revisionist history

https://mishpacha.com/to-know-and-to-grow/

Rav Shmuel wasn’t alone for another reason; he had a partner in the other rosh yeshivah. Rav Elya Svei had been a fellow talmid in Lakewood when the yeshivah in Philadelphia opened, and Rav Shmuel felt he would be the right choice to serve as a rosh yeshivah.

“Rav Elya was a mechanech. He really understood,” Rav Shmuel tells me, and as he remembers Rav Elya, there is a flash of what appears to be sadness, a cloud over the rosh yeshivah’s sanguine features.

Other yeshivos have also had two roshei yeshivah at their head. Not always is the partnership successful, and even when it is, not always does the arrangement work as fruitfully as this one did.

Rav Shmuel must feel like there’s an inherent compliment to him in my comment, so he just shrugs and spreads his hands apart. “It worked.”

But why? I persist: What was the secret?

“You want the secret?” The smile is back. “The secret is that mir zennen gevehn gutte chaverim, we were very good friends. But people see things differently, that’s inevitable, so we agreed early on that if we ever had a real difference of opinion, we would go together and ask.

“The Rosh Yeshivah was gone, and my father was a karov, so he couldn’t decide for us,” Rav Shmuel says, “so we made up that if we had a disagreement, we would go to Queens, to speak with Rav Zelik Epstein. He was a klugge Yid.”

Then Rav Shmuel adds a few more words. “Lema’aseh, we never had to go.”