The story of Professor Yirmiyahu Branover and the unbreakable Jewish soul.
Sometimes, through the life story of a single person, you can gain perspective on an entire generation. One of those rare moments happened this week, when on Monday Professor Herman Yirmiyahu Branover passed away at the age of 94.
Branover was born in Riga in 1931, into a Jewish home where Yiddish was spoken, but Judaism itself was barely present in daily life. He remembered going with his grandfather to synagogue on the holidays. He remembered the Pesach Seder. Beyond that, almost nothing.
Then World War II broke out. His father was murdered, and he and his mother fled deep into Russia, eventually arriving in Leningrad, today’s St. Petersburg. There his extraordinary talent became clear. He excelled in his studies, despite the fact that in those years Jews were rarely given the opportunity to enter the prestigious universities of the Soviet Union. In the end he was accepted, and became a professor of physics, specializing in hydrodynamics.
In the early 1960s, something deeper began to trouble him. At the time he was studying Marxist ideology and the worldview behind Marx’s philosophy, and he came to the conclusion that something was missing. A human being, he thought to himself, is not merely a producer and consumer, someone who manufactures things and then consumes them. There is something far deeper within a person. He began asking himself: What is man’s place in the world? What is the purpose of life? Why does humanity exist at all?
In the enormous library in Leningrad, he decided to search for answers. He read philosophy endlessly, from Aristotle and Plato all the way to the most modern thinkers. He went through nearly everything written on the subject. But the more he read, the less satisfied he became. The real answer he could not find.
Then, almost intuitively, he began to feel that perhaps the answer lay within the Jewish experience. He decided to enter the Jewish section of the library. The librarian warned him gently: “If you are looking for a specific book, I’ll tell you where to find it. But I suggest you do not come here too often. It could damage your career.”
He began reading books about Jewish history, but he was disappointed. There were many history books describing what happened to the Jews, but almost none that tried to explain the meaning of Jewish existence and the role of the Jewish people.
One day he found a Russian translation of the Tanach. He read it over and over again, examining every verse and every detail. Suddenly he felt that there was something entirely different here. That the world has a purpose. That man has a mission. Concepts like life, humanity, and Judaism suddenly took on meaning.
And once he reached the conclusion that it was true, he wanted to begin living by it. The problem was that he had no idea how. He read in the Torah that one must rest on Shabbos, so he stopped working on Shabbos. He understood that one may not kindle a fire, so he stopped lighting matches, although he did not yet realize that electricity was included as well. Regarding kashrus, he knew only the basics. He did not eat pork, and he avoided mixing meat and milk. Beyond that, he knew almost nothing.
Around that time, he and his mother decided to return to Riga, Latvia. When he arrived there, he made a decision: he would go to synagogue on Shabbos. But in the Soviet Union of those days, even that was dangerous. This time he was told officially: “A synagogue is not a place for a promising scientist.” It was perfectly clear that if he continued to be seen in synagogue, his academic career could be destroyed.
Branover understood the message. He began searching for an underground minyan, far from the eyes of the authorities. That is how he found a group of Chabad chassidim who operated a clandestine Shabbos minyan.
Slowly, a relationship developed. The chassidim encountered a rare individual: a renowned scientist, a deep intellectual, someone honestly searching to understand. One day they asked him, “Do you also want to understand what you are praying?” “Of course I do,” he answered immediately. From that moment, a new journey began.
They started learning with him little by little. First Chumash with Rashi. Then Gemara and Tanya. Suddenly an entirely new world opened before him. In Torah learning he discovered not only faith or tradition. He found a profound answer to his philosophical thirst. The questions that had troubled him for years, what is man, what is the meaning of life, what is the purpose of the world, suddenly received a new language and entirely different answers.
The Riga Ghetto
There was another experience that shook him deeply and drew him back toward Judaism.
In the early 1940s, the Nazis murdered the Jews of the Riga Ghetto. But for many years, almost nobody knew where the bodies had been buried. The place had been forgotten and hidden away, as if they wanted to erase not only the people, but even the memory of them.
Then a young woman who had survived the ghetto was found. She was among the few who survived miraculously. One day she led a group of young Jews into a forest outside the city. They followed her between the trees until she reached a mound of earth in the middle of the area. Pointing to it emotionally, she said, “Here. Here they murdered and buried the Jews of the Riga Ghetto.”
