A Famed Yeshiva Returns to a Belarusian Hamlet

Some of the world’s most famous yeshivas bear the names of the European shtetls where they were founded—Brisk, Mir, Telz, Ponevezh—even if they are located in New York City, Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and elsewhere. There is nothing new about this: a millennium ago, Baghdad was home to the world’s two most important rabbinic academies, both named after other cities in Mesopotamia. But a few years ago, a man named Dovid Hofstedter got a different idea for carrying on the legacy of a prewar talmudic seminary, as Shira Li Bartov writes: