Rav Yosef Zundel Salant

Early years

Rav Yosef Zundel Salant zt"l was born in Salant, Lithuania, in 1786, on Rosh Hashanah's first day. His father, Rav Binyomin Beinush, served the community as both shochet (ritual slaughterer) and chazan (cantor). The family traced its line back to Rav Faivush Ashkenazi of Vilna, who lived in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Little is known about Rav Zundel's earliest years.

As a young man he studied at the yeshiva of Volozhin, where Rav Chaim of Volozhin was his teacher. After Rav Chaim's passing in 1821, he made periodic journeys to learn from Rav Akiva Eiger. In every way he walked in the path of the Vilna Gaon.

Torah and leadership

Rav Zundel married Rochel Rivkah. Of their three children, two were daughters, Tziviah and Heniah, and the third, an only son, was Aryeh Leib. In Lithuania he declined every rabbinic position that was offered. A modest business yielded only a meagre livelihood, which left him free to devote much of his time to Torah and mussar.

He inspired Rav Yisroel Salanter, his best-known talmid and the founder of the Mussar movement. In the early years of that movement, Rav Zundel was a familiar figure in the marketplace on Friday afternoons, warning the merchants that Shabbos was approaching so that they would shut their stalls in time and not violate it.

Eretz Yisroel was his lifelong yearning. In the late 1830s he brought his family to Yerushalayim, even though the war between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt made travel difficult.

The Ashkenazi community of Yerushalayim then depended on the Kollel Vilna, based in Amsterdam, for its leadership and support. A committee headed by a wealthy Dutch banker, Rav Avrohom Tzvi Hirsch Lehren (1784–1853), ran it. In 1817 Rav Lehren took the helm of the Pekidim and Amarkalim of Eretz Yisroel (“Officials and Administrators of the Land of Israel”), a charity founded in 1809. It gathered, managed and distributed all the money raised in Western Europe for the Ashkenazi community of the Holy Land.

Though Rav Zundel was entirely unassuming, Rav Lehren saw his greatness and honored him deeply. His command of Torah was remarkable, as though the whole of it lay engraved in his heart and mind, and he was a tzaddik of the highest order. At Rav Lehren's urging he became rabbi of the Ashkenazi community.

Until then, halachic questions and disputes in Yerushalayim had always been brought before the Sephardi beis din. As the Ashkenazi community grew, Rav Lehren wanted it to have its own court. Rav Zundel agreed, but on conditions. He would accept no salary, because all his life he had earned his own living so as not to profit from his Torah, and he had always shunned honors. And he would step aside once a fitting successor was found. He opened the beis din as a temporary court. Over time, Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike came to recognize his greatness and turned to him with their halachic questions.

In 1841 his son-in-law, Rav Shmuel Salant, reached Yerushalayim, and Rav Zundel invited him onto the beis din. Recognizing his son-in-law's stature, he soon named him head of the court. Rav Shmuel held that office for almost seventy years, until his passing in 1909, and is known as the first Chief Rabbi of Yerushalayim.

Life in Yerushalayim

Rav Zundel's home was a tiny one-room apartment inside the Hurva Synagogue compound, in the Old City's Jewish Quarter. He earned his family's living by selling vinegar, yet he passed most days and nights in the Menachem Zion Synagogue, completed in 1837. The Perushim, talmidim of the Vilna Gaon, had built it and named it for their leader, Rav Menachem Mendel of Shklov. Rav Zundel lived a hidden, otherworldly life, and his spirituality shone on the whole community.

He helped establish the Bikur Cholim Hospital, the Chevrah Kadisha and the Etz Chaim Yeshiva, and he helped newcomers to Yerushalayim find their footing. Together with Rav Shmuel he labored tirelessly for the good of the community. In 1860 the two founded the Rav Meir Baal HaNess charity, which became the community's main pillar of support and saved it from financial collapse. Rav Zundel lived only a few more years, and he gave himself wholly to this undertaking in that time. By his passing it was sustaining hundreds of poor families.

Later years and passing

By the 1860s Yerushalayim's water supply was poor, although the Ottoman authorities had repeatedly tried to restore the old channel that ran from Ayin Arrub and Solomon's Pools. Arab farmers who profited from selling water kept damaging the stone pipes. They brought the water in animal-skin bags from Ayin Rogel and the Gihon Spring, entering the city by the Dung Gate, and charged a high price. It tasted bad, smelled foul, and was unsafe unless boiled.

Most households relied on cisterns dug beside or even beneath the houses to collect rainwater, and there were nearly a thousand of them in the 1860s. Such water was safe only while no sewage reached it. With no sewer system in the city, sewage often flowed through the streets and soaked into the wells. The contaminated water caused a severe plague that took hundreds of lives, and the city was quarantined for four months. Sir Moses Montefiore helped the residents with a donation toward improving the water supply.

Rav Zundel passed away in the plague, on 3 Cheshvan 5626 (1865), and was buried on Har HaZeisim, the Mount of Olives. His will asked that no eulogies be given and that no titles be added to his name on his tombstone.

Legacy

Rav Yisroel Salanter, founder of the Mussar movement and Rav Zundel's foremost talmid, said that he had never in his life met a true servant of Hashem to match his mentor.

Rav Zundel's legacy lives on in the Ashkenazi beis din he opened, the institutions he helped found, and the Rav Meir Baal HaNess charity he built with Rav Shmuel Salant.