Heart of Love, Spine of Steel

The modest Stamford Hill home of Rav Elyakim Schlesinger, who passed away last week at the age of 104, was a citadel in the London suburbs. From behind that simple facade, the Rosh Yeshivah presided over a rare synthesis of Brisk, Hungarian fire, and Yerushalmi austerity, shaping generations with a century of love and a brand of leadership as uncompromising as it was misunderstood

To the uninformed, the modest yellow-brick home at the heart of Stamford Hill’s chassidish community was a typical North London house. But behind the front door that was never locked, 45 St. Kildas Road was far from ordinary.

Home to Rav Elyakim Schlesinger, the oldest rosh yeshivah in the world who passed away last week at age 104, it functioned as an embassy of sorts — an extraordinary outpost of Brisk and Yerushalmi-style avodas Hashem in London’s humdrum suburbs.

A legend in his own lifetime, Rav Elyakim was the meeting point of parallel worlds of greatness that together shaped him into a unique individual.

Born in Vienna in 1920 to Rav Dovid and Baila Schlesinger, his mother was a daughter of prewar Agudah leader Rav Yaakov Rosenheim. Despite that background and the fact that his wife, Rebbetzin Yehudit, was the daughter of Rabbi Moshe Blau, Agudah head in Eretz Yisrael, he trod a very different path that took him deep into the anti-Agudah world of Hungarian Orthodoxy.