Mir yeshiva (Brooklyn)

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Not to be confused with Mir yeshiva (Poland).

Not to be confused with Mir yeshiva (Jerusalem).

The Mir yeshiva or Yeshivas Mir (Hebrew: ישיבת מיר‎), commonly known as the "Mirrer Yeshiva" or "The Mir", is the name of a major Haredi yeshiva located in Brooklyn, New York. Its current Rosh Yeshiva is Rabbi Shmuel Berenbaum.

1 History
2 Notable Mir alumni
3 See also
4 References
5 External link

[edit] History

See Mir yeshiva (Poland)

The original Mirrer yeshiva was founded in 1815, in Mir, Belarus, and remained in operation there until 1914. With the outbreak of [[World War the yeshiva moved to Poltava, Ukraine, under the leadership of Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Finkel, son of the legendary Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel (the Alter of Slobodka), and son-in-law of Rabbi Elya Boruch Kamai, his renowned predecessor. In 1921, the yeshiva moved back to its original facilities in Mir, where it remained until Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (see Invasion of Poland) marking the beginning of the Holocaust.Although many of the foreign-born students left when the Soviet army invaded from the east, the yeshiva continued to operate, albeit on a reduced scale, until the approaching Nazi armies caused the leaders of the yeshiva to move the entire yeshiva community to Keidan, Lithuania.As the Nazi armies continued to push to the east, the yeshiva as a whole eventually fled across Siberia by train to the Far East, and finally reopened in Kobe, Japan in 1941. Several smaller yeshivos managed to escape alongside the Mir, and, despite the difficulties involved, the overseers of the Mirrer yeshiva undertook full responsibility for their support, distributing funds and securing quarters and food for all the students. A short time later, the yeshiva relocated again, to (Japanese-controlled) Shanghai, China, where they remained until the end of World War II. The heroism of the Japanese consul-general in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who issued several thousand travel visas to Jews, permitting them to flee to the east, has been the subject of several books.

Following the end of the war, the majority of the Jewish refugees from Shanghai ghetto left for Palestine and the United States. Among them were the survivors from the Mir yeshiva, who re-established the yeshiva, this time with two campuses, one in Jerusalem, Israel (Mir (Jerusalem)) and this one in Brooklyn, New York.