הרב יששכר שלמה טייכטל

Rav Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal (24 Shevat 5645/1885–10 Shevat 5705/1945) — known by his responsa Mishneh Sachir and above all as the author of Eim HaBanim Semeichah — was rav and av beit din of Piešťany (Pishtian) in Slovakia and among the notable figures of Hungarian Torah in the generation of the Holocaust. Born in Nagyhalász, Hungary, into a family of rabbanim and named for his grandfather, he was raised in the Sanz chasidus of his father Rav Yitzchak; he learned from the age of thirteen under Rav Shalom Weider of Nyíregyháza, and afterward in Galicia and at the yeshiva of Pressburg. He received semichah at twenty-one, and further ordination from Rav Shmuel Rosenberg and Rav Mordechai Leib Winkler.

In 1921 he was appointed rav and av beit din of Piešťany, where he served some twenty years, founded the Moriah yeshiva, and wrote the teshuvot of his Mishneh Sachir. When the Nazi persecution reached Slovakia he hid with his family in the local beit midrash, witnessing from there the deportation of his neighbors, and in Elul 5702/1942 he escaped into Hungary. After much wandering he reached Budapest, where he remained close to two years.

In Budapest, over little more than a year in hiding, he completed Eim HaBanim Semeichah, first printed in 1943 — a sustained argument from the Bavli, the Yerushalmi, and the Midrashim for the rebuilding of Eretz Yisrael. He had until then held the prevailing view of Hungarian Orthodoxy against an active return to the Land; in the fire of the Churban he came to see the settling and building of Eretz Yisrael as the path toward the geulah, and set his reasoning down at length in the sefer that carries his name to this day. Most notably, all of the sources and content cited in the sefer were quoted from his memory alone, as he was confined to a small physical space in hiding from the Nazis (yimach shemam).

In 1944, after the Nazis entered Hungary, the family returned to Slovakia, where they were seized and sent to Auschwitz. As the Soviet armies advanced in January 1945 he was among those transported deeper into Germany, and on 10 Shevat 5705 he was killed on the train toward Mauthausen — murdered, his son Rav Chaim Menachem related, when he rose to demand the return of a crust of bread torn from a starving fellow Jew beside him, refusing to stand by though the others warned it would cost him his life; Hashem yikom damo. A number of his writings survived the Churban, and the Mishneh Sachir center of Torah study in Bnei Brak carries his name.