Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski of Vilna

Early years

Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski zt"l came into the world in the small town of Iwye, near Vilna, on 9 Elul 5623 (24 August 1863). His father, Rav Dovid Shlomo Grodzinski, and his grandfather before him had each served as Rav of Iwye for some forty years or more. As a child he was frail and often ill, yet his memory was extraordinary: whatever he read or heard stayed with him for life.

It is told that when he was nine, Rav Yisroel Salanter put a halachic question to him. The boy rejected the Rav's line of reasoning and brought a different one from the sources, leaving the great sage astonished. At twelve his father sent him to Eishishok, where the peirushim, a circle of Lithuania's finest Torah scholars, were learning together, and there he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Rather than deliver the customary bar mitzvah pilpul, he invited his guests to read aloud a few words from the Ketzos HaChoshen and the Nesivos HaMishpat. From each starting point he continued on his own, reciting entire pages exactly as written and explaining every topic clearly, which showed how well he knew these seforim.

At fifteen he entered the yeshiva in Volozhin and was accepted into the shiur of Rav Chaim Soloveichik of Brisk. The two became friendly, although he never took up the Brisker approach to study. Because of his birthplace he came to be called the illui (prodigy) of Ivya.

Torah and leadership

By the time he was twenty and passing through Vilna, word of his brilliance had reached the city before him. Two prominent men each hoped to take him as a son-in-law: Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Grodnenski, the foremost Rav in Vilna and himself a son-in-law of Rav Yisroel Salanter, and Rav Elinke Levinsohn of Kretinga.

They brought the question to Rav Yitzchok Elchanan Spektor of Kovno. After listening to both, he asked to meet the young man and spoke with him at length on a range of Torah subjects. He then told the two fathers, “The truth is that if I had a daughter to marry off, I would take him and leave you both out in the cold.” Having no such daughter, he chose the Rav of Vilna as the better match.

Two years after the wedding his father-in-law passed away, and the community of Vilna invited him to succeed him. At twenty-two he thus became the city's leading Rav, and the older rabbonim embraced him without hesitation. To those who noted his youth he replied with humor, “Don't worry, it's only a temporary blemish. I'll get over it with time.” Whatever doubts remained vanished when Rav Chaim Soloveichik and Rav Alexander Moshe Lapidos arrived in Vilna and made their first call on Rav Chaim Ozer. In 1887 he was named a dayan on the beis din of Vilna.

He attended the 1912 conference at Kattowitz, in Silesia, where Agudath Israel was founded, and became a member of its Council of Torah Sages. He also helped establish the Vaad HaYeshivos (Council of the Yeshivos) and led it actively. From 1924 until 1939 this Vilna-based body gave material and spiritual backing to yeshivos throughout eastern Poland.

He had no yeshiva of his own, but he assisted in running the Rameiles Yeshiva of Vilna. He also formed a circle of exceptional young scholars, called iluyim, and gave them shiurim on difficult subjects in Shas. Rav Yechezkel Abramsky, Rav Eliezer Silver, Rav Moshe Shatzkes and Rav Reuven Katz were among his talmidim.

When Rav Yitzchok Elchanan Spektor passed away in 1896, the leadership of European Jewry passed to Rav Chaim Ozer. People turned to him in the campaign for traditional Torah education in Russia and in the struggle against the ban on shechitah. In time his approval was needed for the appointment of any Rav or shochet in Poland or Russia. His astonishing memory held the names of people and places around the world, so communities seeking a new Rav or rosh yeshiva relied on him.

Questions in halachah reached him from every corner of the world, and he was consulted on every communal matter. Over fifty-five years of service he was seen as the foremost halachic authority and the spiritual guide of his whole era.

Both Yerushalayim and St. Petersburg invited him to serve as their chief rabbi, and he declined, since he was needed in Vilna. The Vilna community, grateful for his devotion, wished to give him the title of official chief rabbi of the city. He refused that too, saying he had not come to overturn Vilna's old custom of having no central Rav. Offered a salary increase instead, he accepted only on condition that every other rabbi in the city receive one as well.

Through all of this he held to a strict daily schedule of learning, and amid his communal burdens he wrote his monumental three-volume work, Achiezer.

It is told that when his daughter lay in the hospital near death, he hurried to his office to answer the halachic correspondence piled on his desk. He knew that during the week of shivah he would be unable to research and answer these urgent questions.

Saving the yeshivos

He was instrumental in keeping the Lithuanian yeshivos alive under Communist rule. In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, he arranged for the yeshivos of Poland and Russia to relocate to Lithuanian cities, and so rescued them.

Later years and passing

Rav Chaim Ozer died of cancer in Vilna on 5 Av 5700 (9 August 1940). Not long before, two other leaders of the Lithuanian yeshiva world had passed away: Rav Shimon Shkop, rosh yeshiva in Grodno, on 22 October 1939, and Rav Boruch Ber Leibowitz, rosh yeshiva of Kaminetz, on 17 November 1939.