Over 100 years ago, on the 20th of Sivan (this coming Wednesday), Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim was closed by special order of the Russian government. The yeshiva, which had been established to counter the new and foreign ideologies that threatened the Jewish people from within, was a favorite target of proponents of the Enlightenment. Indeed, on this occasion their slander succeeded, but only for a very short while, as we see in this excerpt from the Previous Rebbe's diary dated 21 Sivan, 5662 (1902):
"Yesterday, a messenger arrived around six o'clock with a letter stating that at twelve noon a police captain, his lieutenant, and three officers had burst into the great study hall of the yeshiva and ordered everyone to stop learning. They wrote down all the students' names, then ordered that the place be evacuated. The captain then instructed that the windows be closed from the inside, and when everyone had exited, the front door was locked. A wax seal was affixed to the official order, with strict instructions not to open it.
"The action had been initiated by the Regional Minister of the Enlightenment, who had issued an order to immediately close all yeshivot founded by Rebbe Schneersohn."
What was the reaction of the Previous Rebbe, the administrator of Tomchei Temimim? He simply made a new entrance.
"After arriving [in Lubavitch] and evaluating the situation, I instructed Yankel the builder to construct a small platform with a flight of stairs leading into the front window ...I put a metal can on top of the wax seal so that it wouldn't break. By seven in the morning the yeshiva was open as usual."
Decades have passed. Neither the Russian goverment of the Czar, nor the Communist government of the USSR, could force the students of the Lubavitcher yeshiva to stop studying Torah. Today Chabad-Lubavitch yeshivas and day schools in the former Soviet Union flourish; there are nearly 700 schools under the auspices of Chabad-Lubavitch world-wide. New entrances are made, and the doors are open "as usual."
