The Mystery of Rabbi Hillel Bishko
The Hidden Founder of Beth Medrash Govoha
Who Was Expelled from Lakewood
Table of Contents
[a] Introduction
[b] Background
[c] The Lithuanian Period
[d] The Mission in Britain
[e] A New Beginning in the United States
[f] The Source of my Astonishment
[g] The Rabbinical Court Case
[h] After the Expulsion from Lakewood
[i] The End
[j] Conclusion
[k] Appendix
Introduction
Why did I decide to write about Rabbi Hillel Bishko—a little-known rabbi whose name most of you have probably never encountered until now? There is no doubt that this rabbi made a very significant contribution to the expansion of Torah study in Lithuania and in England during the 1920s and 1930s, and for that alone he deserves to be remembered and commemorated. Yet it seems that his most significant Torah enterprise was the founding of the kollel Beth Medrash Govoha, known today as the Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey.
I am not a biographer, and until now I have never had occasion to write an article or a book about any rabbinic figure, however important. Why, then, did I depart from this practice in the case of Rabbi Hillel Bishko? Was it his fascinating and highly complex life story—whose many questions I have not entirely resolved—that prompted me to recount it in detail? No. The reason is simpler: I decided to rescue his memory from the depths of oblivion because of the glaring injustice that was done to him.
The man who planted the seed of what would become one of the largest and most illustrious yeshivas in the Jewish world today—his memory has been almost completely erased from the history of this yeshiva in particular, and from the history of Orthodox education in the United States in general. And this was no accident. The reason will become clear in the story that follows. (Sources for the quotations and other scholarly notes appear in the Hebrew version of this story on this website.)
Background
“I read your article on the Tiferet Bachurim movement for working young men in Lithuania, published in the journal Zion in 2017. Might we exchange a few words about some of your citations in that article?” This innocent email set in motion an intensive, daily collaboration that lasted more than a year, spanned continents, and involved many people.
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It was immediately after the Passover holiday of 2020 when a message from an unfamiliar address appeared in my email inbox. I opened it. It was written in English and signed by a man named Martin Stern. The writer introduced himself as the editor of the biography of Rabbi Meir Shapiro—a biography that had already appeared in five editions.
I was curious to know what the man had to say about an article I had written quite some time ago. We spoke on the phone that very day.
“I read your article carefully, albeit three years late. When I reached the description of Hillel Bishko’s activities in England, I became alert.”
Rabbi Hillel Bishko had been one of the founders of the Tiferet Bachurim movement in Independent Lithuania, a movement that promoted the teaching of basic Torah studies to workers and craftsmen in evening classes. When he began serving as a paid emissary in England, collecting donations on behalf of the Kovno Kollel, he simultaneously volunteered to raise funds there for his own movement, Tiferet Bachurim, in order to strengthen its financial standing and enable its continued development in Lithuania.
“I myself was born in London,” the speaker continued, “and although I have lived in Israel for many years, I know very well the influential Jewish figures who lived in that city in the twentieth century.”
Thus began the conversation—or rather, Martin Stern’s monologue. I wondered what new information he intended to provide, and above all what he wanted from me. I did not have to wait long.
“I can tell you,” he went on, “that the figures mentioned in the article who assisted Bishko with fundraising and who themselves contributed—such as the philanthropist Sarah Portugal—are completely unknown to me. And, as I said, I should have known of such a benefactor if she had indeed lived in London.”
Here he reached the key sentence of his remarks: “I have the feeling that this Bishko created a false impression before the leaders of the Tiferet Bachurim movement in Lithuania, and in fact he invented these English figures.”
I felt as though a blow had landed on my head. Could it be that I had fallen into a trap and published imaginary facts concocted by a swindler named Bishko? Was such a thing possible? After all, my article—into which I had invested far more time than into any of my other articles—was based on thousands of documents from the movement’s archive, including dozens of letters of thanks from the central office to Sarah Portugal, expressions of condolence upon the death of her son, and even congratulations on the marriage of her granddaughter.
I felt certain that I had not made a mistake. And yet the doubt gnawed at me—had I perhaps been misled and, as a result, misled many others? And in the prestigious journal of Israeli historians, no less?!
Who Are You, Rabbi Hillel Bishko? This was the unspoken title hovering over the beginning of the search for this obscure figure. The more we tried to trace him, the thicker the veil of mystery that seemed to surround him.
The simplest way to check what was known about Rabbi Hillel Bishko was to search the internet. In that search, the website Kevarim stood out. Founded in 2007, the site is devoted to documenting the graves of pious individuals in North America, and it proved to be a surprisingly rich source for the enigmatic personality of Rabbi Bishko.
The site’s administrator, Baruch Amsel of Brooklyn, regarded Rabbi Hillel Bishko as a pious figure worthy of inclusion in his database. Indeed, the entry for Rabbi Bishko recorded that he passed away in 1960 and was buried in the Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge, New Jersey. As with every entry on the site, a photograph of the tzaddik’s gravestone was supposed to appear. Yet in Rabbi Bishko’s case this was not so at first. Instead of a gravestone, a photograph of an empty burial plot was posted…
And if this puzzling fact were not enough, it emerged that his wife as well—Sarah Gittl Bishko, who had died seven years before him and was buried in the same cemetery—had never been given a gravestone.
How could it be that Rabbi Bishko, whose righteousness had been acknowledged, left his wife’s grave without a marker? Did he lack the money to erect one? Or perhaps he expected—maybe even instructed—that after his death their remains would be transferred together to the Land of Israel?
To this puzzlement was added an even greater one, also raised by visitors to the website: why had no gravestone been erected over Rabbi Bishko’s grave for more than fifty years? After all, the Bishkos had a son who survived them, Aharon (Eddie), who lived in Munich and had come especially to New York for his father’s burial. Had he not been able to ensure that his father’s wishes were carried out—or at least to arrange for gravestones for his parents?
The site administrator contacted the cemetery authorities to confirm that Rabbi Bishko and his wife were still buried in their original plots. After receiving confirmation, he issued a call for donations to fund gravestones at a cost of $4,000.
Three months passed. Help came from Israel of all places. Emanuel Raibstein of Tel Aviv happened to wonder whether any information about his uncle, Rabbi Hillel Bishko—his mother Dobe’s brother—might be found online. At the very beginning of his search he reached the Kevarim website and saw the administrator’s open appeal for assistance in financing the gravestones. Emanuel consulted with his brother, and together they decided to donate the funds needed to erect markers over their uncle’s graves.
