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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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