Rabbi Hillel Pevzner, who founded the first Jewish day school in post-World War II Paris and was awarded the National Order of the Legion of Honor – France’s highest civilian distinction – passed away Thursday. The Chabad-Lubavitch emissary, noted Talmudic scholar and sought-after Jewish legal authority was 85.
Forcefully orphaned at a young age from his father – whose dedication to strengthening Jewish life in the Soviet Union ran afoul of Communist authorities – Pevzner was known for his own self-sacrifice in providing a Jewish education to Parisian children. The Sinai-Lubavitch Educational Complex he opened in 1992 today serves thousands of students.
Pevzner was born in 1922 to Rabbi Avraham Baruch and Alte Pevzner in Minsk, Belarus, where the couple had been sent by the Sixth Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, to strengthen Jewish life. The Sixth Rebbe wrote that he chose the rabbi because he needed an emissary who would look out for the affairs of the local Lubavitch community without any concern for his personal interest. Avraham Baruch Pevzner fit the bill and carried out his mission by organizing Torah classes in each of Minsk’s more than 100 synagogues, as well as serving as a spiritual guide for the city’s Lubavitch Chasidim.
But in 1930, Soviet authorities cracked down on Jewish observance in the city after an American rabbi told U.S. journalists that he witnessed Minsk officials treating local Jews harshly. Avraham Baruch Pevzner was one of 30 rabbis arrested in the purge, having been accused of proffering anti-Soviet propaganda and working for United States agents.
The elder Pevzner was jailed for a short period of time, which he took as a warning to cease his activism on behalf of the Jewish community. True to the Sixth Rebbe’s summation of his character, he refused to stop his activities. When news came of his planned re-arrest, he fled Minsk.
Forced by the authorities to themselves leave Minsk, the family eventually reunited with the rabbi and moved to Kharkov, where Pevzner was again active in strengthening Judaism. In 1939, however, the police arrested the rabbi and three other Lubavitch leaders. It was the last time Hillel Pevzner saw his father.
After the patriarch’s arrest, the family went to a suburb of Moscow, where Alte Pevzner reasoned it would be easier to provide a Jewish education for her children.
Example of Self-Sacrifice
Much time passed before the family learned of the father’s fate: He was imprisoned, and nearly died during Passover, because he refused to eat any religiously-prohibited foods. His cell mates rationed their own sugar and gave the majority of it to the rabbi. The non-Jewish prisoners, meanwhile, waited by the window for night to come in order to inform the weak man that the eight-day holiday had ended, so that they could give him their bread.
He was later transferred to Kazakhstan, where the guards confiscated all of his belongings, including his prayer shawl and tefillin. Pevzner protested by starving himself until they returned the holy items a few days later. When he was finally able to once again don the tefillin, he was overcome by emotion and fainted. A short time later, he became ill and passed away in the hospital with his wife – who had left Moscow to join him – by his bedside.
Alte Pevzner’s promise to her dying husband was to continue to provide a Jewish education for their children. Refusing to allow her son to help support the family, she sent Hillel Pevzner to the underground Lubavitch school system, which maintained floating institutions all across Eastern Europe. The young Pevzner learned in schools in Zhitomir, Ukraine, and Baronovitch, Belarus.
One of his teachers reportedly thanked Pevzner’s mother profusely for giving her son the opportunity to continue his studies. The teacher told her that his brilliance would one day place him in the realm of the great Torah scholars.
“We would learn in the attic of the synagogue in Zhitomer,” Pevzner told the magazine of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe years later. “Even those that would come to pray daily had no clue that there was a school in the building.”
Pevzner rejoined his family when they moved to Samarkand, Uzbekistan, a city know for the relative ease afforded Jews in their religious practice. Still, the government came calling for the young man in order to draft him into the army. Pevzner, though, had been asleep in the courtyard when officials came looking for him. Finding only his shoes, they didn’t bother looking further and left.
Educational Shelter for Fleeing Jews
In the 1940s, after the close of World War II, Pevzner made his way to Paris to continue his studies. After his marriage to Echka Eidelman, he started delivering lectures to the older students at the Tomchei Tmimim Lubavitch yeshiva in the Paris suburb of Brunoy. He soon earned recognition for his far-reaching knowledge of the Talmud and its vast commentaries.
