Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich

I know Im supposed to answer the question I asked about milah.  But the formulation is still fuzzy in my mind.

Tonight Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich came to speak at YU, where I had the zechus to hear him.  If you never heard of him (like I hadnt till last week), he was born an irreligious Jew in Soviet Russia, became interested in Jewish history and started an underground Jewish education movement in Russia, was arrested trying to escape to Israel and spent eleven years in the gulag in communist russia.  Despite all that, he remained (and if anything grew more) committed to Judaism and when he was freed, moved immediately to Israel where he became fully Orthodox.

What stood out to me was Mendelevich's tremendous ahavas yisrael.  He said that the publicity of his trial and attempted escape forced the Soviet Union to begin to allow Jews out of Russia, such that while almost no Jews had left Russia once communism took over there, by the time he was freed 300,000 Jews had emigrated from Russia to Israel.  He said that he felt it was a worthwhile trade - he would stay longer in prison to free more Jews from the communists.  and this prison wasn't exactly a pleasant place - he was beaten, put to forced labor, never allowed visitations from family or friends.  If he had given in to Russian demands to confess, to not act religious, things would have gone much easier for him.  He brought the hard conditions upon himself, and still felt it was worth it to help other Jews escape.  That is pure ahavas yisrael in every sense of the phrase.

Too often we separate our private religious lives / relationship with Hashem from our interpersonal relationships - this man allowed no such distinctions - when he spoke about his life, you saw that to him, being true to G-d was the same as being true to His people, and vica versa.  He almost died on several occasions because of his refusal to take off his yarmulke - you could just look at that narrowly as dedication to mitzvos bein adam lamakom (and it is certainly incredible even in that light alone).  But Mendelevich described that to him it wasn't just that - it was about him representing the spirit of the Jewish people to the Russians - we cannot be broken.  Should Mendelevich give in, he realized it reflects badly not on him alone, but on our entire people.  Through that, his action of (literal) mesiras nefesh became one that is limaan kol klal yisrael.

Please G-d, we should all never know any of the suffering Mendelevich knew, but we should all strive to reach his level of ahavas hashem and ahavas yisrael.