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The Rabbinical Seminary of America, commonly known as Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim is located in the Kew Garden Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York. It is headed by Rabbi Alter Chanoch Henoch Leibowitz, son of its founder, Rabbi Dovid Leibowitz .
Founded in 1933 after differences of opinion between Leibowitz and Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendelowitz of Yeshiva Torah V'Daas and named after the Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Leibowitz's great-uncle, who passed away in the latter part of that year. Until then, Leibowitz had been serving as Rosh Yeshiva in YTV. Both Yeshivot started out in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in New York City and later relocated - YTV to Flatbush (also in Brooklyn), and RSA to Forest Hills, NY, and more recently, to Kew Garden Hills, NY.
R.S.A. houses a boys Yeshivah high school, a post-graduate Yeshivah, and a Rabbinical school. The post-grad Yeshivah students are often laymen or R.S.A high-school graduates who have come to continue their Jewish studies. Rabbinical students at R.S.A. often spend a decade or more at the Yeshivah, studying Jewish law, texts, thought, scholarship and philosophy. Many then go on to become teachers, synagogue rabbis, community leaders, organizational officials, and the like.
For the past forty years, Rabbi Leibowitz has been encouraging his students to open institutions for instruction at earlier levels which would further his unique educational theories. Some of RSA's more iconoclastic characteristics are its focus on textual-analytic (as opposed to more purely analytic styles currently favored in most other yeshivot), participatory didacticism (in contrast to the prevalent lecture style), and a slow pace, in its morning (analytic) Talmud study. The disproportionate emphasises placed on the half-hour afternoon ethics study session, the twice-weekly sermons of Rabbi Leibowitz, and on the afternoon and evening (survey) Talmud study sessions also set RSA apart from other advanced yeshivot.
In support of his self-consciously unique educational program, R. Leibowitz has often maintained that he desires nothing more than the furtherance of his father's vision, which he claims was itself the vision of R. David's mentor, Rabbi Nosson Finkel , the famed "Alter of Slabodka"). This assertion plays a major role in the development of the psyches of his pupils. The prevalent spirit in RSA, repeated frequently by the faculty of the branches, is "without passing judgement on other yeshivot, we can say say that we are confident that we have a totally transmitted tradition of the correct path in life which we can trace back for generations". In fact, RSA's curriculum has undergone important transformations over the course of R. Leibowitz's 63 year tenure. The slower pace of analytic studies, the language of instruction, and the introduction of survey Talmud study sessions are deviations from RSA's tempor in the 1950's. (This dose not mean that R. Leibowitz is prevaricating; it means that the nature of the environment in which he is plying his trade has changed. For example, many European yeshivot, including Slabodka, had survey Talmud study sessions - de facto if not de jure. RSA in the 1940's and 1950's had a large number of transient students who would probably be considered of poor quality by contemporary standards.) Sometimes, the unshakable degree of confidence in which RSA's leadership, and their teachers, etc., are held, crosses the line into outright condenscention toward other institution's ethos. Whenever R. Leibowitz condemns others Orthodox Jewish figures - as he did to Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson - his students
Perhaps more important than these educational differences from the other yeshivot, particularly the degree of authority with the "transmitters of the tradition" there are invested, is the insular spirit it fosters among its students, most of whom have studied in this manner for at least six or seven years before entering RSA. One sign of this disconnectedness is the rarity of transfers between RSA and other yeshivot. The few RSA students who transfer typically leave due to feel of discomfort at RSA, and often return to RSA after short periods at the other yeshivot, in which they feel even more uncomfortable. A far more palatable option for the misfits is employment, which RSA's leadership has not discouraged, and even stimulated by allowing students to attend Touro College , a local college popular among Orthodox youth for its program of mens-only night classes, mostly in vocational subjects.
Since the early 1990s, R.S.A. has been experiencing a dramatic increase in enrollment. Among the reasons for its upswing are:
A)The success of its outlying branches (only R.S.A.'s campus in Jerusalem is termed an "affiliate"). Since the opening of the Talmudical Institute of Upstate New York (TIUNY) in Rochester in 1974, RSA has scored several major sucesses in the Orthodox Jewish educational scene. Typically beginning as struggling, upstart schools with little backing from local communal leaders, RSA's branch high schools have collectively recruited thousands of students over the past three decades. While some have floundered and failed, and TIUNY has stagnated, the branches in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Los Angelas, California, and Miami, Florida, have breathed life into their respective communities, and to varying degrees, won the support of their host environs. Particularly gratifying to these schools' religious leaders - students of R. Leibowitz, to the number - is the ever-increasing retention rate of graduating high school students. In Milwaukee and Miami, well over half of graduates now continue their education at various branches. Since, since at least the early 1990's, the majority of RSA students have not been graduates of RSA's in-house high school, the impact of these branches growth and success has been enourmous. Of particular note is the student body at RSA's Jerusalem campus, which has been composed primarily of graduates of those three high schools for the past several years.
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