The Perlow (Novominsk) Family

Understanding Novominsk

To understand Novominsk, one must trace back to the Hasidism of the northern lands, that which flourished not in Podolia or Galicia, but in the Lithuanian and Belarusian provinces. The house of Karlin, a suburb of Pinsk, was one of the very first centers of the movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov, renowned for the almost physical fervor of its prayer — to the point that "praying like a Karliner" became a consecrated expression in the Hasidic tradition.

From Karlin was born the branch of Koidanov, founded by Rabbi Shlomo Chaim Perlow in the early nineteenth century. This is where the patronym Perlow enters into dynastic history. The Hasidism of Koidanov, like that of Karlin, distinguished itself through a moderate and demanding practice: little spectacle, much study, a piety centered on prayer and on attachment to the rabbi as guide of the soul.

This filiation derives, in part, from transmitted Memory rather than continuous archival documentation: Hasidic courts long recorded their lineages in internal chronicles, prefaces to works, and oral traditions, which modern scholarship subsequently cross-referenced. Works devoted to the transmission of Jewish traditions indeed remind us how, in these worlds, orality and writing nourish one another, the master's word gradually crystallizing into text [Elman & Gershoni, 2000]. The Perlow house exemplifies this phenomenon admirably: its legitimacy rests on a chain of masters and disciples as much as on documents.

The Hasidism of these northern lands had woven a singular bond with Talmudic knowledge. Where other currents of the movement had been able to emphasize the ecstasy of prayer at the expense of study, Koidanov maintained what its guides considered the indissociability of limmud and davenen — of study and prayer. This refusal of the divorce between head and heart constitutes one of the most tenacious legacies that the Perlow lineage would carry from generation to generation, until its fullest expression in the written corpus of the last Yaakov.

From this foundation, the lineage inherits a cardinal value of Judaism: Talmudic knowledge conceived not as cold erudition but as a path of sanctification. At Koidanov, study was not separated from fervor; it is this balance that Novominsk would later bring to other lands.

The dynasty proper was founded by Rabbi Yaakov Perlow (circa 1847–1902), descendant of the house of Koidanov, who established himself in Minsk Mazowiecki (Nowo-Mińsk), in Congress Poland, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, according to dynastic tradition corroborated by Hasidic historiographical sources. It was he who gave his name to the "Novominsker Rebbe" and fixed the seat of the court in this small town near Warsaw.

This first Yaakov Perlow is known in tradition for his work Shufra de-Yaakov, in which Lithuanian Talmudic rigor and the Hasidic sensibility of Karlin-Koidanov are conjoined. He thus embodied the synthesis proper to his house: rigorous study in service of spiritual life. This conception of Jewish Law (halakha) — not as burden but as the structure of a sanctified existence — inscribes itself in the long rabbinic meditation on the meaning of the commandments and their public teaching. The very title of the work, Shufra de-Yaakov — "the beauty of Yaakov" — is a program: it says that the study of the Law is not austere constraint but a form of inner beauty, a grace granted to those who dedicate themselves to it honestly.

There is here an intersection between Memory and History: the figure of the founder reaches us first through the veneration of his descendants and his Hasidim, but his existence and written work leave verifiable traces in catalogues and chronicles. The status remains nonetheless probable for many details — dates, itineraries — that Polish archives restore only imperfectly.

What the lineage already expresses, at this stage, is implication in collective life: to found a court is to assume the charge of a community, to listen, to guide, to arbitrate, to succor. The rabbi of Novominsk was not a recluse of learning but a shepherd, in a dense and suffering Polish Jewry. With the Shufra de-Yaakov on one side and pastoral charge on the other, he inaugurates a twinhood — the author and the guide — that will traverse the entire lineage.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the court of Novominsk took root in the Polish Hasidic landscape. After the founder, the dynasty continued notably through Rabbi Alter Yisrael Shimon Perlow (1874–1933), called the Tiferes Ish, who transferred part of the court's activities to Warsaw, capital of Polish Jewish life and one of the largest Jewish concentrations in the world at that time, according to Hasidographic sources.

