Photos: Mattis Golberg, Flash 90, Mishpacha archives
Over the 100 years of his life,
Rav Gershon Edelstein accrued many roles and responsibilities, ultimately taking on the burden of leadership for the entire yeshivah world. But even as he dealt with Klal Yisrael’s thorniest dilemmas, he never abandoned his primary post as rebbi.
His was the story of quiet force, of influence without fanfare. It’s the story of a gadol hador who spent seven decades saying shiur to 17-year-olds – and whose words were so compelling, whose relationships so enduring, that alumni in their forties or fifties crowded into the room to keep learning. It’s the story of a man who demanded mastery of Shas from tender bochurim, but showed them, by personal example, how to achieve it with serenity.
And it’s the story of a leader whose knowledge of Torah was staggering – but never lost his ability to intuit the heart of a child.
One day at the end of 1943, Rav Shmuel Rozovsky, the prized student of Rav Shimon Shkop and brilliant maggid shiur, arrived in the dusty Israeli village of Ramat Hasharon. He knocked on the door of the local rav, Rav Tzvi Yehuda Edelstein, a noted talmid chacham and posek originally from the Russian town of Szumiacz near Smolensk.
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