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Ponevezher Rav

Ponevezher Rav

1886 CE1969 CE · Acharonim · Kuliai

Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman (1886-1969), remembered as the Ponevezher Rav, was a Lithuanian rabbi who founded and led Torah institutions. Born in the small town of Kuliai, he studied as a boy at the yeshiva of Plungė and then, from about the age of fourteen, at Telz under Eliezer Gordon and Shimon Shkop; he later spent time at Novardok and at Radin, where his teachers included the Chofetz Chaim and Naftali Trop. After serving as rabbi of Vidz, he was appointed rabbi of Ponevezh in 1919 and founded a yeshiva there, along with a school and an orphanage, and he sat in the Lithuanian parliament between 1923 and 1925. When his institutions were destroyed during the Second World War, he rebuilt the Ponevezh yeshiva in Bnei Brak, where it grew into one of the largest centers of Torah study. He died there in 1969.

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Kuliai

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