אברהם דוב כהנא שפירא

Rav Avraham Dov Ber Kahana Shapiro (11 Tishrei 5631/1870 – 22 Adar I 5703/1943), known by his sefer Devar Avraham, was the last rav of the kehillah of Kovno and among the great poskim of the twentieth century. He was born in Kobryn on the night following Yom Kippur to Rav Zalman Sender Kahana Shapiro, a kohen and the author of chidushim on Kodshim, and he descended from Rav Chaim of Volozhin and from Rav Alexander Ziskind of Horodna, author of Yesod VeShoresh HaAvodah. He learned in the Volozhin yeshiva.

At eighteen he was taken into the Russian army and sent to Minsk, where he spent whatever free time he had in the local beit midrash. The rav of Minsk, Rav Yerucham Yehuda Leib Perlman, the Gadol of Minsk and author of Or Gadol, worked to have him released and then took him as a son-in-law; at twenty-one he married his daughter Rachel. At twenty-six he was appointed rav of Smolevich, and at forty-three rav of Kovno, second in importance among the cities of Lithuanian Jewry. In the years when Kovno was the capital of independent Lithuania he served as chairman of the Agudat HaRabbanim of Lithuania, and in 5684 he traveled to America on a delegation to raise funds for the yeshivot, together with Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, who headed it, and Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein.

The first volume of Devar Avraham, his teshuvot and chidushei halachah, appeared in Warsaw in 5666/1906, when he was thirty-five; the second came out in Piotrkow in 5673/1913, and the third was printed in New York in 5706/1946 by his son Yerucham. A lecture he gave in Kovno on taharat hamishpachah was printed in Yiddish and spread widely, and was later put into Hebrew. Among his talmidim were Rav Ephraim Oshry, who wrote Sheilot U’Teshuvot MiMaamakim, and Rav Yaakov Yitzchak Ruderman, rosh yeshiva of Ner Yisrael in Baltimore.

When the war broke out he was in Switzerland recovering from a hard illness. His son Yerucham, living in New York, pressed him by telegram to come to America until it was over. He showed the telegram to a close friend and said that a captain is the last to leave his sinking ship and not the first, and that in a time of danger his place was with the people of his city — and he went back to Kovno. He was niftar of illness in the Kovno ghetto on 22 Adar I 5703, and a large crowd accompanied him to his kevurah, which in those days meant real danger to life. He lies in the cemetery of Kovno, beside the ohel of Rav Baruch Horowitz.