Early Life
He was born in the town of Dolyna in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, the son of a distinguished Chassid, Rabbi Yosef Yehuda Weiss, later spiritual leader of the Hungarian Jewish community in Munkacs. He had frequent encounters with the Ziditchover Rebbe, Rabbi Yehuda Zvi Eichenstein, until the age of seven when the latter died. However, with the onset of World War I in 1914, he moved with his parents to Munkacs in Hungary, where his father had lived before marrying. In 1918, the region was under the rule of independent Czechoslovakia.
He studied under his father and received Semicha from the Munkatcher Rebbe, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Shapiro, the famed author of the Minchas Elazar. Soon after, he also received semicha from Rabbi Meir Arik of Tarna. He also became close to Rabbi Shimon Greenfield. At the age of 20 became a Rosh yeshiva in the town.
Rabbi Weiss then served as the Av Beth Din in Grosswardein, Romania, before World War II. When Grosswardein was ceded to Hungary as a result of the Vienna Awards, he fled to Romania in 1944, where his wife died after contracting an illness. He and his family managed to escape the deportation of Jews during the Nazi occupation of the area by hiding in bunkers and attics.
Read more about this topic: Yitzchok Yaakov Weiss
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrification of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion’s little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.”
—Caroline Lejeune (1897–1973)