By a Grandson of Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz

I grew up in the shadow of a man I never had the privilege to meet, but whose name and fire were spoken about in my home with a reverence normally reserved for prophets. I carry his name with the fear that I have not done enough to carry his legacy forward. My grandfather, Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, was not merely a builder of institutions—though he built the most consequential Torah structures in American history. He was not merely a teacher—though he taught a generation of future leaders who would shape the spiritual destiny of American Jewry. He was not merely a visionary—though his vision reached decades beyond his lifetime. What he truly was—and what many people still fail to grasp—is that he was a survivor of one world who came to save another.

His eyes were European eyes, forged in a Hungary that sleepwalked into antisemitic catastrophe. His mind was a Mussar mind, trained to see danger not at the moment it erupts, but at the moment it germinates. His heart was a Chassidic heart, filled with fierce love for every Jew, especially those drifting dangerously far from their own heritage. And his mission—his entire earthly task—was to prevent America from repeating Europe’s mistakes.

Today, as the political and ideological currents in America turn ominous, as antisemitism rises with a speed that should terrify anyone with historical memory, and as figures like Zohran Mamdani ascend to public office by running explicitly on anti-Jewish narratives, I find my grandfather’s teachings not quaint, not old-world, not outdated—but frighteningly current. I can feel his warnings pulsing beneath today’s headlines. I can hear the echo of his storm-sensing instincts vibrating beneath today’s political rhetoric. And I know, with absolute certainty, what he would say to us now.

What follows is not a fantasy reconstruction. It is not a fictional monologue. It is not an attempt to put words into his mouth. It is a synthesis—based strictly on documented statements preserved by by illustrious family, Torah Vodaath archives, oral traditions recorded by his talmidim, testimonies from Gedolim who knew him, and the worldview he articulated in the Mussar discourses and strategic decisions that shaped Jewish life in America.

This is the essay my grandfather would demand be written.

If my grandfather were alive today, his voice would not be soft. It would not be gentle. It would not be approving. It would be a thunderstorm breaking over a generation too complacent to recognize the smell of rain.

He would begin, as he often did, by reminding us that the Jew who forgets history is the Jew who repeats it.

“I have seen this before,” he would say. “And I fear I am seeing it again. I was born into a world that believed itself immune to catastrophe. A world that believed progress was irreversible, that stability was woven into the fabric of modern life. A world where Jews walked proudly, confidently, even arrogantly, believing themselves secure. And that world collapsed with a speed that left entire communities gasping for breath. You think America is different. Every Jew in Europe once said the same.”

He would speak not as a pessimist but as a realist—one who understood that history does not announce itself politely. When he declared, many times, “Golus America iz oich golus—America is also exile,” he was not speaking poetically; he was issuing a strategic warning. When he insisted that without a vast network of Torah schools, America’s Jews would spiritually dissolve, he was not theorizing; he was diagnosing. And when he said that if Torah does not grow here, the Jew will not survive here, he was not speaking about metaphysics; he was speaking about sociology, politics, history, and the raw instincts of a man who had seen the ground shift beneath Jewish feet before.

His Mussar was not theoretical. It was geopolitical. His warnings were not abstract. They were........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)