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Avigdor Miller

Avigdor Miller

1908 CE–2001 CE · Modern · Baltimore, MD

R. Avigdor Miller (1908-2001) was the most influential English-language popularizer of yeshivish hashkafa in postwar America. A Slabodka talmid (under R. Yitzchak Isaac Sher, son-in-law of the Alter of Slabodka), he served as a rav and maggid in Chelsea (Boston), Brownsville (Brooklyn), and for his final decades the Young Israel of Rugby and Beis Yisroel Torah Gateway in Flatbush. His Thursday-night lectures (later released as 1000+ taped shiurim) and over a dozen English books — Rejoice O Youth, Sing You Righteous, Awake My Glory, Behold a People — shaped the worldview of the postwar Brooklyn-Yeshivish baal habayit class.

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Stop 1 of 51908Born

Baltimore, MDNer Israel yeshiva center

What they did here

Born in Baltimore in 1908, he was raised in a Yiddish-speaking household and given the English name Victor, attending public school while growing up in a religiously observant Jewish home.

About Baltimore, MD

Baltimore, Maryland, became a major center of American Orthodox Torah life with the founding of Yeshivas Ner Yisroel (Ner Israel Rabbinical College) in 1933 by Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman, a disciple of the Alter of Slabodka. It was the first major yeshiva established outside the New York area and grew, under Rabbi Ruderman's leadership, into one of the most influential yeshivas in North America.

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Avigdor Miller’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Across the traditions

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Avigdor Miller’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

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