With French Jewry dwindling in the immediate post-war years, the newly installed Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, called on Lubavitch families to remain and strengthen Jewish life. Hillel and Echka Pevzner took up the Rebbe’s call and cemented themselves in the Lubavitch network there as educators.
In the early 1950s, Pevzner became the head rabbi of the Lubavitch community in Paris, and later on took up the leadership of the Lubavitch synagogue in the city’s 17th district. For many years, the rabbi, who lived in Brunoy, would commute to Paris each weekend to spend Shabbat.
Despite the steady growth of Parisian Jewry, Pevzner’s 1965 opening of a day school in the famed Jewish neighborhood known as the Pletzel came as a shock. With 20 students, the institution was the first Jewish day school to open in the French capital since World War II. The rabbi went door to door collecting funds for the school and recruiting children who were not receiving a Jewish education.
Early successes were not to be seen, but the Rebbe encouraged Pevzner to continue his labor on behalf of the school. The Rebbe also advised Pevzner to formulate a curriculum that stressed both Jewish studies and general academics.
One year later, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War spurred Arab governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa to either expel their Jewish populations or curtail their freedoms, tens of thousands of Jews flooded Paris and other Western cities. The school ended up being an ideal place for the new immigrant children, and the influx of students taxed the small structure.
In 1975, boasting an enrollment of some 400 students, the school moved to the home of the central Jewish community. The school continued to experience annual growth, and in 1980, Pevzner and his wife moved from Brunoy to Paris to fully devote their energies to administering the institution. At the suggestion of the Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Pevzner joined his father in running the school.
In 1992, Hillel Pevzner presided over the opening of the Sinai-Lubavitch Educational Complex, a massive building that at the time served 1,400 students and included a community center to encourage parental participation in the Jewish educational experience. Three years later, the complex added an additional building; today, the institution is recognized as one of most modern Jewish day schools in the world.
Scholar and Advisor
Over the years, Pevzner’s educational budget ballooned to several million dollars, but the rabbi’s home remained a modest dwelling; its simple furnishings didn’t change much from when the day school enrolled just 20 children. From his home, Pevzner – who was a founding member of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe and a member of its presidium – answered thousands of questions in Jewish law from people throughout the continent.
“There was not a moment in the day that he was not available,” said Rabbi Levi Isak Kahn, director of the Heikhal Menachem study center in Paris. “He would respond to calls at all hours of the day and night.”
Known as a leading halachic authority in all matters of Jewish life, Pevzner’s particular expertise was in building Jewish ritual baths, known in Hebrew as mikvahs. Together with his wife, he personally built at least two mikvahs in Paris, including a stunning facility near the Place de la République. After the fall of Communism, he returned to the former Soviet Union to supervise the construction of many other ritual baths.
“Building mikvahs in the open was my greatest revenge to the Soviets,” he said.
Rabbi Irmiya Kohen, the leading member of Paris’ court of Jewish law and a member of the Rabbnical Centre of Europe's presidium, called Pevzner “a man of great scholarly knowledge.”
“There was nothing that you could ask him in Jewish law that he didn’t know” the answer, said Kohen. “They would say about him, that if you would bring him a page from one of the commentaries on the Talmud, he would be able to point out who the author was and what book it was from.”
“Many people would call him to ask his advice,” rejoined Kahn. “They knew that they could receive his honest opinion on all subjects.”
Kohen, who previously held a position in the rabbinate in Belgium, relayed that when there was a disagreement between two rabbinical judges in Antwerp, the court would defer to Pevzner for a ruling.
“He was a Jew who was imbued with Chasidic teachings. He did not worry about himself, and did not stand out,” said Kohen, despite maintaining relationships with every segment of the Jewish community and the French government, including with former President Jacques Chirac. “When it came to Jewish law, he was adamant that it should be followed to its fullest extent.”
In addition to sisters Fruma Junik, Yehudis Raskin and Nechama Lazar, Rabbi Hillel Pevzner is survived by his wife Echka and their six children, many of whom serve as Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries throughout the world: Rabbi Avraham Baruch Pevzner in Jerusalem, Rabbi Yoseph Y. Pevzner in Paris; Rabbi M. Mendel Pevzner in Geneva; Sterna Kalmenson in Brunoy, France; Rivka Naparstek in Paris; and Chana Slonim in Dijon, France.
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