Six months passed after the Raibstein brothers’ response. Rabbi Jack Mueller of Lakewood—who apparently handled the donations on behalf of the site administrator—announced that enough money had been collected. He also set a date for the unveiling ceremony: the anniversary of Rabbi Bishko’s death, the 28th of Adar II 5771 (April 3, 2011).
After the ceremony, a photograph of the new gravestone was added to Rabbi Bishko’s entry on the Kevarim website.
Thus ended the mysterious burial chapter of Rabbi Bishko—albeit very late, some fifty years after his death.
But the affair did not end there. On the contrary, a new and exciting chapter began.
Two years after the gravestone was erected, the American polymath Rabbi Yaakov Dov Miller raised an innocent question: why was the name of Rabbi Bishko’s father—Shaul, according to the testimony of his nephew—not inscribed on the gravestone, as is customary on every Jewish tombstone?
No one knew how to answer this question.
I myself began searching through Lithuanian archives in an attempt to trace Rabbi Bishko’s origins. What I found was nothing short of astonishing.
First, I found the 1939 marriage certificate of Emanuel Raibstein’s parents. It recorded that his mother, Dobe Bishko, was the daughter of Yitzhak Ber Bishko of Kovno and Miriam Zhmudzhiak, and that she was born in 1912 in the town of Baranovitch. Very strange, I thought—neither in the Kovno nor in the Vilna Province, but in the distant Minsk Province!
In the same search I was pleased to find Rabbi Bishko’s own marriage certificate from 1912, issued in the town of Vilky in the Kovno Province. The document recorded that he was from Ushpol in the Kovno Province and that he was born in 1881 to his father, Yitzhak Ber Bishko.
The father’s name—Yitzhak Ber—appearing in both marriage certificates seemed to confirm the relationship between brother and sister. Yet something odd stood out: the age difference between them amounted to thirty-one years.
I continued searching for other documents and found the birth record of Hillel Bishko from 1880 in the town of Sejny in the Suwalk Province. There the names of his parents appeared as Yitzhak Ber and Chaya Tzippe Bramson.
This document showed that Hillel and Dobe were half-siblings, sharing the same father only. This reassured me, since the large age gap between them now had a plausible explanation.
But then I found the father’s death record. Yitzhak Ber had died in Sejny in 1905.
1905?? How could that be? Dobe had been born in 1912—seven years after her father’s death!
Marriage records from that period were not always precise regarding the ages of the bride and groom, and I assumed that she had probably been born no later than 1905, before her father’s death. Yet difficulties remained. In the documents, the father was associated with towns in the Kovno Province and with Sejny in the Suwalk Province, while Dobe had been born in Baranovitch in the Minsk Province, far to the east. Moreover, her son Emanuel claimed that her father’s name had actually been Shaul!
For many years I had researched my family’s history in the Lithuanian archives. I had encountered inconsistencies before, but never such a tangle of contradictory data.
From Martin’s conversation with Emanuel, further surprising information emerged: Emanuel’s maternal grandfather was Shaul Stein, and his uncle Hillel had changed his surname from Stein to Bishko. I immediately called Emanuel myself, and he told an interesting and rather strange story:
Indeed, his mother Dobe had a mother named Miriam, and Dobe herself had been born in Lachovitch near Baranovitch. This, he said, should not surprise me, since his mother’s parents had lived in the Minsk Province rather than in the traditional Lithuanian Provinces. Hillel himself, whose full name was Yitzhak Hillel, had raised Dobe as a daughter and may even have formally adopted her. He had urged her to leave Lithuania after her marriage in 1939, but the young Raibstein couple remained in Lithuania and endured the horrors of the Holocaust in the Kovno ghetto and later in camps in Germany. Emanuel himself was born in the ghetto and was handed over to a Christian woman in 1943. After the war, his mother smuggled him out of that woman’s home.
I turned to the online archives of Belarusian Jewry. There I found the following account:
In the town of Lachovitch in the Baranovitch district of the Minsk Province lived the Stein family—the father, Mattityahu, who had a son named Shaul, born in 1867. When he grew up, he married a local woman named Miriam Zhmudzhiak.
Since Emanuel’s testimony—that his mother’s parents were Shaul Stein and Miriam—matched the findings in the Belarusian archives, it followed that Yitzhak Ber could not in fact have been Dobe’s father. This also fit the fact that his death preceded the year of her birth.
Meanwhile, Martin received from Jack Mueller of Lakewood some notes that had been sent to him by Gary Palgon, an expert on Baranovitch at the Belarusian online archives site. These notes contained the history of the Stein family as Palgon had learned it from family members. Among other things, it was stated that Dobe had a brother named Yitzhak Hillel Stein, who had changed his surname to Bishko. In a conversation with Palgon, he added that Yitzhak Hillel Stein had studied at the Slutsk Yeshiva, and that after receiving rabbinical ordination he had become angry with his relatives for not being sufficiently observant; for this reason he changed his surname to Bishko. He married Sarah Gittl, and they had two sons.
Thus the confusion deepened. On the one hand there were documents from Belarus and family traditions according to which the children of Shaul and Miriam Stein in Lachovitch included a daughter Dobe and a son Yitzhak Hillel Stein–Bishko (often called by the Yiddish diminutive “Itze”). On the other hand there were documents concerning the same brother and sister in the Lithuanian archives stating that their father was Yitzhak Ber Bishko—who supposedly had died long before the birth of his daughter.
It soon turned out that I was not the only one perplexed by these contradictory and embarrassing findings. Jack Mueller sent Martin a photograph of Rabbi Bishko’s Hebrew ketubah (marriage contract) and in a telephone conversation told him that he had learned from Mordechai Peltz, the synagogue gabbai (sexton) where Rabbi Bishko had served, that this ketubah was forged. According to Peltz, the forgery had been made by the son Eddie (Aharon) in order to challenge the will, and therefore the names recorded in it were incorrect. The gabbai added that when Rabbi Bishko was called to the Torah he was addressed by a different name from the one appearing in that ketubah [= Hillel son of Yitzhak Ber]. Jack, who had been involved in drafting the tombstone inscription, explained that these remarks by the sexton were the reason he had refrained from writing the father’s name on the monument.
