Me’orei Galicia, the five volume “Encyclopedia of Galician Rabbis and Scholars” published in Jerusalem in 1978-1997 has been exceedingly praised by all sectors of our people and hailed as a great memorial to the Torah centers of Galicia destroyed by the Holocaust.
The encyclopedia is the creation of one man, Rabbi Meir Wunder, a student of the Ponovezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak. He served as librarian of the Yeshiva and worked for many years in the Jewish National and Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem. A scholar of wide erudition and a well known bibliographer, Rabbi Wunder worked for decades on the encyclopedia and traveled widely in search for information.
The encyclopedia’s biographies of great rabbis and Hasidic leaders overflow with information about their forebears, teachers, families and disciples as well as about the positions they occupied and the places where they resided.
We learn not only about the books they wrote but also about the persons with whom they corresponded, the writings in which responses addressed to them are found and the periodicals to which they contributed.
The entries are illuminated with many photographs of the rabbis, their teachers, friends and family members, as well as with reproductions of letters and documents which Rabbi Wunder discovered in national archives and private collections. Each volume is provided with a number of helpful indices.
Some time ago Rabbi Wunder published a volume of corrections and additions.
In the preface to the new volume Rabbi Wunder eulogizes his friend, the late Rabbi Baruch Shimeon Shneiersohn, son-in-law of the late Rabbi Dov Baer Weidenfeld of Tchebin and head of the latter’s Yeshiva in Jerusalem, who died in the summer of 5761 (2001). Rabbi Wunder writes in praise of Rabbi Shneiersohn’s greatness in Torah and his fine human qualities, as well as his invaluable assistance in the work on the encyclopedia. Rabbi Wunder would submit to him the manuscript of each of the encyclopedia’s five volumes and would call on him a few days later to hear his comments and suggestions.
The new volume features hundreds of entries of which only a few can be discussed here.
In volume 4 of the encyclopedia Rabbi Wunder had written a very long article about the Late Rabbi Meshullam Rath, rabbi of Czernowitz, who was a member of the Chief Rabbinate after he settled in the Land of Israel. In the additions in the new volume we read that Raglei Mevasser, a volume of sermons on the Torah and the festivals, Rabbi Rath had delivered when he was still rabbi in Suceava, Bukovina, was published in Jerusalem in 1994, many years after his death. The sermons had been written down by Chaim Walzer and were edited by Rabbi Rath’s great-grandson, Eliyahu Haeitan.
The new volume also includes an entry about Rabbi Rath’s brother, Rabbi Ephraim Rath, who was not mentioned before in the encyclopedia. Rabbi Ephraim Rath was born in Kolomea, Galicia and was active in behalf of religious Zionism. During World War I he escaped to Grosswardein. He established branches of the Mizrachi movement throughout Transylvania and was chosen secretary general. After he settled in the Land of Israel he serve as secretary of the Mizrachi in Jerusalem.
About Rabbi Pinhas Hirschsprung, rabbi of Montreal, who passed away in 1998, we learn from the additions in the new volume that in 1999 the treatise Peri Pinchas, novellae of his on Tractate Berakhot (until Daf 15) which he had expounded during his weekly Shiur at the Beth HaMidrash of Agudath Israel in Montreal, was published together with novellae by his son Rabbi Yizhak. The additions also include a list of publications in which Divrei Torah of Rabbi Pinhas Hirschsprung are found.
(To be continued)
The Jewish Press, Friday Feb. 2, 2007
The following are some of the personalities that are described in Rabbi Wunder’s new volume
Pinhas Scheinmann (1912-1999) was born in Poland. He was a leader of Poland’s HaShomer HaDati and later of that country’s Mizrachi movement. He settled in Israel in 1948 and was chosen secretary general of the Mizrachi.
He was one of the founders and served as president of the Central Synagogue of North Tel Aviv where he gave Shiurim in Talmud and Parashat Hashavua that attracted hundreds of attendants.
In 1957 he was chosen chairman of Tel Aviv’s Religious Council and held that position for more than three and a half decades. During that period, tens of new synagogues and Mikva’ot were built throughout the city at his initiative, and strict Kashrut supervision was introduced in hundreds of enterprises.
He was elected as Mizrachi representative to the eighth and the ninth Knesset and served as deputy chairman of that body.
Yaakov Griffel was born in Cracow. His wife and children were killed during the bombardment of Warsaw at the beginning of World War II. He succeeded in reaching Palestine and alarmed the Yishuv to come to the aid of Europe’s persecuted Jews. For three years during the war he represented Agudath Israel as a member of the Yishuv’s rescue delegation that was active in Istanbul. He was instrumental in saving many Jews from Slovakia, Hungary and Rumania. He died in Brooklyn in 1962.
Rabbi Ze’ev Gottlieb (1910-1983) was born in Eastern Galicia. He was ordained by the Rabbinical Seminary of Vienna and received a doctorate from the University of Vienna for his dissertation on the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel. From 1932 until 1938 he served as rabbi in the Anshe Emet Synagogue and the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Vienna. He was also active in the Austrian Mizrachi movement. After the Anschluss he escaped to England where he engaged in Jewish education. He was in charge of a hostel in Wales for Jewish refugee children from Austria and Germany. In 1948 he published MiYemei Kedem, a selection of stories from the Talmud and the Midrash with Hebrew notes and an English translation. The illustrated book, which was published in London by the Council for Jewish Religious Education carried a preface by Dr. Nathan Morris.
In 1959 Rabbi Gottlieb was chosen chief rabbi of Glasgow and also served as head of the community’s rabbinical court. He headed the Mizrachi in Great Britain and settled in Israel in 1977.
He edited Eitan Aryeh, responsa by his father-in-law, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Rosen (the father of Rabbi Moses Rosen, chief rabbi of Rumania) with notes of his own (Jerusalem, 1977) and completed Avraham Darom’s scholarly edition of Rabbi Ovadia Seforno’s commentary on the Torah (Mosad Harav Kook, Jerusalem, 1980).
Rabbi Joseph Rosenthal studied with the Haffetz Hayyim and Rabbi Naftali Tropp in Radun and was one of the outstanding students of the Yeshiva of Mir. He went through the entire Talmud every year, studying seven Dappim daily. He headed a Yeshiva in Rymanov (Galicia) and was invited to replace Rabbi Y.Y. Kanievsky as head of the Yeshiva in Pinsk, where he arrived with ten students dressed in “Galician garb.” His fate and that of his family is not known.
Rabbi Wunder’s volume of “Corrections and Additions,” like the other volumes of his encyclopedia is illuminated with many photographs of rabbis as well as facsimiles of letters and documents.
The Jewish Press, February 9, 2007