Rabbonim, Rebbes and Crown Rabbis of Lyakhovichi

By Deborah G. Glassman
copyright, 2004, and all updates are also copyright

Note from the author - while I update the table and the notes about the rabbis, I have left the core article as I wrote it in 2004.

I started collecting the names of rabbis connected with Lyakhovichi around a year ago. I was interested in all people who carried that title and whatever documentation I could find, I copied. The sources were books and on-line publications, and whatever could be tracked down with a search engine. The result was a rough list of around thirty people beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and continuing to the twentieth. I submitted it to the long-time researchers on Lyakhovichi, Neville Lamdan and Gary Palgon, and they each made suggestions and the list grew. But this is a very rudimentary database in its earliest stages of development. Lyakhovichi’s earliest days as a Jewish community have not been researched. The oldest synagogue in existence in the twentieth century was said to date from the 1400s, even the late 1390s. The Jewish community helped make up the tax leveled on the Lithuanian Jewish communities in the 1520s and again in the 1560s. Prominent residents of Lyakhovichi appear in the records of the Grand Duke of Lithuania and in those of the municipal court of Kaunas in the 1550s. But for three hundred years, from the late 1400s to the 1790s, we do not yet know the name of a single religious official – rabbi, teacher, scribe, slaughterer, judge, or author. It is appropriate that the very first Rabbi that we documented is claimed proudly by both the traditional and hasidic schools – Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz of Frankfurt, who was rabbi in Lyakhovichi from 1764-1771. Lyakhovichi was in the forefront of Lithuanian modern orthodoxy and it was equally dominant in the role it played in the formative years of the Hasidic movement in Lithuania. Though further research has since moved Pinchas Horowitz out of the "first known" category, he remains a perfect blend of the Hasidic and traditional forms of Orthodoxy that typified Lyakhovichi until the Holocaust. As I compiled the list of the rabbis named in our few sources, Neville Lamdan had this comment – “What also emerges from the list is that Lechowitz had three sets of rabbis - Rabbonim, Rebbes and, in the 19th cent., Kazonni Ravvin ("Crown Rabbis" or rabbonim mi-ta'am). Those last are notable for their absence from your list, even though we know the names of a few of them - Sholom Uzkalin in 1850 or so, my great uncle Shmuel Yosef Mandel in the 1890's and a gentleman called Velvel Brimberg in the early 1900s.”

Three sets of leaders

The Rabbis

The first, the Rabbis, were those who led the traditional orthodox community and who in the twentieth century held sway in what would be called the Kalter Shul. They are the oldest group, for three hundred and fifty years, they were the only group. They are the Rabbis, the rabbonim. We would expect to find different levels of scholarship: people who could sit on the Bet Din, people who could declare slaughtering knives fit, people who could write a valid get. Lyakhovichi was also bound by the seventeenth century ruling of the Council of Four Lands requiring that Jewish communities with more than one rabbi maintain a Yeshiva with the students being kept at the expense of the town, and we know of its existence in Lyakhovichi from graduates in the eighteenth century. The term RABBI was properly held by someone who had completed Yeshiva studies, studied with a noted rabbi and received a recognized rabbi’s recommendation for the title. A rabbinical contract would not be offered from any town to a rabbi who did not have those accreditations.

The Hasidic Leaders

The second, were the leaders of those who followed the Hasidic teachings. In the 1770s, under Dov Ber The Great Maggid of Mezheritch, it was decided to spend considerable effort preaching Hasidus to the Lithuanian Jewish community. The earliest generation in Lithuania were Rabbi Aaron of Karlin and Rabbi Shlomo haLevi of Karlin, supported by their key men Rabbi Asher of Stolin and Rabbi Mordechai of Lechowitz (the Holy Elder of Lechowitz). Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyady (the Alter Rebbe, first of the Lubavitcher dynasty) was the able assistant of Mendel of Vitebsk who did the same work for the north eastern portions of “Lithuania” from Minsk until Mendel emigrated to Eretz Israel in 1777. Mordechai of Lyakhovichi was arrested alongside the Alter Rebbe and Asher of Stolin in the Fall/Winter of 1798 for teaching Hasidim, and it is one of the miracles still cited, that the Czar set them free during Chanukah that year. Mordechai of Lyakhovichi is really the founder of at least three lines – Lechowitzer, Koidanover, and Slonimer Hasidic dynasties. And the Lechowitzer shuls were in towns all over Belarus as the twentieth century commenced. Each Hasidic leader was a REBBE rather than a rabbi. The term Rebbe is to be distinguished from the general title of respect “Reb.” To earn the title Rebbe the person first qualified as a Rabbi – completing Yeshiva studies, studied with a noted rabbi and received a recognized rabbi’s recommendation for the title. But in most Hasidic communities the title Rebbe was tied to the concept of a Tzaddik, a specially gifted leader, often of a family that could demonstrate its ancestral merit by having led a Hasidic group over generations. Lyakhovichi, which had several Hasidic shuls including a Lechowitzer shul, had a little rebbe for each one and each was a pupil and adherent of the Rebbe who led their particular Hasidic group.