I examined the Hebrew ketubah and was very surprised. It corresponded perfectly to the marriage registration recorded in the metrical books of the Lithuanian archive—books that could not possibly have been forged. So what, then, was the forgery here? Yet above this question hovered an even more troubling one: were there perhaps two Hillel Bishkos—Hillel son of Yitzhak Ber Bishko, whose ketubah this truly was, and Yitzhak Hillel son of Shaul Stein, who for some reason had changed his surname to Bishko? If these were the same person, after all, how could both father and son bear the identical name “Yitzhak”? The only apparent solution would be to separate these two individuals.
And yet, on the other hand, later in their lives they seemed somehow to merge into a single person, since the names of the wife and children appeared both in the family traditions reported by Gary Palgon and in the Lithuanian archives. Moreover, the sister Dobe—who was the daughter of Shaul Stein and could not possibly have been the daughter of Yitzhak Ber—appeared in the Lithuanian metrical books as having been born in Baranovitch near Lachovitch, as though it were indeed the same woman. The riddle thus seemed enormous and insoluble.
I began to speculate that perhaps the sister Dobe had been adopted by Hillel Bishko, and that as a result she had also taken his father’s name, Yitzhak Ber, even though her biological father had been Shaul Stein and she was the real sister of another Yitzhak Hillel Stein-Bishko.
Then came a telephone conversation that set me on the right path.
The call was with Shaul Stein, a nephew of Yitzhak Hillel Stein-Bishko. He told me that he had always wondered aloud to his father why his uncle Yitzhak Hillel had changed his surname to Bishko, but his father refused to answer. Someone else, however, had told him that Yitzhak Hillel had been required to enlist in the army, and that this might have been the reason for the change of name. At this point Shaul added a detail that astonished me: he had noticed that the letterhead of “Beth Medrash Govoha” in New York bore an emblem stating the name of the founder—Rabbi Y. Hillel Bishko.
To understand my astonishment at this discovery, I must open another chapter—no less mysterious—concerning Rabbi Hillel Bishko’s activities in the United States. His path there was long, and I shall briefly outline the principal events along the way.
The Lithuanian Period
As noted, Rabbi Hillel Bishko was one of the founders of the Tiferet Bachurim movement in Lithuania. The history of this movement goes back to the 1890s, when study societies devoted to basic Jewish learning began to arise for young men of the lower classes who worked for their livelihood as laborers, craftsmen, or small traders. Most of these groups were forced to close during the hardships of the First World War.
After the establishment of Independent Lithuania, Tiferet Bachurim societies began to reappear in its towns, and—just as before—the initiatives to found them were private ones. The first of these societies was established in 1922 in the Kovno suburb of Slabodka. One of its founders, Rabbi Hillel Bishko, was appointed rabbi of the new society, and he began teaching seven hardworking young men who had agreed to attend his lessons. The place of study was a neglected little room in the Zivchei Tzedek synagogue, without electricity or heating, furnished with broken tables and benches. One of the first students later recalled those days with longing:
Once, on a Friday evening, the frost was biting and we were shivering with cold—literally. Suddenly the chant “Blessed is our God who created us for His glory and separated us from those who go astray…” was heard, and at the suggestion of our beloved rabbi, Rabbi Hillel Bishko, may he live long, we went out to snatch a brief dance. As the moments passed, the dance became livelier and stronger, and it grew so warm—so blazing hot.
Rabbi Bishko did not remain in this position for long, and he was soon replaced by another rabbi. For several years Rabbi Bishko “disappeared.” Where did he wander? Perhaps the following description, found in the memorial book of the community of Yurburg, refers to that period:
An interesting and colorful figure among the religious circles was Rabbi Bishko. He was not counted among the community’s official religious functionaries, since he was a small-scale manufacturer. In his private home he ran a small factory producing various kinds of sweets, from which he earned his livelihood. Yet Rabbi Bishko, who was a learned man, did not content himself with physical labor; he devoted much of his time to spreading knowledge of Judaism among the younger generation. He was one of the founders of the Tiferet Bachurim society and also of a preparatory yeshiva where he taught Torah to the youth during the evening hours. Rabbi Bishko, with all his eccentricity, was a pleasant and popular man by nature, and despite his dedication to spreading Torah among the public he was not distant from the realities of this world. He sent his children to the Hebrew gymnasium [high school].
A brief complementary testimony by a native of the town also appeared in the same memorial book:
The chief activist on behalf of the Hebrew school was the tsukernik, Rabbi Bishko, the owner of the candy factory… This Rabbi Bishko dealt with two things—Torah and tsukerkes [candies].
It thus appears that Rabbi Bishko lived in the town of Yurburg, about 100 kilometers west of Kovno, and earned his livelihood from a home-based production of sweets, which earned him the local nickname “tsukernik” (the candy maker, from the Yiddish tsuker—sugar).
Both testimonies tell us that alongside his efforts to disseminate Torah learning, Rabbi Bishko also displayed strong sympathy for the Hebrew cultural enterprise that was becoming institutionalized in Lithuania, and he was even actively involved in it. This was expressed in his participation in establishing the Hebrew school in Yurburg—founded at the request of the parents in place of the traditional Talmud Torah that had existed before the First World War—and in sending his children to the local Hebrew gymnasium.
To understand this episode better, we should place these events on a timeline.
The Hebrew school in the town was founded in 1919, and its continuation—the Hebrew gymnasium—was established in 1921. The first testimony does not specify which of the Bishko children attended the gymnasium; the eldest son, Aharon (born 1913), reached the age of admission in 1924 (in fact, by 1929 we find him appearing in the official portrait of the Slabodka Yeshiva student body). The daughter Sheyne (1917) might have entered the gymnasium in 1928, and the younger son Yehuda (1918) could have joined it in 1929.
The first account notes that Rabbi Bishko was among the founders of the local Tiferet Bachurim society. Indeed, other sources confirm that he established it in 1929, and that he later organized additional study groups for younger boys of the town in 1935.
One may therefore conclude that he lived in Yurburg from the time of his return from exile in Russia, at least until the late 1920s. Yet his residence there was not continuous, for it seems that Rabbi Bishko was destined for activity that extended far beyond the boundaries of an ordinary Lithuanian town.
Across Lithuania, Tiferet Bachurim societies continued to arise through the initiatives of individuals. As noted, the first of them was in Slabodka, where Rabbi Bishko had been among the founders and teachers. After twenty-six such societies had been established in Lithuania, a central organization was created in late 1927 to unite them into a movement, similar to other movements of that period in Lithuania. The goal of the central body was to strengthen the existing societies and to establish new ones throughout the towns of Lithuania.