This shift to Warsaw was not insignificant. It placed Novominsk at the heart of the great debates then agitating Eastern European Judaism: the rise of Zionism, the growth of Jewish socialism (the Bund), secularization, and the birth of organized Orthodoxy with the founding of Agoudat Israël in 1912. This period was one in which the Jewish world questioned its political future — a moment that historians describe as one of confrontation between rival projects, of which Herzlian Zionism was the most spectacular figure [Penslar, 2020]. Facing these currents, Hasidic courts like Novominsk defended a path of fidelity to tradition, while learning to organize themselves politically in order to have a say in communal life.

It is here that another virtue of the lineage reveals itself: the care for the other and charity (tsedaka), in the full sense of social responsibility. In the overcrowded and impoverished Warsaw of the interwar years, Hasidic courts served as institutions of solidarity — support for the destitute, dowries for orphan girls, assistance for the sick. The rabbi was often, in concrete terms, the last resort of a deprived community.

It should be noted that Rabbi Alter Yisrael Shimon Perlow was also the father of Rabbi Nochum Mordechai Perlow, who would become the third Rebbe of Novominsk and cross the Atlantic. The fact that the Lubavitcher Rebbes themselves recognized a dynastic kinship — the sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, addressing Nochum Mordechai as a cousin from the house of Chernobyl — says something about the interweaving of the great Hasidic houses, these networks of crossed filiation through which tradition reinforces and mutually controls itself. This tolerance within the Hasidic world, this capacity to recognize the spiritual authority of another court even while maintaining one's own, is a dimension often overlooked in these dynasties.

The status of this chapter is probable: the broad outlines are attested by research on Polish Hasidism, but the details of Novominskian institutions have largely disappeared in the destruction that was to follow.

The catastrophe that struck Polish Jewry did not spare Novominsk. The city of Minsk Mazowiecki and Jewish Warsaw were annihilated: ghettos, deportations, extermination. This fact — the destruction of Polish Judaism between 1939 and 1945 — is one of the best established of all contemporary history, documented by a vast mass of archives, testimonies, and research.

Like so many other Hasidic dynasties, Novominsk experienced rupture: part of the family and followers perished, another part managed to flee. It was from this crossing that American refoundation was born. Migration to the United States — often via precarious routes through Europe or Asia — allowed a few survivors to reconstitute, in Brooklyn, what had been destroyed in Europe.

Rabbi Nochum Mordechai Perlow, third Rebbe of Novominsk, had in fact anticipated this movement by establishing himself in the United States before the war, which enabled him to lead an exiled court even as the world he had left was burning. He established the court of Novominsk in Brooklyn and played an instrumental role within the Agudath Israel of America, thereby laying the institutional foundations that his son would amplify. His death in 1976 marked the end of a generation of transition — that of rabbis trained in Europe, arrived in America with their mental libraries intact but their world reduced to ashes.

This moment carries an essential value of the memory of Israel: fidelity in catastrophe, this refusal to let the chain of transmission die. To rebuild a court after annihilation is to act as memory in the strongest sense — that of zakhor, the injunction to remember. Studies on the transmission of traditions show that the survival of a heritage depends precisely on this capacity to reconstitute, from fragments, a living continuity [Elman & Gershoni, 2000]. Novominsk, like other Hasidic houses, embodied this resilience: not to forget in order to survive, but to survive in order to remember and teach.

It is also here that the lineage touches upon humility before history: no glory in survival, only the responsibility to continue. The silences of this period — the names of the disappeared, the courts erased — are an integral part of the narrative and forbid any easy celebration.

The American refounding of Novominsk finds its most celebrated incarnation in Rabbi Yaakov Perlow (November 16, 1930 – April 7, 2020), known as the Novominsker Rebbe of Brooklyn. Fourth Rebbe of the dynasty, he succeeded his father Rabbi Nochum Mordechai and brought the house to a stature that none of his American predecessors had yet achieved.

