Wolf Boskowitz

Rabbi Binyamin Ze'ev (Wolf) Boskowitz ha-Levi was a Central European halakhist who worked in Moravia and Hungary during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He took his name from Boskovice (Boskowitz) in Moravia, where his father, Rabbi Shmuel (Samuel) Kelin — author of Machatzit ha-Shekel, a commentary on the Magen Avraham on the Shulchan Aruch — headed a yeshiva. He held a succession of rabbinical posts, among them Aszód, Prossnitz, Alt-Ofen (Buda), Pest, and Balassagyarmat, before settling around 1810 as rabbi of Bonyhád, where he served until his death in 1818. He exchanged questions of Jewish law with Rabbi Yechezkel Landau of Prague. His writings include Seder Mishnah, glosses on Maimonides' Mishneh Torah whose first volume his son published in Prague in 1820; the homiletic collection Ma'amar Esther; and Le-Binyamin Amar. His notes on the Babylonian Talmud first appeared in the Vienna Talmud edition of 1830.