The Gerrer Rebbe and Rabbi Aryeh Leib Steinman went to Western Europe on a "spiritual" mission. They spoke to audiences in England, France and Belgium. Here is the core of Rabbi Steinman's message, as reported by Ha'aretz:
…Rabbi Steinman is 93 years old and is revered throughout the ultra-Orthodox world, even by those who do not belong to his designated audience. His trips abroad are a sharp divergence from the usual habits of other rabbinical leaders from his world, which is generally quite introverted. Both he and the Gerrer rebbe have been recruited into activities that were until now the sole domain of Chabad, even if this didn't include the distribution among women of candles for the Sabbath, or invitations to the men to lay tefillin. Steinman, the dominant one of the two as a speaker, headed off to Europe with a luggage filled with a strictly ultra-Orthodox message - which he had packed all by himself.
Rabbis Elyashiv (left) and Steinman (right).What is the importance of this? As recently as a few years ago, the elderly leader of the Lithuanian yeshiva world represented the pure hope of moderate religious and secular people who regarded him as an ultra-Orthodox reformer who was afraid of nothing; a moderate ultra-Orthodox leader who was prepared to be flexible in a way that no other ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi leader had been flexible for the past 60 years. This week, in Marseille, Lyon and Paris, he presented an unswerving and uncompromising ultra-Orthodox line. In Marseille, for example, he was asked by local rabbis how to treat young men who had left the yeshivas and "cannot find themselves either here or there." Rabbi Ohana asked him: "Would it be possible to set up a yeshiva for them where they would also learn a trade?"
"You are saying that since he is already not good, then we should send him to learn a trade?" Steinman replied. "That is merely adding poison to poison. A trade is poison."
About the education of children, he said that it was absolutely forbidden to teach them secular subjects, declaring: "Everything must be merely Torah." In his previous trips to America and France, he also said that education for women must be kept to "the minimum of the minimum." About the prospect of cooperating with modern-Orthodox rabbis, he said that it was tantamount to "uprooting the religion." …
Earlier, I called Rabbi Steinman an idiot savant. Some of you asked me to take it back. I now agree. I do take it back. The man is certainly an idiot. A savant in any form? That I'm not sure of.
[Hat Tip: Ben Qor'ha.]