His own formation was an embodied synthesis of two worlds. A disciple of Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, the master of Yeshiva Chaim Berlin—a cardinal figure in the world of Lithuanian yeshivot transplanted to America—he simultaneously pursued secular studies at Brooklyn College, a path then rare in Orthodox circles. He subsequently taught Talmud at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, Illinois, before being appointed rosh yeshiva at the yeshiva of the Khal Adath Jeshurun (Breuers) community in Washington Heights, Manhattan. It was there that he also established a Novominsker synagogue, the first nucleus of the reconstituted American court. He eventually left that position to devote all his energy to his own institution, the Yeshivas Novominsk of Boro Park, Brooklyn—known as Kol Yehuda—which became the living center of the court.

This trajectory reveals a form of humility uncommonly practiced: descending from an illustrious dynasty without imprisoning oneself within it, accepting to learn from masters of other traditions, teaching in institutions that are not one's own before building one's own. It is the mark of a man who understood that authority is not decreed: it is earned through the depth of formation and the quality of service.

He presided over the Moetzes Gedolei ha-Torah, the Council of Sages of the Torah of Agudath Israel of America, from 1998 until his death. In this capacity, he was for more than two decades one of the most authoritative voices of American Orthodox Jewry, arbitrating communal, educational, and religious questions that concerned far beyond the hasidim of his own court. His proximity to great figures of worldwide Torah—Rav Shach, the Rosh Yeshiva of Ponevezh, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, Rav Steinman, the Belzer Rebbe—illustrates Novominsk's capacity to weave connections beyond its own dynastic boundaries, embodying that tolerance internal to the Orthodox world which is one of the conditions of its collective survival.

His death on April 7, 2020, at the age of 89, occurred during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic that struck the Orthodox Jewish communities of New York hard. The funeral, transmitted by teleconference and live broadcast, gathered some sixty thousand listeners in a beit midrash empty of all physical presence—a striking image of an era in which sanitary catastrophe joined, at least in its form, the experience of distant mourning that the Jewish people has known for centuries. In this sense, the mourning of Yaakov Perlow was itself an act of collective memory.

There is a dimension of Yaakov Perlow that dynastic history risks erasing behind the public figure of the president of the Moetzes: that of the author. For the Novominsker Rebbe was a master of the pen as much as of the spoken word, and his written work constitutes the most lasting contribution of the lineage to Jewish thought in the strict sense.

The work is titled Adas Yaakov — "the community of Yaakov" — a title that expresses both personal rootedness (the name of the founder as of the refoundation) and collective vocation (an edah, a community, gathered around the Word). It is a corpus of six volumes devoted to the entirety of the Shas — that is, to the six orders of the Mishna and the Babylonian Talmud — to which are added volumes of notes on the festivals and a commentary on the Houmach (the Pentateuch). The whole represents a considerable undertaking, carried out throughout a life of rabbinical and teaching work, and testifies to first-rate Talmudic erudition.

What strikes one in this project is its encyclopedic ambition: to cover the Shas in its entirety is to inscribe oneself in the lineage of the great commentators who have sought, generation after generation, to make the Talmud accessible and living for their contemporaries. It is not the approach of a man satisfied with his dynastic renown: it is that of a mind which considers that heritage must be earned through work, and that transmission is not only a matter of charisma. The court may give fervor; the text must give substance.

The name Adas Yaakov also resonates with the history of the lineage. The first Yaakov left the Shufra de-Yaakov; the fourth leaves the Adas Yaakov. Between the two, a century of catastrophe and reconstruction, but also an uninterrupted faithfulness to the idea that the rabbi is first and foremost a man of the text. There is in this gesture a kind of justice rendered to tradition: it is not enough to survive, one must also write, so that the generations to come may have not merely a memory of the court but a resource of thought.

Furthermore, according to the testimony of those close to him, Yaakov Perlow also left numerous manuscripts containing his hidoushim — his novellas of Torah — which were to be the subject of posthumous publications. This manuscript dimension of the work echoes an age-old practice in the Jewish world: the knowledge one keeps in reserve, not from intellectual avarice but from humility, conscious that not everything one writes is necessarily ripe for publication during one's lifetime. The rabbi who censors himself speaks as much to piety as one who publishes abundantly.

