Early Years
Reb Yidele was born in 1905 in Dzików, a shtetl near Tarnobrzeg, Poland. His mother Chava was the daughter of Rabbi Yisrael Hager, Rebbe of Vizhnitz, and his father was Rabbi Alter Yechezkel Eliyahu.
He studied for five years under Rabbi Meir Arik of Tarnów, who greatly admired him. "No one can compare with him in Galicia", he said. Rabbi Horowitz was brought up in the house of his maternal grandfather, and in 1928 he married his cousin Chana Miriam Sima, the daughter of Rabbi Chaim Meir Hager of Vizhnitz. After ten childless years of marriage he divorced her, but they subsequently remarried and once again divorced. She then married Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Weiss.
Rabbi Horowitz was given Semicha by Rabbi Meir Arik, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Shapiro of Munkacz, and by his uncle Rabbi Chaim.
Rabbi Horowitz was a great admirer of the Chasam Sofer, whose seven-volume responsa of that name he knew almost by heart, as well as his sermons and Talmudic novellae. He encouraged Rabbi Yosef Naftali Stern of Romania to publish these works, even giving up his dowry for this purpose.
At the age of 30, Rabbi Horowitz was appointed Dayan in Klausenberg. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he was in the spa town of Krynica. He returned to the Dzikov ghetto and then to Cracow. He subsequently lived in Arad, Bucharest and Klausenberg, and miraculously survived the Holocaust. Indeed, Rabbi Horowitz's father died in 1943 in Plaszow near Cracow; Rabbi Yidele was his only surviving son.
Read more about this topic: Yidele Horowitz
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