Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor - Rabbinical Positions

Rabbinical Positions

In 1846 Spektor was chosen rabbi of Nishvez, government of Minsk, but the community of Baresa was unwilling to let him go, and he was obliged to leave the town at night. The salary of his new position, four rubles a week, was a munificent one for those days; and at first many of the older members of the community objected to so young a rabbi. After he had become known, however, his popularity was such that when he decided to accept the rabbinate of Novohrodok (government of Kovno), whose community had exonerated him of a false charge made against him by an informer of Nishvez, the people of the latter town wished to restrain him; he had to leave it, as he had left Baresa, stealthily at night. He went to Novohrodok in May, 1851, and remained there until the same month in 1864, when he was appointed chief rabbi of Kovno, which he occupied until his death.

Spektor was an indefatigable worker, and in the last forty years of his life, when he was steadily becoming more generally recognized as the foremost rabbinical authority in Russia, he maintained a large correspondence with rabbis, communities, philanthropists, and representative men in many parts of the world, who sought his advice and instruction on all conceivable subjects relating to Jews and Judaism. He early began to take an interest in general Jewish affairs, and his sound reasoning, his liberal views, and his love of peace combined to establish him as one of the great leaders of Russian Jewry.

In 1857 he was the youngest member of a committee of rabbis chosen to regulate the management of the Volozhin Yeshiva. Ten years later he settled a quarrel which threatened to ruin the Mir Yeshiva. In 1868 he stood at the head of a committee to help the poor during a drought which almost produced a famine, and he allowed as a temporary measure the use of peas and beans in the Passover of that year. In 1875 he decided against the use of the Corfu Citron as Etrog, because of the exorbitant price to which they had risen. In 1879 he arranged, through Prof. A. Harkavy, his former pupil, that three rabbis, Reuben of Dünaburg, Lipa Boslansky of Mir, and Elijah Eliezer Grodzenski of Vilna, should be added to the official rabbinical commission, which had thitherto consisted entirely of men of affairs and secular scholars.