With his commercial instincts, Rabbi Bishko understood that proper expansion—namely, the establishment of Tiferet Bachurim societies in nearly every Lithuanian town—would require considerable resources that no private initiative or domestic fundraising campaign could hope to obtain. He therefore conceived the idea of traveling to England and establishing funds there that would receive regular support from well-to-do members of the local Orthodox communities, funds that would provide monthly financing for the movement’s activities.
For his own livelihood he proposed to the director of the Kovno-Slabodka Kollel that he serve as the kollel’s paid emissary in England. Indeed, in 1928 he departed for England as a representative both of the kollel and of the movement.
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The Mission in Britain
Rabbi Bishko tried to interest donors in the English cities of Liverpool and Leeds and in Belfast in Northern Ireland. He also traveled beyond the United Kingdom, visiting the cities of Dublin and Cork in the Irish Free State, as well as Amsterdam and Groningen in the Netherlands. A particularly valuable success came to him in Birmingham, England, where the philanthropist Yitzhak Mendel Glass began contributing regularly to the movement’s central office from late 1929 onward, channeling donations collected from sixty-nine members of his local Jewish community.
Yet Rabbi Bishko appears to have reached the height of his success already at the end of the summer of 1928, when he managed to enlist the support of one of London’s benefactresses, Sarah Ethel Portugal. At first her donations were only occasional, but she undertook to establish a permanent support network by coordinating contributions from twenty-two London philanthropists. The consolidated monthly donations she began sending to the central office from early 1929 saved it from collapse.
All of this I described in my article in the journal Zion. As mentioned, Martin Stern questioned my account and wondered whether such a woman had really existed in London at that time. About two months after our research began, I wrote to Martin:
I firmly believe everything Bishko reported. It is inconceivable that he would lie to the members of Tiferet Bachurim and invent donors who did not exist in London or Birmingham. His work for Tiferet Bachurim was entirely voluntary! (He received a salary only from the Kovno Kollel.)
That is why I cannot accept your challenge to what I wrote in my article. In my opinion, there is not a single word of error in it, and this will yet be proven in the future. The day will come when we will discover Sarah Portugal of London and Mendel Glass of Birmingham. I have no doubt of it.
In an effort to solve this puzzle, Martin enlisted the help of Rabbi Meir Salasnik, who had formerly served as a synagogue rabbi in London and knew many of the city’s Jewish personalities. Rabbi Salasnik examined articles that had appeared in the Jewish Chronicle during the 1930s describing Tiferet Bachurim societies established in England at Rabbi Bishko’s initiative. He recognized most of the figures connected with the movement’s activities in England, yet he had never encountered the name of Rabbi Hillel Bishko, nor that of the benefactress Sarah Ethel Portugal. Her name also failed to appear in extensive internet searches, and even the details I provided about members of her family did not help, since their surnames were quite common.
The breakthrough came at the end of 2020, about half a year after our research had begun. It occurred after I found, in a bulletin of Tiferet Bachurim in Lithuania, a report about a large gathering held in Sarah Portugal’s home in 1930, at which Rabbi Bishko and Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Zev Kirzner (1896–1991) delivered speeches. Rabbi Salasnik remembered that at that time Rabbi Kirzner had served as the rabbi of the “Stamford Hill Beth Medrash” at 26 Grove Lane, a synagogue of Lithuanian–Polish character. He wondered whether the benefactress Portugal might have been one of the synagogue’s members. Pursuing this line of inquiry, he soon found a long list of synagogue officers in London from 1931—and there appeared the name Sarah Portugal.
Indeed, just as Rabbi Salasnik had surmised, Sarah Portugal was a member of the Stamford Hill Beth Medrash. Moreover, befitting her status, she served as president of the synagogue’s Ladies’ Aid Society.
Thus she was not an “invention” of Rabbi Bishko, as Martin Stern had suspected, but a real figure of prominence in the London community.
From that point onward, a flood of information about this woman became available, since some of her descendants had preserved details about the family matriarch. What, then, are the principal facts that emerged from their research and from my own further investigation?
Sarah Ethel Portugal was born in 1861 in Uman, in the Kiev Province, with the maiden name Chacham.
She married Isaac Abrahams, and it appears that after his death she and her children emigrated to London. She later remarried, to Rabbi Harry Portugal. After his death in 1904 she remained a widow for the rest of her life, living in a respectable three-story house at 111 Cazenove Road in the Hackney district of London.
These are the bare facts. But who was Sarah Portugal—née Chacham, later Abrahams—in reality?
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Photograph of Sarah Portugal, which hung in the sukkah at 111 Cazenove Road (courtesy of Sandy Littman; from the collection of her grandmother Bertha Kramer).
Family testimonies reveal that she was a woman of exceptional charity. Poor people gathered at the door of the ground floor of her home at 111 Cazenove Road and ate breakfast at the table she prepared for them.
During the First World War one of her guests was Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Ha-Cohen Kook, who had been the rabbi of Jaffa before the war and served during the war as rabbi of the Machzikei Hadath community in London.
It is therefore not surprising that she rallied to support the Tiferet Bachurim center in Lithuania. More than that: when Rabbi Bishko came to London she would give up her own bedroom for him, and when he later returned to the city with his wife, Portugal vacated the room for a longer period. The Bishko couple may have lived there until her death in 1935—or perhaps even until their move to Manchester.
The gravestone of Sarah Portugal in the cemetery at Edmonton, London.
The income that the movement’s central office derived from Rabbi Bishko’s activities in England formed a significant portion of its overall budget—40 percent in 1931. It seems that he spent extended periods in the country at that time and may even have brought his family there. Evidence for this can be found in the fact that he sent his eldest son Aharon from London to study at the Lithuanian-Novardok yeshiva in Pinsk. In 1929 Aharon had still been studying at the Slabodka Yeshiva, and he may have left it in order to accompany his family temporarily to England. For some reason his father preferred that he continue his yeshiva studies not in Slabodka in Lithuania—associated with the doctrine of gadlut ha-adam (“the greatness of man”)—but in the central Novardok yeshiva in Pinsk, in Poland, whose approach to the Musar tradition emphasized shiflut ha-adam (“the lowliness of man”), the opposite of the Slabodka method.
Did Rabbi Bishko confine himself in England to fundraising? It appears that he used his stay in the country to spread the message of Torah study there as well. In 1930 a Tiferet Bachurim society was founded in Liverpool—one of the first such groups in England—and by mid-1931 nine societies were already active in the country, almost all of them established at Rabbi Hillel Bishko’s initiative.