Crown Rabbis

The third, were the Crown Rabbis. The Russian government used all sanctioned religions as agents of the state. The Russian Orthodox priest was required to keep a register of births and deaths, the Mennonite minister was supposed to report on the comings and goings of his flock, the Catholic Church had long standing disputes with the Russian government about what they were recording in the registers about tenants on their land holdings. The Russians found the concept of a representative from the religious community who nevertheless was a state employee, a handy one. The person could be held to requirements of Russian literacy. He could function in the role of notary to the municipal authorities and to the justice of the peace (a court that handled cases under a certain monetary amount). He was expected to keep track of his people and to head off problems before they came to the government’s attention. He, like all Russian civil servants, was expected to augment a miniscule salary with hefty bribes but nevertheless, to walk the line which, in the Russian culture, still constituted an honest employee. It was frequently claimed that the Russian government tried to foist the unlearned off on the community as “official rabbis.” This was because while the Russian government cared that the candidate had a university degree or had graduated from one of the two or three state “rabbinical” schools, they did not value a traditional rabbinic education. In reality most crown rabbis appear to have been capable, if not exemplary, students of Jewish law who were also conversant in Russian. Because of the low regard in which they were held by the Jewish community on matters of Jewish law, most towns with a crown rabbi also had a community rabbi. This is not to say they were regarded poorly on a character level – the fact that many filled essential Jewish communal posts such as mohel, community clerk, slaughterer, etc. says that they were men of good repute, just not necessarily learned enough for the critical role of community leader and judge. We don’t know much about the particular Crown Rabbis of Lyakhovichi. Elsewhere, they were generally conversant in a number of languages and literate in both Hebrew and Russian. They took fees for behaving as advocates in the lower courts and for creating legal Russian documents for their Jewish constituency. It was the Crown Rabbis who were primarily responsible for the keeping of Jewish civil record books, the metrecheski knigi, but the fines for non-compliance were against the Crown Rabbi, his assistant, and the elders of the synagogue to which the family belonged. Though the laws requiring the keeping of the metrecheski knigi were in effect in this part of Russia since the 1820s, they became the particular task of the crown rabbi in 1857. The Crown Rabbis were, almost uniformly, university graduates, and they were required to fill in paperwork for their position comparable to that of authorized teachers, so reportedly, there were employment files on each, and from the late nineteenth century photographs were taken of each as part of the file. And as state employees, pensions passed to their widows when they died, and claims about some of those pensions in other cities, survive.

Rabbi, Rebbe, or Kazonni Ravvin - appointment to the position of rabbi of a town in any of these roles, was always documented. Negotiations including salary and privileges had to be resolved. Responsibilities and hierarchies had to be established. A town usually had one main Rabbi, and a community large enough for multiple synagogues had rabbis for each of those shuls. A community with a Bet Din had a number of rabbis available at intervals, but some of those rabbis might have lived in surrounding communities and come to a central site at designated intervals. Despite the origin of the appointment, whether by the larger community, a particular shul, or an appointment by the government – all were properly titled Rabbis and that is how they are described below.

As you look at the list of Rabbis and Religious Officials, note that the tabulation is not complete in any of its elements. Often I have only the tiniest of sketches of important rabbis, and there are many that I haven’t even begun to detail. There was a Bet Din in Lyakhovichi in 1915, there were students at every one of the Yeshivot and each Bet Midrash, there were books written that I have not listed. Please help. Use the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page and send more info on this important piece of our past. We are trying to add pictures or title pages for each of these rabbis, so please share what you know and make copies of your photos and your book covers for us.