Place
Mir מיר
A small town in Belarus whose yeshiva left the war whole — and survived whole.
The Mir yeshiva opened in 1815 and by the twentieth century was among the largest in Lithuania. It taught the Volozhin way: long terms, independent analysis, mussar in the daily order.
In 1939 the yeshiva left Mir for Vilna, and from there across Russia to Japan and Shanghai — some three hundred people, not breaking off study on any leg of the journey. After the war it was rebuilt in Jerusalem and New York and remains among the largest yeshivas in the world; in all of them they learn as they learned in Mir.
On the timeline
5700 · 1940 CEThe Rescue of the Mir Yeshiva: Vilna, Kobe, Shanghai5701 · 1941 CEThe End of the Yeshiva World of Eastern Europe5706 · 1946 CERebuilding after the War: DP Camps and New Yeshivot
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Ha'amek She'elah — a specimen of the Volozhin–Mir analysis these yeshivas taught by
Basis: documents and evidence.