He was also active in promoting more advanced study in England. In 1929 he was involved in the founding of the Beth Yosef yeshiva in Gateshead in northeastern England, which was regarded as a branch of the Novardok yeshiva network. In the early 1930s he established a study circle devoted to advanced Talmudic analysis in Dalston, in London’s Hackney district, placing Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler at its head.
The central office of Tiferet Bachurim in Lithuania regarded the growth of societies outside the country as a sufficient reason to convene a conference of all Tiferet Bachurim organizations and proclaim the establishment of a worldwide movement. However, the resources required for such an undertaking were lacking, and the conference was never held. Even without a formal declaration, however, by 1931 the central office already regarded the new worldwide movement as an accomplished fact—and Rabbi Hillel Bishko as its head and director.
The economic crisis that followed the Great Depression of 1929 in the United States spread to Europe and brought the movement’s activities in Lithuania to a halt. A meeting of the central committee in late 1933 decided on sweeping changes: it dismissed the sitting chairman and appointed Rabbi Hillel Bishko as temporary chairman, with his agreement.
This decision reflected a measure of desperation. Rabbi Bishko already stood at the head of the worldwide Tiferet Bachurim movement and was almost solely responsible for securing its financial resources. His appointment as chairman of the Lithuanian organization was therefore an echo of the emergency situation—a drastic step meant to rescue the movement from decline. Yet this unusual choice restored the activists’ confidence in the central leadership and rekindled enthusiasm for renewed organizational activity.
The new chairman surprised everyone by setting an ambitious goal: eighty visits to towns during the winter of 1934—fifty of them immediately—in order to found new societies and strengthen existing ones. The central office renewed its contacts with the local groups, and its emissaries were dispatched tirelessly.
Indeed, in the months following this revival more than sixty visits were made to various towns. One of the most active emissaries was Rabbi Hillel Bishko himself, who did not hesitate to travel to distant towns in the depths of winter despite his frail health and the poor state of the roads. Many societies were reorganized, and new members and activists joined them. It seemed that the movement had regained its strength after its lowest point, and some observers saw this renewed activity as its greatest peak of vitality.
At the same time Rabbi Bishko vigorously promoted the establishment of societies for younger boys—“Young Tiferet Bachurim”—alongside the existing organizations. In most places he carried out this work personally: traveling from town to town, delivering speeches, persuading local residents, founding new societies, and teaching the first lesson himself. One contemporary account described his activity as follows:
When the oldest creator of Tiferet Bachurim once again wanders from town to town…, everyone believes anew in the ancient yet ever-new idea of Rabbi Chiyya—that if Torah is planted in the hearts of our children, God forbid it will never be forgotten in Israel; and if Torah is not forgotten, the people of Israel will never disappear.
It is not entirely clear on what financial resources the ambitious program of visits for the winter of 1934 was based. It is likely that Rabbi Bishko relied on promises from his donors in England. Yet their support was slow in coming, and after about forty visits—half the original plan—the central budget sank into a large deficit. The movement’s representatives were forced to appeal to philanthropists in Lithuania for a one-time campaign to complete the program. Rabbi Hillel Bishko saw no choice but to return to England in the summer of 1934 to obtain the resources so vital for the continuation of the movement’s activities.
Some time after the death of Sarah Portugal, Rabbi Bishko arrived in Manchester. The salary he received for collecting donations on behalf of the Kovno Kollel was no longer sufficient, and he settled in the city, accepting an offer to serve as rabbi of the “Fuchs Shtiebel,” a small, informal new synagogue founded in 1935 that would later be known as Heaton Park Shul. There he began delivering lectures in the morning and evening—lectures that in time became renowned. When Rabbi Alexander Altmann (1906–1987) was appointed chief rabbi of Manchester in 1938, he too joined the audience attending these lectures.
During these years of Rabbi Bishko’s tenure in Manchester, the Tiferet Bachurim movement continued to expand in England. By 1937 thirty study circles were already reported in the country, and by 1939 there were forty societies—twenty-four of them in London alone.
As the situation in Europe darkened, Rabbi Hillel Bishko urged his sister Dobe, after her marriage in April 1939, to leave Lithuania without delay. He himself also informed the leaders of his congregation that he was preparing to emigrate to the United States in June 1939. Rabbi Alexander Altmann, upon hearing this, implored him to remain in his position. Rabbi Bishko agreed and prolonged his stay in the country.
During his fundraising and organizational tours for Tiferet Bachurim at that time—both establishing local societies and collecting donations for the parent movement in Lithuania—he reached Dublin in the Irish Free State. Among other places he visited the Chevra Tehillim synagogue on Lombard Street, founded in 1893 by Jews from Lithuania and Poland. He apparently impressed the local community leaders, who then invited him to remain and serve as the synagogue’s rabbi.
The war soon began, and the Irish Free State declared neutrality. The government decided to close its borders to Jewish refugees. Despite the local community’s request that Rabbi Bishko remain as their spiritual leader, the government’s restrictive policy toward Jewish refugees prevailed. In 1940, the Irish Minister of Justice, Gerald Boland (1885–1971), signed a formal deportation order against the Bishkos. Having been forced to leave only a year after their arrival, they moved to Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland.
This time Rabbi Bishko resolved definitively to emigrate to the United States. His immigration visa was issued in Belfast, and less than a month later the Bishkos arrived at Ellis Island in the United States.
A New Beginning in the United States
It is not known what Rabbi Hillel Bishko knew at that time about the fate of East European Jewry, but with his keen intuition he sensed the need to train distinguished Talmud teachers for the many American yeshivas. He was the first to raise the idea of the kollel in the United States, and at the beginning of 1942 he founded a kollel for married scholars in the city of White Plains in Westchester County, New York. He named it “Beth Medrash Govoha in America – Kollel for Avrechim.”
Rabbi Bishko wished to appoint a leading Torah authority to head the institution, and he found the right candidate in Rabbi Yechiel Mordechai Gordon (1882–1964), formerly the head of the Lomzhe Yeshiva in Poland and of its branch in Petah Tikva, who since 1933 had been traveling throughout the United States collecting funds for both institutions.
Rabbi Bishko and Rabbi Gordon jointly defined the aim of the institution:
To enable outstanding married scholars to study for five years and thereby acquire broad knowledge of the Talmud and the Poskim (Halachic authorities) according to an established curriculum arranged by the director of the institution.
