Forgery expert Rav Yitzchak Yeshaya Weiss exposes tricksters and frauds
The apartment in the Neve Achiezer neighborhood of Bnei Brak looks like a typical rabbinic home: A dining room walled with seforim, from floor to ceiling, shelves crammed into every available corner. But the seforim in this room are actually the main characters in some fascinating detective stories.
Rav Yitzchak Yeshaya Weiss, the rav of Neve Achiezer, is a famed mechaber seforim and posek renowned for his proficiency in halachic literature. He spent decades editing the writings of scholars from previous generations, and put out the legendary Torah journal Tzefonot (with his unforgettable friend, Reb Zusha Kinstlicher, ztz”l), featuring manuscripts of Torah giants.
Along the way he gained a unique expertise in discerning forged manuscripts, a skill that’s the fruit of tremendous Torah knowledge, proficiency in the history of seforim, and most importantly, a sharp eye for tiny details that others might easily miss.
In the antiques market, which is riven with forgers and counterfeiters, this combination of traits is vital. A person who is about to pay a few thousand (or even hundreds of thousands of) dollars for a historic manuscript would do well to verify it’s neither a forgery nor a copy.
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