Rebuilding after the War: DP Camps and New Yeshivot

After May 5705 roughly a quarter of a million Jewish refugees were left in Europe with nowhere to return to. They were housed in displaced persons camps — Landsberg, Föhrenwald, Bergen-Belsen. Something strange and powerful happened there: people who had just come out of the death camps posted lists of names on walls, searched for relatives, and married at an extraordinary rate. In 5707 Belsen had the highest birth rate in the world. Schools opened, Yiddish newspapers appeared, and in Munich the 'Survivors' Talmud' was printed — a complete Babylonian Talmud for people who had no books left at all.

A new centre of Torah was built at the same time. Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman of Ponevezh, who had lost his family and all his students in Lithuania, came to Bnei Brak and in 5704 opened the Ponevezh yeshiva on a bare hill; asked why build when there is no one left to study, he answered, 'I am not burying, I am building.' Rabbi Aharon Kotler founded a yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey in 5703 with fourteen students; today thousands learn there. The Chazon Ish became the leading halachic authority of the Land of Israel.

Within one generation the number of Torah students exceeded the prewar figure.