People from Valozhyn - Meir Bar-Ilan, Chaim Volozhin, Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik, Chaim Berlin (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Meir Berlin, later Hebraized to Meir Bar-Ilan, (1880-1949), born Volozhin, Lithuania, died Jerusalem, Israel) was an Orthodox rabbi and leader of Religious Zionism, the Mizrachi movement in USA and British Mandate of Palestine. He inspired the founding of Bar Ilan University in Israel which is named for him. He was a scholar of Talmud as well as the son of an important Haredi rabbi, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known as the Netziv, who was the head of the famous Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania. He studied in the traditional yeshivas of Volozhin, Telshe, Brisk and Novardok, where he learned with his grandfather, the renowned Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein. Gaining Semicha in 1902, he travelled to Germany where he became acquainted with a more modern form of Orthodox Judaism that had a more tolerant attitude to secular education and to political Zionism (although such attitudes were also present in the Lithuania of his youth, and in his grandfather). There, he attended the University of Berlin. In 1905 he joined the Mizrachi movement, representing it at the Seventh Zionist Congress, voting against the "Uganda Proposal" to create a "temporary" Jewish "homeland" in Uganda in East Africa, as suggested by Great Britain. In 1911 he was appointed secretary of the world Mizrachi movement. In 1913 he came to the United States and developed local Mizrachi groups into a national organisation, chairing the 1st U.S. Mizrachi convention, held in Cincinnati in 1914. In 1915 he became president of the U.S. Mizrachi, holding the position until 1928, whereupon he became honorary president. He was an active member of the JDC during World War I, also serving as vice president of the Central Relief Committee of New York City in 1916. He founded th... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=640155