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to tell him, ““Oh, my God, I 
recognize this photo in the 
book. My whole life, that 
was on my mother’s bedside 
table. That was one of sev-
eral women sitting together, 
and one of the women was 
my mother’s sister. One of 
the women in the photo is 
my aunt.” 
Her aunt that she had 
never met, of course; her 
mother had three sisters. 
She didn’t know which of 

the three is in the photo-
graph. No one has identi-
fied the other five women. 
The book ends with the 
poignant request: “If you 
recognize any of the people 
or places in these photos, 
please let us know at: White 
Goat Press, Yiddish Book 
Center, 1021 West Street, 
Amherst, MA 01002, USA, 
or whitegoatpress@yiddish-
bookcenter.org. 

Yeshiva Chochmei Lublin
The Glass Plates of Lublin includes photographs of dignitaries 
laying the cornerstone for the Yeshiva Chochmei Lublin on 
May 22, 1924, and of the Yeshiva’s opening on June 24, 1930. 
At the time, it was among the largest institutions for tradition-
al study of Jewish sources in the world. The building of the 
Yeshiva Chochmei Lublin now houses 190 Jewish refugees 
from Ukraine. 
 Rabbi Meir Shapiro, founder of the Yeshiva, appears with 
other rabbinic leaders in several of the photographs. Rabbi 
Shapiro also originated the popular Daf Yomi project, setting 
up a schedule for Jews to study the same two-sided page 
of Talmud each day, and so to complete learning the entire 
Talmud in more than seven years. Around the world, Talmud 
students celebrated the 13th Siyyum (rejoicing at completing 
the Talmud) in January 2020; one celebration took place in 
Lublin in the building that had held Yeshiva Chochmei Lublin. 
The Yeshiva met in its building in Lublin until the German 
army came to Poland in 1939. The scholars who remained in 
Poland were doomed. Rabbi Moshe Rothenberg, who had 
escaped Poland, became the founding dean of a successor 
Yeshiva Chochmei Lublin, founded in Detroit in 1942. He wel-
comed many refugee scholars who had escaped from Europe. 
Among the refugees who settled in Detroit from Chochmei 
Lublin Yeshiva in Poland Yeshiva were Rabbi Shapiro’s assis-
tant Baruch Elbaum and Rabbi Itzhak Kuperman. 

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