Rabbi Moshe Mintz

Rabbi Moshe Münz, known in rabbinic literature as the Maharam Mintz, was born around 1750 in Minkowitz (Minkovtsy) in Podolia. He studied under Meshullam Egra of Tysmienitz and afterward settled for several years in Brody, in Galicia, where he led a yeshiva and earned a wide name as a Talmudic scholar. On the recommendation of Ezekiel Landau of Prague, he was called in 1790 to the chief rabbinate of Alt-Ofen (Óbuda), then among the largest Jewish communities in Hungary, and in 1793 he was appointed rabbi over the Pest region. Questions reached him from across the Austrian Empire during the years when reform-minded changes were first taking shape in Hungarian Jewish life. His teachings survive in the responsa collection Shu"t Maharam Mintz (Prague, 1827), the synagogue-dedication discourse Dvir HaBayis, and his glosses to the sefer Pri Yaakov. He died in 1831 in Alt-Ofen.