Dovid Lifshitz

Rabbi Dovid Lifshitz was born in Minsk in 1906 and, after his family moved to Grodno, studied there under Rabbi Shimon Shkop at the Shaar HaTorah yeshiva before continuing at the Mir yeshiva, where he received ordination around 1932. He married in 1933 and, upon his father-in-law's death, became rabbi of Suwałki (Suvalk) in northeastern Poland, leading the town until the German occupation in 1940 and becoming known as the Suvalker Rav. He fled eastward across the Soviet Union and, by way of Kobe, Japan, reached the United States in 1941. After a brief period at Beis Midrash LeTorah in Chicago, he was invited by Rabbi Samuel Belkin to the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) in New York in 1944, where he taught for close to fifty years. His Talmudic lectures were later collected in Shiurei Rav Dovid Lifshitz. He died in 1993 and was buried in Jerusalem.