Biography
David Weiss was born in the small town of Kobyletska Poliana (Кобилецька Поляна, Poiana Cobilei, Gergyanliget) in Carpathian Ruthenia, then in Czechoslovakia (now in Rakhivski district, in Ukraine). His parents separated when he was 4 years old, and he grew up in the home of his grandfather, a Talmud scholar in Sziget, Romania. During the Holocaust, at the age of 16 he was deported to Auschwitz. After a week he was transferred to a forced labor camp, Gross-Rosen, then to AL Wolfsberg, and later to Mauthausen camp and was the only member of his family to survive.
When he arrived in the United States at the age of 18, he was placed in a Jewish orphanage where he created a stir by challenging the kashrut of the institution since the supervising rabbi did not have a beard and, more importantly, was not fluent in the commentaries of the Pri Magadim by Rabbi Yoseph Te'omim. This was a standard for Rabbis in Europe. A social worker introduced him to Saul Lieberman, a leading Talmudist at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) in New York, who recognized his brilliance and took him under his wing. Weiss studied with Lieberman for many years at the JTS.
Initially, he studied in Yeshiva Chaim Berlin and was allowed to not attend lectures because of his advanced standing. Over the next decade, he completed his elementary, high school and college studies, and went on to earn a master's degree in philosophy and a doctorate in Talmud.
He married Zipporah Hager, a descendant of the Vizhnitzer Rebbes. They had 3 children: Baruch, Ephraim, and Yeshiahu. Baruch married Laura Blumenfeld and they had three children, Daniel, Rebecca, and Benjamin. Weiss later changed his name to "Halivni," a Hebrew translation for "weiss" or "white." He originally wanted to abandon the surname Weiss because that was the name of a guard in the concentration camp in which he was interned. He initially considering changing his name to Halivni; however, out of respect for this grandfather/teacher Yeshayahu Weiss, he maintained a memory of the family name, using the compound name Weiss Halivni.
He is the author of Mekorot u'Mesorot, a projected ten volume commentary on the Talmud. He is also the author of the English language volumes Peshat and Derash, Revelation Restored, his memoirs The Book and the Sword and others. Halivni also served as Littauer Professor of Talmud and Classical Rabbinics in the Department of Religion at Columbia University.
Halivni left JTS in 1983 after the controversy surrounding the training and ordination of women as rabbis. He felt that there may be halakhic methods for ordaining women as rabbis but that more time was needed before such could be legitimately instituted, and that the decision had been made as a policy decision by the governing body of the Seminary rather than as a psak halachah within the traditional rabbinic legal process. His disagreement with the process by which JTS studied the ordination of women led to his break with the seminary and his co-founding of the Union for Traditional Judaism.
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