The writings, legal responsa and transcribed lectures of Rabbi Meir Chaim Chaikin, a Talmudic scholar who endured Soviet labor camps for three years as punishment for his clandestine efforts to strengthen Jewish life, have for the first time been published, released under the title Tiferes Ezriel in keeping with the author’s directive shortly before his passing in 1966.
Some of these writings, composed over a period of years during the Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi’s tenure in the Georgian city of Tbilisi, were nearly abandoned when Chaikin and his children fled Communist rule after the end of World War II. It was only through the self-sacrifice of his son, who unbeknownst to Chaikin smuggled several manuscripts across the border by hiding them in the lining of his coat, that the rabbi’s novel conclusions and erudite explanations were able to be saved.
Orphaned in 1923 at the age of sixteen, Chaikin’s life was fraught with hardship, but he committed himself to keeping Judaism alive behind the Iron Curtain. At the encouragement of his mother, he travelled to his uncle in Gomel to study Jewish texts, and also apprenticed as a ritual slaughterer. He later enrolled in an underground school in Nevel that was part of the network of secret Jewish schools established by the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory.
In Nevel, the Sixth Rebbe established a rabbinic board whose purpose was to train young rabbis to take up vacated positions across the Soviet Union, replacing those leaders who were forced to flee to protect their lives. In 1927, Chaikin received one of these appointments and was sent by the Sixth Rebbe to Surazh, a town in the Vitebsk province in Belarus.
There, Chaikin immersed himself in his rabbinic duties, beginning a series of Torah classes and working to keep kosher food available for members of the Jewish community. These activities attracted the attention of the Communist authorities, but the rabbi was saved when one of the community members, who had a contact in the local branch of the secret police, tipped him off to an impending arrest.
Chaikin headed to Georgia, which, although under Communist rule, was a little more lax in its persecution of the Jewish community. In Kutaisi the rabbi married his wife Sara, and in Tbilisi he established himself as a leader in repairing the city’s Jewish ritual baths, performing ritual circumcisions, and facilitating Jewish marriages and divorces in keeping with religious law.
The rabbi, who learned Georgian to be able to better communicate with the locals, was a thorn in the side of the Soviets, who interrogated him many times and even threatened his safety. Throughout this period, Chaikin continuously penned his scholarly thoughts on Jewish law, writing on the bindings of Jewish volumes. This placed him in great danger, as the mere presence of such writings in his home would have provided the secret police with evidence of Jewish counterrevolutionary activity.
Finally, Chaikin was arrested and jailed in several labor camps. Upon his release, in 1946, he and his family escaped across the border to Poland through the use of falsified passports. Because being caught with religious writings at the border would have endangered their lives, Chaikin left many of his documents behind, but his fourteen-year-old son Ezriel hid some of them, including his father’s ordination certificates, in the lining of his coat.
Once they were safe, Ezriel took out the manuscripts and presented them to his father, who was overcome with joy.
The family travelled to Prague, where they were welcomed by the refugee community in the city. There he joined a rabbinical court that was dealing with the many burning issues of family separation during the war.
From there, at the instruction of the Sixth Rebbe, he travelled to Belgium, where he gave lectures on the Talmud. A short time later, in 1947, he took up the position of spiritual leader of Stockholm’s Jewish community, and in 1951 he moved across the globe to Montreal, where he became rabbi of the Beis Yisroel and Shmuel Synagogue.
He joined the Montreal Rabbinical Board and became the dean of the Tomchei Tmimim Lubavitch Rabbinical College of Canada, where he continued his Talmudic lectures.
To publish his writings and lectures, Chaikin’s descendants combed through his private notes and those of his Montreal students in order to piece together some of his more novel dissertations.
Written in Hebrew and comprised of 43 chapters, Tiferes Ezriel covers such subjects as the Jewish law mandating that a woman has to give her consent to a marriage, a discussion on the finer points of laws governing the return of lost items, and the requirements to render an immersion in a ritual bath kosher.
The book was published with the assistance of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe, and was edited by Rabbi Yehoshua Segal.
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