How the Raavad Saved 75,000 Jews …750 Years After His Death

Rabbeinu Avrohom ben Dovid of Posquières on his Yahrtzeit – today – the  26th of Teves

By Rabbi Yair Hoffman

It was Budapest, Hungary, 1944.  The Nazis had cut off all water to the Jewish ghetto.

Over 100,000 Jews were crammed into a few square blocks of Budapest. They were starving. The soup kitchen run by Maurice Lowinger was the only thing keeping tens of thousands of them alive. But now, without water, even that lifeline was about to disappear.

Lowinger needed 1,250 gallons of water every single day just to make enough soup for the 100,00 neshamos. The city’s pipes were sealed to the Jewish blocks. The wells were guarded. The situation seemed entirely hopeless.

Then an elderly gentleman remembered something from his youth. Long ago, somewhere beneath the streets of Budapest, there was an old mikvah fed by an underground spring. Most mikvaos don’t need a natural spring—rainwater works fine according to most opinions. But the Jews who built this mikvah had wanted to follow a stricter, more machmir view. They wanted to fulfill the opinion of one of the Rishonim who had ruled that the majority of the mikvah’s water must come from a natural, undrawn source and that it is not considered kosher if it falls less than 51 percent.

That Rishon had died over 700 years before the mikvah was even built. His name was Rabbeinu Avrohom ben Dovid—the Raavad.

Lowinger found engineers. They dug down with spoons, and finally, finally, they reached the ancient water source. And the spring that had once purified Jewish neshamos now saved Jewish lives. Day after day, the water flowed. The soup was made. Seventy-five thousand Jews survived.

Because of a Rishon that had lived seven and a half centuries earlier.

This is the story of that Rav

The Raavad’s family history reaches back to the most infamous moment in Klal Yisroel’s history. When the Romans destroyed the Beis HaMikdash, the emperor Titus sent his best Jewish captives to different parts of his empire. One of his officers in Spain asked for nobles from Yerushalayim—skilled craftsmen who knew how to make fine curtains and work with silk.

Among those captives was a man named Baruch. From him descended the Raavad’s grandfather, one of the five most famous rabbis in all of Spain.

So when R’ Avrohom ben Dovid was born around 1125 in Narbonne, France, he inherited a golden chain of Torah reaching back a thousand years—all the way to the ruins of Yerushalayim itself.

Building an Empire of Torah

The young Avrohom was brilliant. He studied under the greatest rabbis of Provence, married the daughter of another famous scholar, and quickly became known as one of the sharpest minds of his generation.

He moved from city to city—Lunel, Montpellier, Nîmes—until he finally settled in a small town called Posquières. The Jews who lived there called it “Kiryas Ye’arim.” Today it’s known as Vauvert.

It was there that the Raavad did something unusual. He was wealthy—very wealthy. And instead of living in luxury, he used his money to build a massive yeshiva. He paid for the building. He paid for repairs. He personally supported poor students who couldn’t afford food or housing.

When the famous traveler Binyamin of Tudela passed through around 1165, he couldn’t stop talking about the Raavad’s generosity. Students came from everywhere to learn from this master. His yeshiva became the most important center of Torah learning in all of Provence.

Thrown Into Prison

But the Raavad’s wealth attracted dangerous attention.

The local nobleman, a man named Elzéar, wanted that money for himself. Without warning, he had the Raavad arrested and thrown into a dungeon. The aged rabbi sat in a dark cell, not knowing if he would ever see daylight again.

It looked like the end. Years later, another great rabbi—Rav Meir of Rothenburg—would die in a German prison under similar circumstances.

But Hashem had other plans.

Count Roger II Trencavel, a friend of the Jews, heard about the injustice. He used his power to free the Raavad and banish the wicked Elzéar to a distant city. The Raavad walked out of prison and went straight back to his yeshiva.

And in a clear case of Mida k’Neged Midah, a war broke out, and the very Elzéar himself was captured. Where was he sent as a prisoner? To the very same city where the Raavad was living. The man who had locked up the Raavad now had to watch his former victim teaching Torah in freedom, while he rotted in disgrace.

The Man Who Wasn’t Afraid to Argue

The Raavad wrote a lot. Commentaries on the Talmud. Seforim about halachah. Hundreds of teshuvos – responsa answering people’s questions. But he became most famous for something else: arguing.

Not arguing for the sake of fighting. Arguing for the sake of truth.  When he saw something he felt to be incorrect or wrong in another rabbi’s writings, he said so. Loudly. Clearly. Without holding back.  It was about protecting the Torah.

When he disagreed with the Rif—one of the greatest halachic authorities ever—he did so gently and respectfully. He called the Rif “the sun by whose brilliant rays our eyes are dazzled.” Even when pointing out mistakes, he treated the Rif like a beloved teacher.

But when an eighteen-year-old Talmid Chochom named R’ Zerachiah HaLevi composed a harsh attack on that same Rif, the Raavad was incensed. Who was this adolescent to dismantle the work of a giant? The Raavad dismissed him as an “immature youth” who had no standing to criticize his elders with such irreverence. The underlying principle was clear: one may challenge anyone—even the most towering scholars. But one must possess the requisite knowledge, the seasoned experience, and the intellectual humility to do so with propriety.

