Biography
Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg was born in Poland. He studied at the yeshivas of Mir and Slabodka. In the latter, "he combined within himself Lithuanian profound understanding of Halacha with the Slabodka musar expounded by the illustrious Alter, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel."
For seven years, he served as rabbi of the city of Pilwishki (Pilviškiai) - which contained scholars of note, considerably his senior. At the outbreak of World War I, he went to Germany. There he studied at the University of Giessen, receiving a Ph.D. for a thesis on the Masoretic Text. Although Polish-born and Lithuanian-trained, Rabbi Weinberg "developed an extremely beautiful German prose style which was matched only by his mastery of modern Hebrew." He taught at and eventually became rector (rosh yeshiva) of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. His students included Rabbis Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Eliezer Berkovits and Josef Hirsch Dunner.
As rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Weinberg emerged as a leading advocate of Neo-Orthodoxy, the German approach to Orthodox Judaism, based on the Torah im Derech Eretz of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Although Torah im Derech Eretz was "an ideology that he had openly opposed in his youth," Weinberg "championed" this approach during his tenure at the Hildesheimer seminary, and he "played and was to play a seminal part in the reconciliation of Torah orthodoxy with modernity." His "melding of sources, methods, and worlds was unparalleled in modern halachic literature. It required breadth and depth of knowledge that were, and remain, rare."
In 1939, he fled Nazi Germany, and became trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he was a prominent leader. Because of his Russian citizenship, the Germans imprisoned him together with Russian prisoners of war, enabling him to avoid the concentration camps and to survive the war. After the war, a loyal student, R. Shaul Weingort, brought him to Montreaux, Switzerland, where he lived until his passing in 1966. While he was involved with a small yeshiva there, it did not provide R. Weinberg with intellectual stimulation. Despite many offers of more prominent rabbinic positions across the globe, R. Weinberg chose not to leave Switzerland, where he penned many influential and important responsa.
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