Early Life and Family
Weinberg was a scion of the Slonimer Hasidic dynasty. He was the great-great-grandson of Rabbi Avraham of Slonim, author of Yesod HaAvodah and founder of the dynasty, and the grandson of Rabbi Noah Weinberg of Slonim and Tiberias, whom the first Slonimer Rebbe had sent to Palestine to establish a Torah community in the late 19th century.
His father, Rabbi Yitzchak Mattisyahu Weinberg, a son of Rabbi Noah Weinberg, was married three times. His first wife died while giving birth to his son, Chaim Yosef David. His second wife also bore him a son, Avraham, before they divorced. Rabbi Yitzchak Mattisyahu married his third wife, Hinda Loberbaum, the daughter of Rabbi Avner Loberbaum of Safed, when he was in his thirties. They had four children at widely-spaced intervals. The first two, Moshe and Chava, were born in 1910 and a year or so later. During World War I, Rabbi Yitzchak Mattisyahu was forced to leave Palestine and move to America; he brought his family to join him in New York in 1921. His and Hinda's third child, Yaakov, was born in 1923. Their youngest child, Noah, was born in 1931.
In 1931 Hinda took her two youngest sons to visit her family in Palestine and ended up staying for three years. During that time, Yaakov Weinberg attended cheder in Tiberias and later learned in the Etz Chaim Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Upon their return to America, Weinberg attended Yeshiva Torah Vodaas and Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim, and later studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin under Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner. Weinberg was regarded as a top student and was assigned to weekend rabbinical duties at the age of 19. Rabbi Hutner gave him semicha in 1944 when he was 21.
Read more about this topic: Yaakov Weinberg
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or family:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“... it is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The family environment in which your children are growing up is different from that in which you grew up. The decisions our parents made and the strategies they used were developed in a different context from what we face today, even if the “content” of the problem is the same. It is a mistake to think that our own experience as children and adolescents will give us all we need to help our children. The rules of the game have changed.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)