הלל ליכטנשטיין

Rav Hillel Lichtenstein (11 Kislev 5575/24 November 1814–10 Iyar 5651/18 May 1891), known as the Maskil el Dal after his sefer and as Reb Hillel of Kolomyia after his city, was a talmid of the Chatam Sofer and the foremost of the kanaim of Hungary in his day. He was born in Vécs in Hungary — Vágvecse, today Veča in Slovakia — to Rav Baruch Bendit Lichtenstein, a dayan, and was descended from twenty-six generations of Polish rabbanim. He learned in Pressburg, five of those years under the Chatam Sofer. In 5597/1837 he married Reizel, daughter of David ben Kalonymus Kalish of Galanta, and remained there thirteen years, opening a yeshiva that he led with some thirty talmidim until 5610/1850, when he was appointed rav of Margareten and the district.

A year later he was chosen as rav of Klausenburg, where he stood out in his opposition to the Neologim. This brought him into conflict with Rav Avraham Friedman, the district rav appointed by the authorities, whose leadership he refused to accept; Rav Lichtenstein was in the end forced from the position and expelled from the city. He lived for a time in Oradea (Grosswardein) in pressing poverty, until Rav Yehoshua Aharon Tzvi Weinberger and the parnas Leib Frankel prevailed on the leaders of Margareten to take him back, and in 5619/1859 he was appointed there a second time. In 5622 he passed the rabbanut of Margareten to Rav Weinberger and went to serve as rav in Szikszó in northeastern Hungary; in 5628/1868 he was chosen as rav of the kehillah of Kolomyia in Galicia, where he remained until his passing.

He allowed no departure from the received practice — not the moving of the bimah from the center of the shul, nor the taking on of foreign dress and manners, nor secular learning, nor even the study of the language of the country — and he set himself equally against the Hungarian Jewish congress of 5629/1868–69 and the founding of the Neolog seminary in Budapest. In 5625/1865 he called the rabbinical assembly at Michalovce, organized together with his son-in-law Rav Akiva Yosef Schlesinger, which forbade the reforming of shuls, and in 5643/1883 he was among the initiators of the rabbinical gathering in Lvov that founded Machzikei HaDat. His own avodah was exacting even by the measure of the Hungarian rabbanim: he kept a she-donkey so as to have petter chamor, and a sheep so as to give the first shearing to a kohen and buy it back from him for tzitzit. He was drawn to chasidut and traveled to the Divrei Chaim of Sanz, and he would daven for people in distress but took no gift for it. His sefarim include the responsa Beit Hillel, and the mussar works Maskil el Dal and Eit La’asot. He was niftar in Kolomyia.