An 8-page pamphlet entirely in the handwriting and signed by the famous Rabbi Yosef Zechariah Stern, Av Beit Din of Šiauliai
Šiauliai (Shavel), 1864.
Rabbi Yosef Zechariah Stern (1831-1904, Otzar HaRabbanim 8783) was one of the great sages of Lithuania and a leading Halachic authority of his generation. He was the son-in-law of Rabbi Mordechai Gimpel Yaffe. At the age of 20, he was appointed rabbi in Yashinovka, and from 1861 he served as the rabbi in Shavel (Šiauliai, Lithuania). His remarkable genius and phenomenal memory were unparalleled. His speech was rapid, matching the flow of his thoughts, and his writing was also extraordinarily fast. Most of his writings were composed "with hints and interspersions and without order." In 1870, a fire in his town of Shavel destroyed thousands of pages of his manuscripts, but he rewrote most of them from memory. His knowledge encompassed all areas of Torah, and any book he read even once, he could later quote verbatim, letter by letter. He authored Shu”t Zecher Yehosef, Tahaluchot HaAggadot, and other seforim.
At his grave, the great Rabbi Itzele of Ponovezh eulogized him, saying: "Here lies buried the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, Sifra, Sifrei, Mechilta, Tosefta, Rishonim, and Acharonim" (Rabotainu SheBaGolah, Vol. 1, p. 120).
The recipient of the letter, the Gaon Rabbi Levi Shapira (1841-1881), was the rabbi of Trishkiai and Novy Alexandrovsk in Lithuania and the author of the Shu”t Beit Levi.
Rabbi Levi Shapira was born in Ilia to a distinguished rabbinical family. His father was Rabbi Leibeli Kovner, the rabbi of the city at that time. His mother, Esther, was the granddaughter of Rabbi Aryeh Leib Schick, the rabbi of Vashilishok, and a descendant of the Tosefet Yom Tov. He married Leah, the daughter of Rabbi Avraham Rabinowitz (a great-grandson of Rabbi Avraham, the brother of the Vilna Gaon), the rabbi of Neishtot Sugint. After his marriage, he lived with his father-in-law, who supported him financially.
In 1864, Rabbi Levi was appointed rabbi of Trishkiai (his brother, Rabbi Moshe Shmuel, succeeded him). In 1874, he moved to serve as the rabbi of Novy Alexandrovsk in the Kovno district, a position he held until his passing. After his death, his brother Rabbi Raphael Shapira, the head of the Volozhin Yeshiva, succeeded him. Rabbi Raphael later passed the yeshiva’s leadership to his son-in-law, Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik.
Rabbi Levi Shapira studied under his father and gained fame as a prodigy at a young age. Hundreds of halachic responses came from his hand, including correspondence with many of the sages of his generation, such as the Pitchei Teshuva, the Netziv of Volozhin, the Zecher Yehosef, Rabbi Eliyahu Shick, Rabbi Eliyahu Klatzkin, and the Aderet, with whom he had close friendships.
Rabbi Levi was frail and sickly and passed away around the age of 40. Most of his manuscripts were damaged by mold, and only remnants of his responses were published in Beit Levi by his nephew Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Hirsch Shapira, Av Beit Din of Lapichi, with additional notes. It was published in Vilna in 1913.
8 Sides, 22 Cm. Tears with loss to first page, & affecting a few characters on the last page, wear.
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Lot #223