יום חמישי י"ח באדר ב תשפ"ד 28/03/2024
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  • The Mission Continues

    As in the past so it remains today - we were and still are under the selfsame commitment to adhere to the directions of the Gedolei Yisrael, who stand guard against breaches of purity threatening our camp. When we were required to ask – we asked. When we were instructed to depart – we left. The moment we are summoned back to raise the flag, every other consideration is pushed to the side and we answer: We are ready!

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בראי היום

  • Harav Yisrael Friedman zy”a, the Rebbe of Husyatin

    מוטי, ויקיפדיה העברית

    The ancestral chain of Harav Yisrael Friedman, the founder of the Husyatin chassidic court, originates with the holy Baal Shem Tov. The Husyatin chassidus has its roots in Galicia and eventually came to Tel Aviv, during the turbulent years between the two World Wars.

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  • Maccabi'im Gravesite

    In honour of Chanukah, we will discuss a fascinating, ongoing investigation attempting to establish the place of burial of Mattisyahu Kohen Gadol and his family.

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Reflections

Rav Itzele Peterburg

Rav Yitzchak Blazer (known as Rav Itzele Peterburg) was one of the giants of mussar and a devoted talmid of Rav Yisrael Salanter.

Avi Lazar 01/08/2009 20:40
Rav Yitzchak Blazer ztz”l was born in the year 5597 in the town of Shnipishuk, near Vilna. His immense intellect was already apparent in his youth, and at the age of fourteen his father published a pamphlet of chiddushei Torah which his son had written with tremendous clarity, on maseches Bava Kamma. He learned b’chavrusa with Rav Naftali Amsterdam ztz”l, who was another of the devoted talmidim of Rav Yisrael Salanter ztz”l, the father of the mussar movement. (This movement was founded by Rav Yisrael Lipkin of Salant, and its main objective was the study of works that arouse the heart to yiras Shamayim and lead to enhanced interpersonal relationships – this movement spread to many of the Lithuanian yeshivos, who incorporated a special study session dedicated solely to mussar into their daily schedule.)

In the year 5612, when he was fifteen years of age, Rav Yitzchak married and went to live in Gur which is in Kovno, near the Beis haMussar of Rav Yisrael Salanter. During the years he spent there he gained renown as one of its most prominent talmidim, with whom Rav Yisrael had a personal connection. The extent of Rav Yitzchak’s veneration for his rebbe is evident in the introduction to his sefer ‘Ohr Yisrael’. There he brings the well-known words of the Rambam; that just as a body can be either healthy or sick, so too can the soul be healthy or ill. A healthy soul is a person with good middos, and someone with bad middos has a sick soul. Just as a physically sick person goes to seek a cure from a doctor, so too should a spiritually sick person go to seek advice from a chacham – a doctor of the spirit. Rav Yitzchak then added that just as in physical illnesses, we know that with the passage of the generations, physical strength has waned and sickness has a greater hold on the body, so too is the case in spiritual matters; people are less healthy from generation to generation. There are more physical illnesses plaguing us, and there is a corresponding rise in medical knowledge to combat this. Doctors exert themselves day and night to find new cures with HaShem’s help, and they reveal new medicines all the time that were hitherto unheard of – but with spiritual matters, although sickness has multiplied, the doors to cure were locked – there were no doctors and no cures, no solutions in sight, until HaKadosh Baruch Hu had mercy on his people and sent them a faithful healer to bring life to the masses, to find them a salvation from their spiritual weaknesses – and who is this? This is the great gaon Rav Yisrael Salanter.

Since Rav Yitzchak wished to support himself through the labour of his own hands, he learned the craft of a painter, but his rebbe forbade him to work at this, and instructed him to enter the rabbinate. In the year 5622, when he was twenty-five years of age, Rav Yitzchak was appointed as rav of the kehillah in St. Petersburg, and he served there for sixteen years. Rav Yitzchak was the embodiment of the answer to the challenge posed by the maskilim that those who studied mussar only did so because they were incapable of learning Gemora – this was evidenced by the sixteen years that Rav Yitzchak served as Rav in St. Petersburg, during which he also made important halachic rulings, which were later compiled in his sefer ‘Pri Yitzchak’.

Despite, and perhaps especially because he was a talmid chacham of such stature and had such a huge intellect, he exerted himself immensely in the study of mussar. His greatness in Torah was widely renowned, and also his great humility was often observed, for example at a meeting that took place in St. Petersburg, in which many of the gedolim of the generation participated. Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, the Beis haLevi and Rav of Brisk, posed a difficult question that had been raised by his son Rav Chaim. All those present exerted themselves to attempt to answer it, without success – and then Rav Yosef Dov himself stood up and answered the question with two solutions, one in his own name, and one in the name of his son Rav Chaim. These two answers astounded those present with their sharpness – only Rav Yitzchak sat unmoved by all the commotion, not adding to the discussion as if he was incapable of understanding the matter. Rav Yosef Dov noticed this, and expressed surprise that this was the man who was renowned as a great lamdan. When he returned home, he wanted to futher investigate who exactly was Rav Yitzchak, and he opened the sefer ‘Pri Yitzchak’. To his astonishment, he found there the same question that he had posed at the convention, and the same two solutions that he had offered. This clearly illustrated to the Beis haLevi not only the great scholarship of Rav Yitzchak Blazer, but also the great level of humility he had attained.

When Rav Yitzchak had first arrived in St. Petersburg, he had found there a city devoid of Yiddishkeit and full of the ideas of the enlightenment. Rav Yitzchak immediately began to establish a strong kehillah and to generally strengthen the religious life of the city, effectively setting out to do battle with the maskilim. The maskilim, for their part, did not sit back and allow the new rav to interfere with their designs; they proceeded to mock and defame him in the newspapers. One of their leaders even decided to refer to Rav Yitzchak with a derogatory name; the name that he settled on was ‘Rav Yitzchak Nafcha’, since ‘nafcha’ is the translation of ‘blazer’, which means ‘glass-blower’. However, he did not realise that this was in fact a complimentary title, since the original Rav Yitzchak Nafcha was an important Amora who is cited many times in Shas.
However, Rav Yitzchak did suffer intensely from another local matter; problems with arranging divorces among those who had thrown off the yoke of Torah. It was then that he decided to abdicate his position and return to Kovno. There he followed in the tradition of his rebbe, Rav Yisrael Salanter, and began to teach Torah and mussar by means of shiurim and personal instruction. When Rav Simcha Zissel Ziv ztz”l was niftar (the Alter of Kelm, the founder of the derech of Kelm which emphasises uncompromising chinuch, a strict adherence to seder, great attention to personal cleanliness and immense control over self), Rav Yitzchak was appointed as the spiritual father of the yeshiva there.

In the year 5664, when he was sixty-seven years of age, Rav Yitzchak ascended to Eretz Yisrael and settled in Yerushalayim, where he was reacquainted with his friend of times past, Rav Naftali Amsterdam. Together they established in Yerushalayim the first ‘Beis haMussar’ ever to exist there, the concept of which had originated in the Jewish population centres in Europe, by the great baalei mussar – in Yerushalayim, however, it was a revolutionary idea. On the eleventh day of the month of Menachem-Av, when he was seventy years of age, Rav Yitzchak returned his pure soul to his Maker and was buried on Har haZeisim, at the side of HaGaon Rav Eliyahu Dovid Rabinovitz-Te’umim (the Aderes).