Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg

Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935) noted rabbi, author and Jewish communal leader in Poland and Canada.

Early life

Rosenberg was born in Skaraschev, Poland near Radomsko, Poland. As a young boy, he was known as “the genius of Skaraschev”.^[1]

At age 17, he married Chaya Chava, the daughter of Shlomo Elimelech, of Tarlow, Poland, granddaughter of the Otrovtzer Rav, Rabbi Liebish Zucker and great-grandchild of the Ostrovtzer Rebbe.

After receiving his rabbinic designation, he became a Rabbi in Tarlow, Poland, and was known in Poland as Rav Yudel Tarlow’er. The famous Talmudist, the “Pnei Yehoshua”, also lived in Tarlow some two centuries prior.

Move to Canada

In 1913, Rosenberg moved to Canada, where he became the spiritual leader of Toronto’s Beth Jacob Congregation, which was founded in 1899 by a group of Polish-born Jews. He became known as the “Poilisher Rebbe” as opposed to other rabbis from different European origins (such as the “Galitzianer Ruv” and the “Russian Rebbe”.)^[2]

During his close to six years in the city, Rosenberg founded the Eitz Chaim Talmud Torah on D’Arcy Street, in a building which once was an Italian club. Eitz Chaim Schools, which still functions today, recently celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Rosenberg moved to Montreal in 1919,^[3] where he became the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Orthodox Congregations, a group of synagogues serving immigrant Ashkenazi communities and vice-chairman of the Jewish Community’s Rabbinic Council, which he served as until his death in Montreal at age seventy-five. He passed away on October 23, 1935.^[4]

Rosenberg’s grandson was the celebrated Montreal author Mordecai Richler.

Works

Rabbi Rosenberg was a prolific author. His writing ranged from an anthology of the sciences (Sefer ha-Berit)^[5] - which was a source of scientific knowledge for Jews unfamiliar with European languages – to a Hebrew translation of the Zohar^[6] (his most important work), which he hoped would revive interest in Kabbalah, to numerous halakhic works.

He is perhaps most famous for his 1909 stories about the Golem of Prague, which he attributed to the Maharal of Prague, published in Hebrew as Niflaʼot Maharal, and known in English since the 2007 translation by Curt Leviant as The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague.^[7] Rosenberg himself later translated the Hebrew text into a rather different Yiddish version, also available in English translation.^[8] Rosenberg's text claims to be an edition of a three-hundred-year-old manuscript found in an imperial library in Metz, and this has led some readers to imagine that it was just this. But scholarship now recognises the text as a work of fiction by Rosenberg.^[9][10]

References