דב בר מייזלש

Rav Dov Ber Meisels (5558/1798–14 Adar II 5630/1870), known by the acronym MaHaRDaM, was chief rabbi of Krakow and afterward of Warsaw, and a member of the Austrian parliament. He was a son of Rav Yitzchak Meisels, author of Chosen Yeshuot on several masechtot of Shas, and his family reached back to the Meisels of Prague; his childhood years were spent in Kamenetz-Podolsk, where his father sat as rav. After marrying the daughter of the gvir Rav Shlomo Bornstein he founded, at his father-in-law’s urging, the banking house of Meisels and Horowitz, and settled in Krakow. He took up the Polish cause early, buying arms for the fighters of the November rising.

In 5592/1832 he was appointed rav of Krakow. The rival candidate, Rav Shaul Landau, would not accept the appointment and a part of the kehillah held with him, but the greater number of Krakow’s Jews and the rabbanim of Poland stood with Rav Meisels, and he held the position for close to a quarter of a century. In 1845 he moved to overturn the municipality’s plan to build over the old beit hakevarot of Krakow. The following year he was chosen a senator of the city and a delegate to the Austrian parliament, and his standing among the Polish nobility let him redeem young men from conscription. When the president of that body expressed surprise at seeing a rav seated with the radicals, he answered that Jews have no rights.

In 5617/1857, after the passing of Rav Chaim Davidson, he was called to the rabbanut of Warsaw, welcomed there by the chassidim who would not receive Rav Yaakov Gesundheit. Warsaw then lay under Russian rule. Rav Meisels held that only common cause between Poland’s Jews and their neighbors would bring the country its independence, and he labored toward it in his speeches and with his money, again buying arms for the insurgents. For this the Russian authorities arrested him in 1861 and expelled him from the city; he was invited to settle in London, and in 1862 was permitted to return to Warsaw, though barred from serving as rav. He aided the rising of 1863 as well, was banished a second time for several years, and lived under watch thereafter.

He was niftar in Warsaw on Purim of 5630. More than forty thousand people accompanied him, and the Russian government forbade the press to print notices in his memory. His Chiddushei MaHaRDaM on the Rambam’s Sefer HaMitzvot was brought to press by his son Rav Yisrael, dayan of Krakow and av beit din of Siedlce, and was reissued in Yerushalayim in 5736 by Rav Yehuda Aryeh Meisels. A street in the Jewish quarter of Krakow, where he had lived for many years, carries his name.