Yisroel Salanter - Biography

Biography

Rabbi Lipkin was born in Zagare, Lithuania on November 3, 1810, the son of Rabbi Zev Wolf, the rabbi of that town and later Av Beth Din of Goldingen and Telz, and his wife Leah. As a boy, he studied with Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh Braude of Salant.

After his 1823 marriage to Esther Fega Eisenstein (died August 1871, Vilnius), Rabbi Lipkin settled in Salant, where he continued his studies under Rabbi Hirsch Broda and Rabbi Yosef Zundel of Salant, himself a disciple of Rabbi Chaim Volozhin. Rabbi Zundel exerted a deep influence on the development of Rabbi Lipkin's character; he had stressed religious self-improvement (musar), which Rabbi Lipkin developed into a complete method and popularized.

He was a tremendous Torah scholar. Around 1842, Rabbi Lipkin was appointed rosh yeshiva of the Rabbi Meile yeshiva (Tomchai Torah) in Vilna. However, there was a minor scandal revolving around his appointment, and he willingly left the post to its previous inhabitant, moving instead to Zarechya, an exurb of Vilna. While there, he established a new yeshiva where he lectured for about three years.

At Rabbi Lipkin's suggestion, the Musar writings of Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Menachem Mendel Lefin were reprinted and popularized in Vilna.

Despite the prohibition against doing work on Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath) Rabbi Salanter set an example for the Lithuanian Jewish community during the cholera epidemic of 1848. He made certain that any necessary relief work on Shabbat for Jews was done by Jews; some wanted such work to be done on Shabbat by non-Jews, but Rabbi Salanter held that both Jewish ethics and law mandated that the laws of the Torah must be put aside in order to save lives. During Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) Rabbi Salanter ordered that Jews that year must not abide by the traditional fast, but instead must eat in order to maintain their health; again for emergency health reasons.

In 1848, the Czarist government created the Vilna Rabbinical School and Teachers' Seminary. Rabbi Lipkin was identified as a candidate to teach at or run the school. However, he feared that the school would be used to produce rabbinical "puppets" of the government and refused the position. Fearing backlash, he left Vilna and moved to Kovno, Lithuania, where he established another yeshiva at the Nevyozer Kloiz.

He retained charge until 1857, when he left Lithuania and moved to Prussia to recover from ill health. He remained in the house of philanthropists, the Hirsch brothers of Halberstadt, until his health improved, and then in 1861 began the publication of the Hebrew journal "Tevunah", devoted to rabbinical law and religious ethics. However, this was discontinued after three months as the journal failed to garner enough subscriptions to cover its costs.

Rabbi Lipkin lived for periods in Memel, Königsberg and Berlin. He devoted the last decades of his life to strengthening Orthodox Jewish life in Germany and Prussia. He also played a large role in thwarting an attempt to open a rabbinic seminary in Russia. Toward the end of his life Rabbi Lipkin was called to Paris to organize a community among the many Russian Jewish immigrants, and he remained there for two years.

Rabbi Lipkin is also known as one of the first people to try to translate the Talmud into another language. However, he died before he could finish this immense project, Rabbi Lipkin died on Friday, February 2 (25 Shevat), 1883, in Königsberg, then part of Germany. For many years, the exact location of his grave was unknown. Following a lengthy investigation, in 2007 the grave was located in Königsberg.