הרב שלמה זלמן אהרנרייך

Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich (9 Tammuz 5623/1863 – 11 Sivan 5704/1944) was av beit din of Simleu in the Salaj district of Transylvania, the author of the teshuvot Lechem Shlomo and some forty further works, and was killed in the Holocaust together with his community at the end of the Second World War. He was born in Beregszasz in Hungary to Rabbi Yaakov and to Hindel Reizel, eldest daughter of Rabbi Avraham Yehudah HaKohen Schwartz. His parents moved in his childhood to Sobrance in the Ung district, and from the age of six he was raised in his grandfather’s house; at thirteen he began to write chiddushei Torah.

At twenty-one he married Hindel Reichman, a granddaughter of Rabbi Yehudah Schindler, and lived some four years with his father-in-law. When his father-in-law lost his means in 5648 the couple moved to the household of his mother-in-law’s parents in the town of Sikszo. He was offered rabbanut in various respected communities and refused, preferring to make his living in trade: for some three years he kept a grocery, and when it suffered much from theft because he gave it too little attention he closed it and went over to trading in etrogim, traveling each year to buy them in the port of Trieste. When that did not suffice for his family’s needs, and after much urging from rabbanim, he agreed to take a rabbinical position.

In 5654/1894 he was chosen rav of Csoba near Miskolc, an appointment that met opposition from part of the community and was settled through arbitration. There he founded a yeshivah in which he taught Gemara with the commentaries, halachah in Shulchan Aruch Orach Chaim and Yoreh Deah, and Chumash with Rashi, teaching the abler talmidim the sugyot with the Rishonim and Acharonim. Around that time he proposed at a national gathering of rabbanim that a stipend be set aside for outstanding talmidim about to marry so that they could continue learning; the proposal was not accepted, but it led the baron to whom it was made to take an interest in the Torah institutions of Hungary and to support them, and Rabbi Shlomo Zalman was appointed chairman of the committee distributing those funds in three regions.

In 5659/1899, on the advice of the rav of Sighet, he wrote to the heads of the larger community of Simleu and was appointed rav of the town and its region. There he opened a yeshivah in which about a hundred learned and a talmud Torah attended by hundreds of children. He set a series of strict takanot for the community, among them limits on the cost of a matzevah, separation at weddings, a strict standard of dress, and a prohibition on Jews selling non-kosher meat even to non-Jews; on his instruction a new mikveh was built to a strict standard. His way of learning followed the plain sense of the sugya and he opposed the method of pilpul, and he kept his derashot to twenty minutes at most.