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R' Miller on anti-Torah nationalism

After many years of hacking away at the Torah and corrupting a part of the people, an outward change took place in these anti-Torah writers. The pogroms in Kishinev and elsewhere showed that assimilation was bringing no benefits, for the mobs had attacked the assimilationists as well as other Jews. A new and more pernicious trend began under the banner of anti-Torah nationalism. The same Hebrew and Yiddish writers, in the same periodicals in which they had preached assimilation, now began to preach Jewish nationalism. Their hatred of the Torah and the Torah leaders did not diminish, and it has continued to this day. The animosity of the nationalist leaders today toward the Torah is an inheritance from the old assimilationists.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller, Rejoice O Youth! #560.

True, the assimilationists and the nationalists corrupted part of the people, but the vast majority remained loyal. But the persecutions by the czarist government caused a tide of emigration which weakened Russian Jewry and sent its sons to lands where their Jewish way of life was discontinued. Then came World War I, when the czar uprooted great masses of Jews and exiled them from their established communities, thus breaking down the painstakingly built institutions and practices by which Jews maintained their Torah existence. Then the Communists smothered most of Russian Jewry with the suffocating blanket of enforced atheism. The surviving Jewry of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia (carved out of old Russia) were by now bereft of their former vitality. After ravaged years of wandering and homelessness, the Jewish youth had received little Torah education. A generation was thus lost, and old customs and institutions had been wiped out. The remnant returned to newly formed countries bristling with new found nationalism which considered the Jews as outsiders. In these lands the Jewish youth felt they had no future, and they fell into the hands of the anti-religious nationalists, who, buttressed by rich American funds, had power to promise them a new life in the land of Israel. Before sending them to the land of Israel, the nationalists trained them in their many training camps, where they were indoctrinated with the spirit of hostility toward the Torah. The nationalists controlled public opinion by their newspapers and their large and numerous educational institutions. The loyal Torah circles were still vigorous and of very high quality, but they were now headed in the direction away from the Torah, although still maintaining outwardly many of the practices of Judaism.

Rejoice O Youth! #561

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