Pinsk

It was marsh which cut off the western, Polish civilisation from the eastern, Russian civilisation, and was the main geographical cause of that sharp division in culture which has affected the whole of later European history.

We may say that the Russian Orthodox Church and the last revolution would neither have been, save for the Pinsk marshes.

To take lesser examples, we can see today the way in which even our modern ways avoid marsh.

The large district of Gargano in southern Italy has remained largely isolated through marsh upon its flanks.

But all the Danish attack on Sussex, such as it was, and it was very slight, came from the sea.

Another very conspicuous example of the breakdown of the road and the political effect thereof is the chaos you get in the Balkan Peninsula after the decay of the great Roman trunk roads.

If the Greek Church is today separate from the Latin Church to the west, it is due not only to the obstacle of the Pinsk marshes in the north, but to the gradual decline in the south of the main artery between Durazzo and Constantinople.

For centuries, old and new Rome communicated by the great trunk road down to Brundisium, and then across the narrow sea to Dryacium and Byzantium.

The rabbi has a big program in every shul.

My father-in-law, Zechan Lev Racha, learned in Europe in the Miri Yeshiva, and he came from the city of Pinsk.

So when he came back after Pesach, he came back to the yeshiva, so the mashgirch and the yeshiva, Rabbi Yerucham Levavetz, asked him, did he have a chance to talk to the rabbi in Pinsker, the big tamachachem was the rabbi.

So he asked him, did you have a chance to talk to the rabbi in learning during Pesach? He says, no.

He says, you didn't.

In Europe, it was different.

It took a week sometimes to get from Minsk to Pinsk, so therefore you needed this time, or you didn't go home for Shabboses during the long winters month.

Now, the idea of getting off two weeks before Pesach, the week of Pesach, and a week after Pesach, just as an example, and then three months later, another three weeks, I think is absurd.

Do you agree with me?

And this group of Novardokers founds this Kolel in partnership with the Chazon Ish.

Now, of course, also the Chazon Ish's brother-in-law is the Steipler, Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, who's not only a student of Novardok, he was a Rebbe in Novardok in Pinsk, which was one of the four main branches in Poland before the war.

And when he moves to, um, Eretz Yisrael in the 1930s, the Steipler is a Rebbe in the Bnei Brak Novardok.

So he's still Novardok, right? So there's this...