing in those Jewish souls to their Heavenly Father. These thousands of activists surely testify that the people out there are seeking to know, learn and find out firsthand what it is all about. These are like thorns in the eyes of the anti-forces which touted the ideal that "Israel is like all the nations."

An American teacher published a clip in which he displayed textbooks of Palestinian children and their content. In the first grade, the children learn arithmetic by counting the shahidim suicide heroes throughout the Intifadah. In the third grade, they learn that Jerusalem is not sacred to the Jews. In the fifth grade they are taught that Jews are the enemies of Islam, while terrorists and Nazi devotees are to be venerated. In the sixth grade the students are taught that a Palestinian state is meant to stretch from the sea to the river...

This major series of articles about the heroic rosh yeshiva HaRav Moshe Schneider whose talmidim, both Ashkenaz and Sephardic, went on to great achievements, was first published in 1994.

Part II

In the first part, we learned of HaRav Schneider's growth and early education, and how he wound up in the German city of Memel. He had a difficult time securing an appropriate shidduch, and it was the Chofetz Chaim himself who helped.

If in heaven they have a special department for those courageous Torah disseminators who established yeshivos in spiritually empty vicinities against mighty odds, Rav Schneider will have an eminent place there.

And if there is a special department for the brave-souled who cried out, "Give me Yavne and her wise men!" at a time of bitter destruction — Rav Schneider will have a distinguished spot there.

And if there is a special department for those who revived Torah study at a time when it was almost lost and forgotten—Rav Schneider will be in the front row there too.

Rav Schneider was truly among the main disseminators of Torah in the last century. An unusual and dynamic individual who transplanted Torah and made it flourish in spiritual wastelands where no one believed it was possible, he did the painstaking groundwork that enabled the barren atmosphere in England and France to give way to the dozens of yeshivos, religious institutions and frum communities that are in existence today.

HaRav Schneider was a man whose entire focus was in the yeshivos which he established, and in his love for Torah, for which he lived. He was not well-known in the various cities where he resided, and, in keeping with his modest personality, his accomplishments for Torah were not fully appreciated in his lifetime. But the love for Torah and mussar which he instilled in his students produced mighty talmidim who changed the face of postwar European Jewry.

He erected his yeshivos in places that defied logic. When his yeshiva was forced to disband or close, he tirelessly set it up again somewhere else. His institutions seem a bit like a house of cards that collapses again and again, but his reservoirs of bitochon and mesiras nefesh stood him in good stead to mobilize his next initiative.

Starting a Yeshiva in Memel

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