They also defined the division of responsibilities between them:
The head and director of the institution is Rabbi Yechiel Mordechai Gordon, may he live long, through whom all spiritual and material matters will be supervised. He will guide and endeavor to realize the entire purpose of the institution, with God’s help, ensuring that the scholars receive their financial support so that they may fulfill their proper role without disturbance. No one else is permitted to interfere in the internal administration of the institution…
The income of the funds stands under the administration of Rabbi Hillel Bishko, may he live long, who supervises all matters of fundraising, oversees the creditors, and provides the sums required for the support of the scholars and the other expenses of the institution.
Three buildings stood at the disposal of the kollel: a study hall, a dormitory, and a dining hall. The plan was that the kollel would serve twenty-five scholars who would devote themselves entirely to Torah study for five years. The official schedule ran from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., though in practice the day began at 7:45 and ended at 10:15 p.m., allowing time for the study of works of wisdom and ethics from 10:15 to 11:30 p.m.
In my hands I held the founding documents of the kollel. One of them was the institution’s letterhead, headed by Rabbis Bishko and Gordon, bearing the logo that Shaul Stein had pointed out.
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The Source of My Astonishment
We may now return to the astonishment that seized me when Shaul Stein noticed that the letterhead bore Rabbi Bishko’s name in the form: “The Gaon, Rabbi Y. Hillel Bishko.”
This implied that the head of the kollel was Yitzhak Hillel Bishko (son of Shaul Stein) rather than Hillel Bishko (son of Yitzhak Ber). Until that moment it had been clear to me that these were two different individuals, since their parents bore different names. The Hillel Bishko who had been among the founders of Tiferet Bachurim and had supported it financially in England was the same person who later came to the United States and established the kollel. Yet now, to my great surprise, it appeared that the head of the kollel was Yitzhak Hillel Bishko and not Hillel Bishko.
Could it be that there had in fact been only one such man? And that the changes in the parents’ names were artificial?
The only solution was to compare a photograph of the young Yitzhak Hillel Stein-Bishko, which Shaul Stein possessed, with the known photographs of Rabbi Hillel Bishko. Unfortunately, the photograph of Yitzhak Hillel Bishko was not sufficiently clear. Then Emanuel Raibstein sent me a photograph of his uncle Yitzhak Hillel Bishko—sharp and clear.
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Rabbi Yitzhak Hillel Bishko (from the collection of his sister Dobe Raibstein, courtesy of her son Emanuel Raibstein).
I compared it with Rabbi Hillel Bishko’s naturalization photograph in the United States and found that, with a high degree of probability, they were the same person.
I wrote my conclusions to Martin:
It is very strange that Emanuel had this photograph. Emanuel is the son of Dovah Stein-Bishko, and he does not know of two Hillel Bishkos. He knows only one Hillel Bishko who was his mother’s elder brother, who adopted her, lived in London, and asked her in 1939 to leave Lithuania. So perhaps Yitzhak Hillel Stein-Bishko really is Hillel Bishko.
But then we are left with many questions—the different names of the parents, the ketubah, the confusion in given names. It is certainly not a normal story, and this is only the background to the larger story you are talking about—the rabbinical court case.
What was the rabbinical court case I have mentioned here—and why is it the central story?
The Rabbinical Court Case
Already in the summer of 1942 Rabbi Yechiel Mordechai Gordon resigned from his position as head of the kollel. He was replaced by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Zaks (1898–1974), who had earlier been the head of the Kodshim Kollel associated with the Radin Yeshiva and, from late 1928, its Rosh Yeshiva. He too did not remain long in the position and left for Montreal by the end of 1942.
Rabbi Aharon Kotler (1892–1962), formerly the head of the Kletsk Yeshiva in Poland, was then appointed head of the kollel. It is unclear whether at the beginning of his tenure or shortly before it the institution’s name was changed to “Beth Medrash Govoha Kollel Kovno in America.” The change may have resulted from news that had begun to reach the United States about what was happening in Lithuania at that time, and Rabbi Bishko may have wished to see his kollel as the continuation of the destroyed Kovno Kollel, on whose behalf he had labored during his travels in northern Europe.
At Passover 1943, the kollel was moved from White Plains, New York, to Lakewood, a small resort town in New Jersey. The reason for the move is unclear: perhaps the poor state of the buildings, perhaps conditions set by Rabbi Kotler, perhaps persuasion by Rabbi Nissan Waxman (1904–1982), then rabbi of Congregation Bnei Israel in Lakewood—or perhaps all of these together.
At the beginning, thirteen students studied in the Lakewood kollel, four of them scholars who had come from the White Plains institution, and several unmarried students joined them as well, effectively creating a higher yeshiva framework. Rabbis Bishko and Kotler stood at the head of the institution.
But the partnership did not last long.
For reasons that remain unclear, tensions arose between the two men—perhaps over the boundaries of their respective responsibilities. The students themselves took sides in the dispute. Matters deteriorated to the point that several of the students physically seized Rabbi Bishko, led him outside to a taxi, and expelled him from the yeshiva he himself had founded.
Rabbi Bishko did not accept this treatment passively and brought Rabbi Kotler to a Din Torah before the Rabbinical Association of the United States and Canada. The court convened in 1944 under the chairmanship of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, together with Rabbis Yosef Eliyahu Henkin and Chaim Bik—three leading halakhic authorities of the generation.
The court heard Rabbi Bishko’s claims and recognized the injustice done to him. Since restoring the previous situation was impossible, the court ruled that Rabbi Kotler must pay Rabbi Bishko $5,000 in compensation.
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After the Expulsion from Lakewood
Rabbi Hillel Bishko returned to New York and lived in Brooklyn at 268 South 9th Street. Nearby was apparently his synagogue, the Keap Street Shul, at 274 Keap Street.
In the late 1940s, however, the synagogue building was expropriated for the construction of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. Rabbi Bishko received financial compensation and moved to a nearby building at 345 Keap Street. Close to this building stood his new synagogue at 326 Keap Street (corner of South 5th Street), where he served as rabbi and delivered sermons.
The synagogue was called “Tiferet Bachurim” or “The Chofetz Chaim Movement.” Its character was described in a synagogue announcement before the High Holidays:
The Chofetz Chaim Movement synagogue is a rare place of Torah and prayer, founded especially for Orthodox Jews who observe Torah and commandments. It is distinguished by its fervent prayer and study, with lessons and Psalms led by the rabbi of the synagogue. The synagogue opens every day at 5 a.m. and remains open for study and prayer until 9:30 p.m. In this synagogue no one ever speaks during the Torah reading, the repetition of the Amidah, or Kaddish—not even words of Torah.
