‘And How Can One Behold a Sefer Torah in Distress?’ On the Relationship between Rabbi Chaim Heller and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
This article, published on the occasion of the anniversaries of the passing of Rabbi Chaim Heller (14 Nisan 5720) and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (18 Nisan 5753), may their memories be a blessing, reexamines their relationship through a newly published body of correspondence, situating their bond within the intellectual and material conditions of mid-twentieth-century American Orthodoxy. The letters document both a relationship of unusual personal and scholarly closeness and the economic precarity and institutional instability that affected even leading Torah…