Then came the Rambam.

The Rambam—Rabbeinu Moshe ben Maimon—was a singular genius. Arguably the most formidable Jewish intellect since the redaction of the Talmud. And he had produced something unprecedented: the Mishneh Torah, a comprehensive codification of Jewish law that systematized the entirety of halachic knowledge into one lucid, methodically organized work.

The difficulty? The Rambam did not cite his sources. He simply pronounced the law as settled, without elucidating its derivation or rationale.

To the Raavad, this approach was fraught with peril. How could a rabbi adjudicate matters of halachah if he could not independently verify the underlying sources? How could anyone ascertain with certainty that the Rambam had reached the correct conclusion? The implicit message appeared to be: “Accept my authority. My judgment is infallible.”

More troubling still, the Raavad feared that Jews would eventually abandon the study of Talmud entirely. Why labor through intricate dialectical debates when one could simply consult the Rambam’s elegantly organized code for a definitive answer?

And so the Raavad undertook something audacious. He composed hasagos—critical glosses—spanning the entire Mishneh Torah. Wherever he determined the Rambam had erred, he stated so forthrightly. Wherever the Rambam had misconstrued a Talmudic passage, he identified the misreading. His language could be incisive, even severe.

Yet—and this distinction is crucial—the Raavad also characterized the Mishneh Torah as “a great achievement.” His intent was not to demolish the Rambam’s opus. His purpose was to ensure that subsequent generations would continue to think critically, to interrogate assumptions, to engage directly with the primary sources.

There exists even an account that the Rambam himself, in the twilight of his life, conceded that the Raavad had prevailed over him. “Throughout my entire life,” the Rambam purportedly declared, “no one has ever vanquished me in scholarly debate—except a certain craftsman.” The “craftsman” was the Raavad, whose lineage traced back to skilled artisans from the era of the Churban.

Rigorous with Ideas, Compassionate with People

Here is something unexpected about this formidable critic: when it came to individuals, he exhibited remarkable tolerance.

The Rambam had written that anyone who believes Hashem possesses a physical form is an apikorus—a heretic. The Raavad objected strenuously. “Why does he classify such people as heretics?” he wrote. “Individuals greater and more distinguished than he have maintained this view.”

Now, the Raavad himself did not subscribe to the notion that Hashem has corporeal form. But he recognized that there were sincere, G-d-fearing Jews who interpreted certain passages in the Torah and Aggadah through a different lens. Were they mistaken? Possibly. Were they heretics deserving of exclusion from Klal Yisroel? Categorically not.

This position is remarkable.  He grasped a fundamental distinction: honest intellectual error does not render one a heretic. Only the willful rejection of truth carries that consequence.

The Hidden Dimension

There existed another facet of the Raavad that remains largely unknown.

He was a mekubal—a master of Kabbalah.

The great Rav Chaim Vital enumerated the Raavad among the patriarchs of Jewish mysticism, positioning him as one of the essential links in the unbroken chain of transmission extending back to Sinai. The Raavad lived with austere simplicity, almost as an ascetic, and merited the appellation “the pious one.”

In his writings, he advanced an extraordinary claim: “The Ruach HaKodesh has manifested itself in our beis midrash.” He attested that certain halachos had been disclosed to him through “Sod Hashem L’Yerei’av”—the intimate counsel that Hashem imparts to those who stand in reverent awe before Him.

His son, Rav Yitzchok—known to posterity as “Isaac the Blind”—emerged as one of the most consequential figures in the annals of Kabbalah. Father and son lie interred together in the ancient cemetery of Posquières, their graves serving as a destination of pilgrimage for those who seek spiritual elevation.

The Raavad departed this world on the 26th of Teves in the year 4959—corresponding to 1198 in the secular calendar. He was approximately seventy-three years of age.

Eight centuries later, a street bears his name in Vauvert, France: Rue Ravad. His descendants—carrying surnames such as Raivid, Ravid, and Ravad—reside on every continent.

But his enduring legacy is neither a street designation nor a family name.

Open any edition of the Mishneh Torah today, and one will find the Raavad’s hasagos printed directly alongside the Rambam’s text. For more than eight hundred years, Jews have studied them in tandem—the monumental code and the penetrating critique, positioned side by side. The Raavad ensured that we would never cease questioning, never cease probing more deeply, never accept any authority without scrutiny.

And then there is Budapest.

Because of one stringent opinion regarding mikvah construction—an opinion that most poskim do not even adopt as normative—a natural spring was discovered beneath the streets of a desperate ghetto. Because Jews of earlier generations had sought to satisfy every halachic opinion, including minority positions, they constructed a mikvah connected to an underground water source in accordance with the Raavad’s ruling.

And because of that architectural decision, 75,000 Jews survived to witness liberation.

The Raavad perhaps may never have known that his ruling concerning mikvaos would one day preserve human life. He may not have imagined Nazi Germany or have known of the Budapest ghetto or Maurice Lowinger’s improvised soup kitchen. Hpwever, he simply conducted himself as he always had: he studied Torah with meticulous care, he recorded his conclusions with integrity, and he maintained an unwavering conviction that every word of halachah carries consequence.

Seven hundred and fifty years later, events vindicated his approach.

Zecher tzaddik livrachah.

The author can be reached at [email protected]