Page 58 - HaMizrachi Sukkot 5784 North America

A Sukkot Meeting

that Changed History

When Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever met

Baron Edmond de Rothschild

Odelia Glausiusz

rom 1881 to 1882, pogroms raged center of Lithuanian Jews. A brilliant stu- land in Israel “is considered by our sages
through the Russian empire. dent, he was ordained a rabbi at the age to gain for the individual a share in the
Thousands of Jewish homes were of eighteen, although he initially refused world to come and the commandment to
Fdestroyed, families were reduced to practice this calling and worked as a buy land even overrides a shevut (a form
to poverty and large numbers of men, flax merchant for five years. Eventually, of rabbinic prohibition) on Shabbat.” In
women and children were badly injured. he became rabbi of Radom in Poland, and his eyes, resettling the land of Israel was
Exhausted from his efforts to help the tens was later elected to the more auspicious not only needed to provide a safe haven
of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled post of Bialystok. Moved to practical Zion- for Jews, but a religious imperative. It was
across the Russian border to Galicia, a ist labor by the pogroms of 1881, he was in this spirit that he made the journey to
weary, venerable rabbi arrived at Baron instrumental in organizing the then-na- Baron Rothschild’s door during Sukkot of
Edmund de Rothschild’s magnificent Paris scent Chibbat Zion movement in Warsaw 1882.
home. He gazed up at the imposing doors – one of only a handful of rabbis involved
of Rothschild’s residence and steeled him- in a movement dominated by secularists. Rothschild was the third son of James
Mayer de Rothschild, head of the Roth-
self to act. Mohilever’s involvement in this movement schild family branch in France. As a young
Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever was born in 1824 ran deeper than a need to find a safe haven adult, Edmond de Rothschild had a keen
in a village near Vilna, the intellectual for Jews. He wrote that the act of buying interest in subjects of the humanities

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