Those young people decided the place could not remain like that. They began clearing the area, uprooting bushes, opening a path with their own hands to the mass grave. It was exhausting work that lasted for years. They had no tools, no funding, and no official permission. Only a deep inner desire to perform a true act of kindness for the Jews of the ghetto.
Slowly, the small group became a large and united community. Quietly, almost underground, they worked together until eventually they succeeded in erecting a memorial inscribed in Russian, Latvian, and Yiddish in memory of those murdered.
But Professor Branover would later say that the true monument of the Riga Ghetto was not the stone they built in the forest. The real monument was those two hundred young people, and he was one of them.
They came from every layer of society and every possible background: students, intellectuals, laborers, young people who had grown up with almost no Judaism at all. Yet through their involvement in preserving the memory of the Jews of the ghetto, something deep awakened within them. By the time the work was finished, every one of them had become Torah observant Jews. Eventually they all succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union. Through the mass grave of the Jews of Riga, they rediscovered their ancestors and their roots.
To live as a religious Jew in the Soviet Union was extraordinarily difficult, certainly for someone in the position of Professor Yirmiyahu Branover. In Riga he constantly tried to find ways to manage without directly confronting the authorities. Because he was a world renowned scientist, he was able to arrange his schedule so that he would not need to work on Shabbos. But even then, everything was done with fear and caution.
He hid his Shabbos table. The Shabbos candles his wife lit were carefully concealed, because specifically on Friday nights his colleagues from work would often “drop by for a visit.”
He would always schedule his annual vacation during the month of Tishrei. That allowed him to travel to cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand, where the pressure against Jewish life was weaker. There he could attend synagogue on the holidays with less fear.
Sometimes years passed without his tasting kosher meat. The mikvah was extremely far away, dozens of kilometers, and it was heated only a few times a week. Every small detail of Jewish life required struggle, planning, and personal risk.
Then he decided that he wanted to move to Eretz Yisroel.
By that time he was already considered one of the leading scientists in the Academy of Sciences in Riga. His standing in the field of hydrodynamics was so significant that there was even discussion about nominating him for a Nobel Prize.
But the moment he submitted a request for an exit visa to Israel, everything changed.
In April of 1971 he approached the authorities and requested permission to leave the Soviet Union. He was immediately fired from his job. Fortunately, even before this, he had done everything possible to prevent his Nobel Prize candidacy from advancing, because he understood very well that if he became too prominent as a Soviet scientist, they would never allow him to leave. The Soviet Union did not release people like that easily.
But now they still refused to let him go.
One official told him, “When you forget everything you learned here in Russia, or when everything you learned becomes irrelevant, then we will let you leave.”
When he asked how long that would take, she answered, “Between fifteen and twenty years.”
The situation grew steadily worse. His source of income disappeared. He was forced to sell clothing simply in order to survive. A man who had been one of the country’s most important scientists suddenly became unemployed, under surveillance, and under relentless pressure.
Phone call to the Rebbe
In 1972, Professor Yirmiyahu Branover felt that he had reached his breaking point.
For several years already he had been connected to the Chabad chassidim in Riga. Internally, he already felt that he was one of them. He constantly heard stories about the Rebbe and about the Rebbe’s ability to strengthen Jews even in the darkest places in the world.
He decided that he had to turn to the Rebbe to ask for a brachah.
In the Chabad siddur he owned appeared the address of 770 Eastern Parkway and a phone number in New York. In those days, placing a phone call from the Soviet Union to the United States was extremely complicated. Calls had to go through operators, there were long waits, and often the call never connected at all.
The KGB had disconnected the phone in his home, so he went to the central post office and called 770 from there.
This time, something happened that seemed miraculous to him. Within about ten minutes he succeeded in reaching the Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Binyomin Klein.
“I want to speak to the Rebbe,” he said immediately. The secretary answered gently but firmly, “The Rebbe does not speak on the telephone. Tell me what the matter is.”
But Branover insisted. “This is extremely urgent. I must speak to the Rebbe. It is a confidential matter.”
Rabbi Klein again tried to explain that such a thing was impossible, but Branover would not give up. Finally Rabbi Klein decided to transfer the call to the chief secretary, Rabbi Chaim Mordechai Aizik Hodakov.
He too said the same thing. “Tell me the issue, and I will pass it on to the Rebbe.” And while they were speaking, something unexpected happened.
