They Called Him Rebbe: The Life and Good Works of Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky (Hardcover)

by Raphael D. Blumberg

The present volume, which contains more than one hundred vivid stories about Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky’s relationship with his students, entertains as it inspires. With tears and laughter, you will accompany Rebbe through the tragedies and triumphs of his life as he reaches out to his students with humor, wisdom and compassion, helping each one to achieve his full potential as a Jew and a human being.

They Called Him Rebbe also contains new primary source material about the Holocaust and the Mir Yeshiva’s years in Shanghai.

Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky was born in Vishnevo, Belarus in 1913. Over a twenty-year period, he learned in Radin, Baranovitz and at the Mir Yeshiva. Together with the Mir Yeshiva, Rabbi Milikowsky fled to Shanghai during World War II. The Nazis murdered most of his family.

After the war, Rabbi Milikowsky became a Torah educator and mashgiach at the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore. There, over the course of forty years, he employed his unique, God-given talents to help hundreds of boys to remain Jewishly strong and inspiring many to go on to careers in the rabbinate and in Jewish education. He passed away in 1990 and is survived by four children and many grandchildren who live in both the United States and Israel.

Hardcover, 295 pages

About the Author:

Raphael Blumberg, who grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, studied under Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky in Tenth Grade at the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore. He earned degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent four years learning in Israeli yeshivas. He is the translator of more than twenty-five books and hundreds of articles on mostly Torah-related topics. He and his wife Mona and family have lived in Kiryat Arba, Israel since 1984.

Praise for They Called him Rebbe:

“They Called Him Rebbe demonstrates how a synthesis of wisdom and love created a force that spanned space and time to bring the flavor of prewar Lithuania into today’s American classroom. But only a true Talmid Chacham, as was Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky, z”l, will know how to utilize the “chochmas lev” (Exodus 35:35) effectively. A must read for every educator.”
—Rabbi Nathan Kamenetsky, author of Making of a Godol

“This is the true story of a European Rabbi trained in Mir and Radin who won the hearts and minds of his American students, inspiring them to become leaders of a post-Holocaust generation born out of tragedy. It is must reading for any parent or educator who wants to understand teenage boys and how to motivate them to be better Jews and menschen.”
—Rabbi Yaakov Spivak, Rav and Rosh Yeshiva, Kollel Ayshel Avraham