I recently heard Rabbi Berel Wein speaking with President Isaac Herzog in this home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_0s9xFzB94 .Rabbi Wein recalled a visit from Isaac Herzog’s grandfather Harav Hagaon Rabbi Herzog to his Yeshiva in Chicago after the war. Rabbi Wein was just twelve years old at the time. Rabbi Herzog was coming straight from a visit to the pope in Rome. He explained to the bachurim how he had given the pope a list of Jewish children that were put in Catholic institutions during the war. These parents, desperate to save their children’s lives, had given their children to the churches and monasteries for safekeeping. Now that the physical danger had passed the Jewish community wished to bring these children back to their people as their parents would surely have wished.

Rabbi Herzog was requesting that the Pope return children to the Jewish people, now the war was over. The pope refused. The children were all baptized, he explained, and would have to remain in the Catholic faith. After recounting this story, Rabbi Herzog put his head on the shtender and started to weep. Rabbi Wein related that he had never seen somebody cry that way before. Rabbi Herzog then strengthened himself and addressed the young Yeshiva bochurim once more, saying “I cannot do anything more for those children. What are you going to do for the Jewish people? What are you going to do to build the Jewish people up?”. That moment had stayed with Rabbi Wein throughout his life.

Rabbi Herzog had cried so bitterly for the lost neshamos. But times, it seems, have changed. Which Rabbi cries today when a school puts the students on a “list”? More often, the list gets thrown into the garbage and the rejected children feel much the same. Who cries for them?. Who cares for them? We must learn from Hagaon Rabbi Herzog that we must save every Jewish child, regardless of the situation. If indeed there is nothing we can do, we should at least weep.

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Rabbi Abenson is the founder and director of ShaarHatalmud, a unique yeshivah-based online program, which incorporates learning all Kodesh subjects, from Kriah up to learning Gemara, Rishonim, and Shulchan Aruch. He also conducts evaluations, remediation, and training, and consults with school principals to improve students’ underdeveloped skills.