Rabbi Bishko traveled across the United States on behalf of the Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva as its spiritual leader, spreading the ideals associated with the Chofetz Chaim—careful speech, avoidance of slander, and refraining from conversation during prayer. He also worked to distribute the Chofetz Chaim’s books widely.
In addition, he participated in founding Torah institutions: he established a United Kollel in New York, apparently in 1946, and played a central role in founding Rabbi Yisroel Gustman’s yeshiva, Netzach Israel – Vilna Ramailis Yeshiva, in 1950.
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The End
In 1953 Sarah Gittl Bishko died at the age of seventy-nine. Rabbi Hillel Bishko survived her by seven years. His 1960 obituary reported:
Last Sabbath, he was invited to speak in Young Israel of Boro Park. He spoke with his usual enthusiasm about strengthening Torah and Judaism. As he left the synagogue after the evening service, he suddenly felt unwell. He entered the Stolin synagogue in Boro Park. An ambulance with a doctor was called, but the rabbi immediately passed away. The funeral will take place at 12 noon from Anshei Sfard, 14th Avenue and 45th Street in Brooklyn.
Rabbi Kotler died on Thursday, November 29, 1962. Four days later, on Monday, December 3, a group of ten Jews arrived at the Beth Israel Cemetery. One of them, Reuven Savitz, led the group to the grave of Rabbi Hillel Bishko. At the head of the group stood Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner, head of the Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin Yeshiva in Brooklyn.
Standing before the grave, Rabbi Hutner explained that Rabbi Aharon Kotler had asked that after his death—and before his burial—someone should go to Rabbi Bishko’s grave with a quorum of ten men and ask his forgiveness.
Indeed, Rabbi Kotler’s funeral had taken place on Sunday, December 2, and that evening his coffin was flown to Israel. Rabbi Hutner made sure to fulfill the request before Rabbi Kotler’s burial on December 4 on Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.
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Conclusion
Who, then, was Rabbi Hillel Bishko—the man who played a central role in financing the Tiferet Bachurim movement in Lithuania, stood at the head of the worldwide Tiferet Bachurim movement, brought the idea of the kollel to America, founded and first directed Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, and yet was forcibly removed from the institution he had established and whose name was erased from its history?
After examining all the available data, a clear picture emerges: there was only one such figure—Hillel Bishko and Yitzhak Hillel Stein-Bishko were the same person.
Beyond the resemblance between the family photograph of Itze (Yitzhak Hillel) Stein and the photograph of Rabbi Hillel Bishko; beyond the fact that the founder of the White Plains Kollel signed as “Y. Hillel Bishko”; beyond the synagogue records in New York mentioning his father as Shaul—there is also the fact that the emissary of the Kovno Kollel and the sole emissary of Tiferet Bachurim in Europe, Rabbi Hillel Bishko, sometimes signed his letters “Yitzhak Hillel Bishko” or simply with the initials Y.H.B.
How, then, can we explain the different parental names and birthplaces recorded for this same individual?
The most plausible explanation lies in a change of surname. Such changes were not uncommon among Jews of the Russian Empire and were often intended to evade conscription into the Russian army. One common solution was to adopt the family name of parents who had no sons. Although that was not exactly the situation in the Bishko family that adopted him, something similar apparently occurred.
Thus Yitzhak Hillel Stein, who already at the age of fifteen was active in establishing Tiferet Bachurim societies, became—out of necessity—“Hillel Bishko.” Apart from the change of name, however, his character remained the same. After the First World War he was among the founders of Tiferet Bachurim in Lithuania and the man who sustained the movement financially.
In the aftermath of the Second World War and the devastation of East European Jewry, even though the full scale of the catastrophe was not yet known, Rabbi Bishko sensed the need to save the world of Torah and not merely bring estranged youth back to tradition. For that purpose he sought to train the next generation of Talmud teachers within American Jewry by founding the first kollel in White Plains and later in Lakewood. Even after his expulsion from that institution, he continued to work to establish kollelim and yeshivas and to spread Torah and religious devotion.
When I wrote in my article in Zion about the eighty visits Rabbi Bishko initiated to Lithuanian towns during the height of the crisis in 1934—when the central organization lacked even the money for postage stamps—I remarked that his behavior seemed very puzzling to me. I encountered a similar phenomenon among the heads of the Lithuanian yeshivas. In my book The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas (2022) I wondered how they could continue accepting new students when their institutions were in severe financial crisis.
Yet just as the Lithuanian yeshivas did not collapse but continued to grow, so too Rabbi Hillel Bishko, through his uncompromising conduct in the face of economic reality, succeeded in bringing one-third of Lithuania’s secular youth closer to tradition and religion.
One might therefore see Rabbi Bishko as a “visionary on a grand scale”—a man who refused to recognize practical limits and attempted things that a more cautious person would never have dared—and fortunately for him, he often succeeded. Although he personally failed in the case of Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, his initiative in founding that institution ultimately became a tremendous success.
It is clear that Rabbi Aharon Kotler felt pangs of conscience toward Rabbi Hillel Bishko, the founder and sustainer of Beth Medrash Govoha. Yet for reasons of his own, he chose to ask forgiveness for the humiliating expulsion only after Rabbi Bishko’s death. It would therefore be fitting if the leaders of the Lakewood Torah institution were to visit Rabbi Bishko’s grave once again—and pledge that the name of the man who founded the kollel will finally be restored to its rightful place in the historical record.
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Appendix
In a register of Jewish males compiled in the Minsk Province toward the end of 1874, the registrar estimated the ages of the men in the Stein family as follows: the father, Mattityahu – 34; the son, Shaul – 7; and the younger son, Zalman – 5.
Shaul married a local woman, Miriam Zhmudzhiak (this surname was particularly common in the town of Lachovitch, according to archival records).
In the list of the couple’s children preserved by the family, the first son, Yitzhak Hillel, is recorded with the date 1 June 1881. After him came a daughter, Nechama-Rashe, in 1892, followed by additional brothers and sisters until 1911 (a span of 30 years between the first and the last).
The birth date of Yitzhak Hillel is anomalous both in relation to his siblings and because of his father’s age; Shaul Stein, born around 1867, would have been only fourteen at the time of his son’s birth—a biological improbability, or at the very least, highly unlikely.
If we assume that Shaul Stein married at age eighteen, that is in 1885, then Yitzhak Hillel would have been born in 1886, a year closer to the birth of his first sister (1892). It is possible that other infants were born between them who died, or that Yitzhak Hillel’s birth year was even closer to that of his sister—for example 1889 (this will be discussed later). For the moment, however, the events described below compel us to assume that his birth year was 1886.
