Little school does big things

Rambam Mesivta teaches civic involvement

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Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence is a small school, with just 170 students enrolled for the 2018-19 school year, but through the years, no matter the student population, its young men have had an outsized impact on global matters.

Rabbi Zev Friedman, the yeshiva’s dean, received many emails from former students, extolling the virtues of the school that they had attended, when it was reported that known Nazi war criminal Jakiw Palij had been deported to Germany on Aug. 21. For several years, Rambam students, Friedman and other administrators and teachers had protested outside Palij’s home in Jackson Heights, Queens, calling attention to his history as a former SS guard at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland.

“Since the school was founded, we decided that it was important to provide the kids with not just a classroom education, but one outside the classroom,” Friedman said. “… It’s very, very important for us to be involved in the community.”


That commitment began roughly two years after the school was founded in 1992. Rambam students got involved in the effort to deport a native Lithuanian, Aleksandras Lileikis, who was accused of being a Nazi war criminal. A 1994 story in USA Today brought Lileikis to the attention of the students. Initially, Friedman and the students rallied outside his house in Norwood, Mass.

The story caught the eye of Eli Rosenbaum, then the acting director of the Office of Special Investigations, the Department of Justice’s Nazi-hunting unit, which brought civil charges against Lileikis, then 87, the retired manager at a Lithuanian encyclopedia publishing company. Officials said he had headed a Gestapo-like force in occupied Lithuania that handed Jews over to Nazi execution squads from 1941 to 1944.

With Lithuania not willing to accept him, Friedman recalled, Rambam students went to work in 1995 and 1996 and, using old-fashioned research skills (Google had yet to be invented), unearthed an extradition treaty between the U.S. and Lithuania. Students and Rambam officials also met with Lithuanian officials. After Lileikis’s past became known, the District Court of Massachusetts determined that “tens of thousands died under his command,” and ordered his denaturalization in May 1996. A month later, he returned to Lithuania on his own. Despite all the legal wrangling, he was never tried for war crimes. He died in 2000, at 93.

In 2000, Rambam representatives spoke to Australian officials about reputed Nazi war criminal Konrad Kalejs, who fled to that country in 2000. Latvian authorities charged Kalejs with war crimes in September 2000. He died in November 2001.

Rosenbaum, a Westbury native, is now the Justice Department’s director of human rights enforcement strategy and policy. In his remarks at the White House on the day Palij, 95, was deported, Rosenbaum cited Rambam’s role in bringing attention to the case. “Deserving of special mentions,” he said, “are the several generations of high school students at Rambam Mesivta, in Lawrence, Long Island, who, under the leadership of their revered teacher, Rabbi Zev Friedman — himself a child of Holocaust survivors — never stopped crying out publicly for justice in this case.”

Avi Posnick, 33, who graduated from Rambam in 2003, used the lessons he learned at the school professionally, as managing director of StandWithUs Northeast and executive director of StandWithUs New England. StandWithUs is a nonprofit pro-Israel education and advocacy organization.

“In addition to learning how to organize a successful rally and stand up for the Jewish people, it inspired me to work for StandWithUs,” said Posnick, who noted that he took part in a number of demonstrations as a Rambam student, including those outside Palij’s home. “It taught me that when you see something wrong, you cannot just talk about how bad it is, you must act.”

Town of Hempstead Councilman Bruce Blakeman is one of several local elected officials cited by Friedman that have supported Rambam’s actions through the years. “Rabbi Friedman and the students have always been at the forefront of being against anti-Semitism,” Blakeman said. “I’m delighted they were successful, and happy the students have that spirit of activism that really could make a difference in the world.”