Someone May Have Found a Rare Photo of the Chafetz Chaim

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The internet is buzzing over a photo that was recently discovered and may be a photo of the Chofetz Chaim Z”L.

Approximately three years ago YWN published a never seen before video of the Chofetz Chaim crossing the street on his way to the First World Congress (Knessia Gedolah) of the World Agudath Israel – the first major gathering of all the different sects of Klal Yisroel which took place in Vienna starting from Elul 3, 5683 / August 15, 1923 and which lasted for ten days.

The footage shook the Jewish world who watched it with great enthusiasm.

Recently a photo has surfaced which is being claimed as showing the Chofetz Chaim wrapped in his Tallis and Tefillin, and learning from a Sefer. According to online reports, the photographer of the picture was Rav Alexander Sender Linchner.

As a young American Yeshiva student, he was one of the few American Bochrim to study at the great Yeshivos of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. During the course of his studies at the Yeshiva at Radin, Poland, he came under the direct, personal influence of the Chofetz Chaim.

In the 1930’s of Europe, very few private citizens owned a camera. It was an expensive tool that was most often only in the possession of professionals. But in the U.S. Kodak was able to create an inexpensive line of cameras called “brownie”. The cost of the camera was only one dollar. This is how they became popular enough to sell a million cameras. The claim is that R’ Linchner was able to bring one of these cameras from the United States and thus took a photo of the Chofetz Chaim.

He was a devoted disciple of Harav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, who later became his father-in-law when he married his oldest daughter. He later went on to found “Boys Town Jerusalem”. He was Niftar in 1997, and his wife was Niftar in October of 2017 at the age of 104.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)

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