Yehezkel Abramsky - Rabbinate and Scholarship

Rabbinate and Scholarship

Yehezkel Abramsky was born near Most and Grodno (Hrodna) in Belarus, the third child and eldest son of Mordechai Zalman Abramsky, a local timber merchant, and his wife, Freydel Goldin of Grodno, and studied at the yeshivas of Telz, Mir, Slabodka and particularly Brisk under Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik. At the age of 17 he became a rabbi, serving, in turn, the communities of Smolyan, Smolevich and Slutsk. In 1909 he married Reizel, daughter of Rabbi Moshe Nahum Jerusalimsky, the rabbi of Iehumen, Russia.

Following the Russian Revolution, he was at the forefront of opposition to the Communist government's attempts to repress the Jewish religion and culture. As a result the Russian government refused Abramsky permission to leave and take up the rabbinate of Petah Tikva in Palestine in both 1926 and 1928. In 1926, while serving as the rabbi of Slutsk, he joined (together with Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin) the Vaad Harabbonim of the U.S.S.R.

In 1928, he started a Hebrew magazine, Yagdil Torah (lit. "Make Torah Great"), but the Soviet authorities closed it after the first two issues had appeared. In 1929, he was arrested and sentenced to five years hard labor in Siberia. However, in 1931 he was released due to intervention by the German government under Chancellor Brüning, who exchanged him for six communists they held.