The Adas Yaakov thus connects the Perlow lineage to the great chain of Jewish commentators, from Rashi to Maimonides, from the Tosafists to the Aharonim: those who believed that the study of the Talmud was not a frozen monument but a living conversation, to which each generation not only had the right but the duty to contribute. That it should be a Hasidic Rebbe — heir to a tradition which, at its origins, had sometimes put fervor and erudition in tension — who produces such a corpus says something about the maturity achieved by American Hasidism: it has understood that synthesis is not a betrayal but a fulfillment.

Novominsk remains today a living court, with its institutions, its adherents, and its dynastic continuity after 2020. Its legacy lies precisely in its position of intersection: between Hasidism and the Lithuanian world of yeshivot, between destroyed Poland and rebuilt America, between transmitted memory and documented History, between the Rebbe's word and the commentator's text.

This median position is itself a value. In an Orthodox Jewish world often traversed by rivalries between currents, Novominsk succeeded in embodying an internal tolerance—not relativism, but the capacity to hold together sensibilities that others opposed. The presidency of the Moetzes by Yaakov Perlow, a Hasidic house speaking on behalf of a far vaster ensemble, is its most visible institutional symbol. But this tolerance also expresses itself in the Rebbe's formation: studying at Chaim Berlin under Hutner, attending a secular university campus, teaching in yeshivot of "litvish" tradition, then building a Hasidic court—it is to refuse the borders that others would have erected as walls.

The Adas Yaakov extends this legacy beyond the death of its author. A six-volume book on the Shas does not close with the death of the one who wrote it: it enters houses of study, it is cited, discussed, commented upon in turn. It is the most sober and most durable form of relationship to collectivity: not to make oneself indispensable as a leader, but to make oneself useful as a thinker, to offer the community a tool it can appropriate without the master.

The Yeshivas Novominsk of Boro Park continues to welcome students; the Novominsk synagogue perpetuates the nusah of prayer proper to the court; dynastic continuity ensures the transmission of the title of Rebbe. These institutions are the stones of an edifice whose foundation the Perlow laid in Koidanov two centuries ago, and whose final stone has not yet been placed.

Comparative study of transmissions shows that the most enduring traditions are those that know how to combine several registers—oral and written, fervor and rigor, Memory and text [Elman & Gershoni, 2000]. Novominsk is part of this model. The status of this chapter remains probable in its projection toward the future: the historian can only note the vitality of a house whose scope today exceeds its Polish cradle.

From Koidanov to Brooklyn, passing through Novominsk and Warsaw, the Perlow lineage traversed the most destructive century in Jewish history without breaking the thread of its transmission. If a virtue, above all others, emerges from this journey, it is indeed that of Talmudic learning lived as service — this conviction, carried from generation to generation, that knowledge of the Torah is neither a dynastic ornament nor a specialist's expertise, but the very substance of collective Jewish life.

This virtue engenders several others, inseparable from it. Faithful transmission, first — this obstinacy in rebuilding, after each collapse, the house of study and prayer, from Koidanov to Novominsk, from Warsaw to Brooklyn, from the Shufra de-Yaakov to the Adas Yaakov. Service to the community, next, from the Polish rabbi relieving the poor of Warsaw to the president of the Moetzes watching over American Orthodoxy as a whole. And a particular humility, which made authority a service rather than a power: that of a Rebbe who accepts learning from other masters before forming his own, who publishes six volumes of commentary but keeps his manuscripts for posthumous publication, who presides over the highest body of American Orthodoxy without ever ceasing to be, first and foremost, a man of beit midrash.

In embodying these values, the Perlows did nothing other than carry, to their measure, two of Israel's founding injunctions: zakhor, remember and transmit, and limud, study and teach. The coincidence of names — Yaakov the founder of the Shufra, Yaakov the refoundation of the Adas Yaakov — gives this story the form of a circle closing: the promise that between two Yaakovs separated by a century of catastrophe, the chain was not broken, that the same name carries the same commitment, and that the collective memory of Israel finds, in families like this one, its most discreet and most tenacious guardians.