Exclusive: The Steipler Recommended Helping a Young Berland, Decades Before His Crimes

This week, the Haredi world, particularly the Lithuanian stream, marked 40 years since the death of one of its foremost leaders of recent decades, Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, known as the “Steipler” after his hometown of Hornosteipel, now in Ukraine. As you have likely already guessed, the Steipler was the father of the late Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, and Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach’s deputy in leading the Lithuanian Haredi public through the 1970s and 1980s. Most of his time was devoted to Torah study and receiving visitors. Beyond being a prominent Torah scholar, he is revered as a tzaddik, and in his days the Lithuanian leadership model that includes giving blessings and receiving the public, much like the Hasidic rebbes, took root.

In the 1984 elections, he joined Rabbi Shach’s view and announced, “I and my household will vote Shas.” In doing so, he helped found the movement that would later be headed by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. He passed away on Friday night, August 10, 1985, and an estimated 200,000 people attended his funeral.

A lesser known detail in the Steipler’s biography is his close connection to a young kollel scholar in Bnei Brak at the time, who would later stand at the center of one of the most embarrassing sex scandals the Haredi public has known, Eliezer Berland. In those years, long before he became the head of a community numbering in the thousands and moving millions, Berland was, it turns out, a young Bnei Brak avrech in his twenties who struggled to make ends meet. According to testimonies, Berland was then a respected kollel scholar, valued for his learning, and favored by the Steipler because of it.

Documents we publish here for the first time, located by researcher Dr. Dotan Goren in the Israel State Archives, reveal a lesser known episode in Berland’s life involving Rabbi Kanievsky. In a letter Berland sent to the then Chief Rabbi and Rishon LeZion, Yitzhak Nissim, he describes his dire situation: “I have fallen into terrible trouble of dreadful debts, and I run about day and night almost without pause and without rest, taking loans from this one to repay that one, and there is no rest for the sole of my foot.” He ends his letter with a specific request for assistance: “Therefore I have come to plead before you, and I hereby attach an important letter from Rabbi Kanievsky, and I very much ask that you strive to help me with substantial assistance and rescue me from my terrible troubles.”

In the attached letter of recommendation from Rabbi Kanievsky, dated early 1967, he writes that he has learned that “the gaon Rabbi Eliezer Berland, may he live, one of the esteemed scholars of ‘Kollel Volozhin,’” is “in dreadful debts,” and he recommends that anyone who can should come to his aid.

Nearly 60 years have passed since then. The Steipler is no longer with us, nor is his son. Berland went from respected scholar to a rabbinic tragedy as a convicted sex offender, and he is certainly not mired in dreadful debts today, at least not regarding his and his family’s needs. A long lost letter found in the State Archives reminds us that the man who later evaded law enforcement for years using private planes once needed real financial help in the late 1960s, and the one who came to his aid was the Lithuanian Haredi leader of the time, Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky.