Menachem Mendel Kasher

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Kasher (1895-1983) was a rabbinic scholar and author born in Warsaw into a Gerrer Hasidic family; his father was Rabbi Yitzchak Peretz. He studied under leading Polish rabbis, received ordination from Meir Dan Plotzki in 1915, and as a young man edited Degel HaTorah, an Agudath Israel periodical. Around 1924-1925 he settled in Jerusalem at the call of the Ger Rebbe to lead the newly established Sfas Emes yeshiva. His central undertaking was Torah Shleimah, an encyclopedic project begun in 1927 that assembled Talmudic and Midrashic sources verse by verse alongside the biblical text, growing across dozens of volumes. He also compiled the Haggadah Shleimah and guided the Torah journal Noam. In HaTekufah HaGedolah (1969) he argued that the return to the Land of Israel marked the beginning of the redemption. He received the Israel Prize in rabbinic literature in 1963.