At 770 there was a system through which the Rebbe could listen in to conversations in the secretary’s office. Suddenly Branover heard a voice in Yiddish. It was the Rebbe himself.
The Rebbe said to the secretary, “Tell him that he has all the brachos, and soon he will leave there.” Three weeks later, after international pressure and prolonged efforts, he finally received permission to leave.
But even then, the Soviet Union did not give up easily.
The authorities demanded that he pay the enormous sum of forty thousand dollars as “payment” for the academic education he had received from the state. It was an unimaginable amount in those days. People said that he was “the most expensive Jew to leave the Soviet Union.”
When Branover arrived in Israel, the Rebbe did not let him rest.
The Rebbe saw in him the symbol of an entire generation: young Jews in the Soviet Union who had grown up with absolutely no Jewish knowledge, no background, no connection to Torah and mitzvos, and yet drew close to Judaism with extraordinary mesirus nefesh.
It was an almost incomprehensible phenomenon.
On the surface, these Jews had no reason to remain Jewish. Quite the opposite. Everything around them pushed them away from Judaism: fear, persecution, loss of livelihood, isolation, ridicule, constant danger.
And yet, precisely then, an enormous thirst for Judaism awakened within them.
An entire generation of young men and women, almost entirely on their own and with barely anyone to guide them, began searching for Shabbos, tefillin, Torah, Gemara, Chassidus, and meaning.
The Rebbe wanted Branover to become one of the people who would help this generation.
That is why the Rebbe encouraged him to establish the “Shamir” organization, which assisted Torah observant Russian Jews. Branover worked on translating and distributing Jewish books in Russian, because there were almost no Jewish texts available in the Russian language at the time.
He helped Jews who arrived in Israel adjust to their new lives: finding jobs, building homes, keeping Shabbos without losing their livelihoods, and integrating into the country without losing the Jewish identity that had awakened within them through such tremendous sacrifice.
This became his life’s work for many years. At 770, you could see how much the Rebbe cherished him. Every time the Rebbe saw Professor Branover, he would smile at him.
The Rebbe viewed him as a person with a public mission. Therefore the Rebbe made sure that Branover would receive a central place in the academic world even after leaving the Soviet Union. The Rebbe encouraged him to continue developing his research, to lecture at universities in the United States, and to become known in the scientific world.
And indeed, Branover became highly respected in his field.
He conducted groundbreaking research in physics and energy. Among other things, he sought alternative solutions to the global energy crisis.
Already decades ago he was speaking about producing solar energy from sunlight. He believed that humanity would eventually learn to harness the sun’s energy so efficiently that a major portion of the world’s energy consumption could come from it.
Today, when people like Elon Musk speak about a future based on solar power and renewable energy, it is easier to understand how far ahead of his time Branover truly was.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was the rare combination he embodied: a world class scientist together with a Jew filled with faith.
In the land of their enemies
This week we read the parshiyos of Behar and Bechukosai.
In Parshas Bechukosai appear the tochachah, the painful descriptions of what can happen if, G-d forbid, the Jewish people fail to keep Torah and mitzvos and fail to walk in the ways of G-d.
But specifically at the end of the tochachah come the extraordinary verses of comfort:
“And even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them and I will not despise them to destroy them and annul My covenant with them.”
The Torah promises that even when the Jewish people are in the land of their enemies, even when it appears that everything is lost, the covenant will never be broken. The inner bond between a Jew and the Holy One Blessed Be He can never disappear.
And it is difficult to think of a place where Judaism was attacked more brutally than in Soviet Russia.
For decades, the Soviet Union waged war against every trace of Judaism. Synagogues were closed. Mikvahs were destroyed. Jewish books were burned. Rabbis were persecuted. Children were intimidated. Jews were cut off from every spiritual root. Any expression of Judaism could cost a person his livelihood, his education, his opportunities, and sometimes far more.
But then the Divine promise revealed itself with incredible power.
Precisely in the place where they tried to erase every Jewish spark, an entire generation of young Jews arose searching for their way back. Professor Yirmiyahu Branover was the symbol of that generation.
In the final generation of Soviet Russia, the ancient promise of the Torah was fulfilled before the world’s eyes: “I will not reject them and I will not despise them to destroy them and annul My covenant with them.”
The Jewish soul prevailed.