In 1897 one of the Talmudic lecturers of the Slabodka Yeshiva, Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer, was sent to establish a branch of the yeshiva in Slutsk in the Minsk Province. He arrived there with fourteen students from Slabodka. That same year a sixteen-year-old youth, Yosef Eliyahu Henkin, joined this new yeshiva.
According to family tradition, Yitzhak Hillel also wandered to Slutsk in order to study in its yeshiva. If we assume that he arrived there at age fifteen, this would have been in 1901. Could it be that already in that same year he transferred to the mother yeshiva in Slabodka in the Kovno Province? This, at least, might be suggested from the following events:
In Vilkomir lived the affluent merchant Chayim son of Hillel Bishko, born in 1836. One of his sons was Yitzhak Ber, born in 1856. In 1877 this son married Chaya Tsippe Bramson from the town of Sejny in the Suwalk Province in northeastern Poland and settled there. Among the children born to them there was also a son named Hillel, on 12 May 1880.
In the list of families in Vilkomir from 1874, registrars continued to add the names of children and later events. Thus the son Hillel Bishko was recorded as born in 1881, and beside his name a note was added: “re-registered in the town of Ushpol in the Kovno Province in 1901.” Was this the same Hillel, the son of the Bishko family, or someone else who assumed his identity—perhaps because the son himself had not survived (although I found no death certificate for him)?
In 1905 Yitzhak Ber Bishko died, and his widow Chaya Tsippe remained the head of the family. During the First World War she would be forced to wander to the Mohilev Province as a result of the forced expulsion of the Jews.
Family tradition relates that Yitzhak Hillel Stein evaded conscription into the army, as many did at that time. Did he perhaps assume the identity of Hillel Bishko for that purpose? If so, he would have had to make several changes to his name. In the Stein family he was called Itse. He had to abandon this name for two reasons: his new “father” was Yitzhak Ber (and a father would not give his son the same name), and the young man whose place he took was called simply “Hillel.” Consequently he abandoned his first name “Yitzhak-Itse” and remained with “Hillel.” He also had to adopt the birth year of that “Hillel,” and from then on he was considered born in 1880 or 1881.
If Hillel Bishko indeed studied at the Slabodka Yeshiva, then he remained there until 1912, the year of his marriage. Indeed, toward the end of 1911 a student from Ushpol was registered at the yeshiva (no list of names survived). Remarkably, an official 1914 portrait of the Slabodka Yeshiva student body was found in the possession of the Stein family.
In 1912 he married Sarah Gittl Podzovsky, who lived in the town of Vilky in the Kovno Province (her family originated in the town of Grinkishok in the Kovno Province; Podzovsky is a distinctive Lithuanian surname associated only with Grinkishok). He was registered as Hillel son of Yitzhak Ber, a resident of Ushpol.
According to the marriage certificate there was a large age difference between him and his bride, since the certificate states that he was born in 1881. However, if we take the more precise facts into account—namely that he was born in 1886—then he was only three years older than his bride, a very reasonable difference.
In order to marry according to Jewish law he had to record all his precise personal details in the ketubah. Yet apparently, in order to preserve his cover story, he also created a discrepant version of the ketubah (it is not clear for what purpose or who required it). Thus he erased the name “Yitzhak” and left only “Hillel,” and changed his father’s name from Shaul to Yitzhak Ber. All the other details in the ketubah were accurate in both versions.
Three children were born to the young couple:
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Aharon, in 1913 in Vilky.
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Sheyne, in 1917 in Minsk (where the family lived after the expulsion of the Jews of the Kovno Province in 1915).
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Shaul Yehuda, in 1918 in Vilna (the family apparently fled, like many others, from Minsk to Vilna during the severe phase of the war at the beginning of 1918, when the Germans attacked Russia and captured major cities).
In 1939 the family was registered for conscription purposes. According to this record Hillel was born in 1889! His son Shaul Yehuda was a student at the Telz Yeshiva (and it was recorded that he had exemption from conscription until 1 September 1940).
The last child born to the Stein family was Doba Stein, born in 1912. According to the testimony of her son, her brother Yitzhak Hillel adopted her. This may be the reason that she was later recorded (according to her marriage certificate) as Dobe Bishko, daughter of Yitzhak Ber and Miriam Zhmudzhiak (Yitzhak Ber Bishko died in 1905, so it is clear that she could not have been his daughter; in fact she was the daughter of Shaul Stein and Miriam Zhmudzhiak). She married Zalkin Raibstein in Kovno in 1939.
Several questions still remain. Why was I compelled to extend the beginning of Hillel Bishko’s activity to such an early stage in his life? I would have preferred to accept the registration made in Kovno in 1939, according to which Hillel Bishko was born in 1889. This year is closer to the birth of his sister Nechama-Rashe in 1892. Let us examine the events according to this dating.
In that case he would have arrived in Slutsk at the age of sixteen in 1905.
His marriage certificate states that he came from Ushpol; it is not clear how a young man from the Stein family in the Minsk Province would have found his way to the Kovno Province, to the town of Ushpol. This is not simple at all. The change of surname may explain this geographical move. But why did he come to the Kovno Province at all? What was he looking for there? The only reason a youth of that period, a student of the Slutsk Yeshiva, would come to the Kovno Province would be his desire to study in the mother yeshiva, Slabodka. He would thus arrive in Slabodka at the age of eighteen, in 1907. But then the age of conscription would be approaching, and he would need to arrange exemption. For that purpose, he sought an assumed identity. Perhaps following the recommendation of friends from the yeshiva, he adopted the persona of Hillel Bishko, the son of the late Yitzhak Ber Bishko.
The only difficulty in this reconstruction is that in the Vilkomir family register from 1874 a note beside the name Hillel Bishko stated that he had been re-registered in Ushpol in 1901. This obliges us to bring the young man to Slabodka at an earlier stage, not in 1907 but already in 1901. This is possible, but somewhat strained.
It is worth noting, however, that in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle in 1937 he claimed that from the age of fifteen he had already been involved in establishing societies of Tiferet Bachurim. In other words, he was active already at fifteen—an age that appears very young to us.
Yet this naturally raises the question why Yitzhak Hillel Stein would have needed to change his name already at the age of fifteen. After all, he still had ample time before reaching conscription age.
Thus, despite the clarity of the identification, several compelling questions remain.
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