הרב עדין אבן־ישראל (שטיינזלץ)

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (עדין אבן־ישראל שטיינזלץ) was a Chabad chasid in Jerusalem, a teacher and an author, best known for his peirush on the Talmud Bavli. He was born in Jerusalem in 1937, the only child of a family that did not keep mitzvot. His father, a descendant of the first Slonimer Rebbe, hired a teacher of Gemara for him when he was about ten, so that the boy would not grow up an am ha’aretz (ignorant of Torah).

As a teenager Adin became a baal teshuvah (one who returns to observance) drawn by the Chabad rabbanim of Jerusalem: Rabbi Shmuel Elazar Heilprin, rosh yeshiva of Torat Emet, whom he counted as his main rebbe; Rabbi Dov Ber Eliezrov, the rav of Katamon; and Rabbi Shmaryahu Sasonkin. When he was sixteen and a half he began studying mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University, and at the same time he learned at the Chabad yeshiva Tomchei Temimim in Lod, where he grew close to Rabbi Shlomo Chaim Kesselman. He also learned at Torat Emet and at the Mir. He was a talmid of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and met with him privately (yechidut) into the Rebbe’s last years. On the Rebbe’s advice he took the Hebrew family name Even-Israel in 1991.

Rabbi Steinsaltz taught mathematics in Azata (today Netivot) and became principal of a religious high school in Beit HaGadi when he was twenty-four. He set up the Israel Institute for Talmudic Publications in 1965. His edition of the Gemara gives the text with nekudot (vowels) and punctuation, with a Hebrew translation of the Aramaic and explanations alongside Rashi and Tosafot. The first volume came out in 1967 and the last in 2010, and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef gave it haskamot (letters of approbation). The way that Rabbi Steinsaltz translated the Talmud was innovative for its time. Barely a generation after it was first introduced, there are many popular translations, that follow a similar format. It was later printed in English as the Koren Talmud Bavli. He went on to write peirushim on Tanach, on the Mishneh Torah of the Rambam and on the Mishnah, completed after his passing. His peirush on the Tanya grew out of a weekly shiur in Chassidut that he took over in 1958 and gave for decades; his shiurim on Torah Or and Likutei Torah were also printed. He wrote some sixty books, among them The Thirteen Petalled Rose, on kabbalah.

He was rav of the Tzemach Tzedek shul in Jerusalem, and founded Yeshivat Makor Chaim with Rabbi Menachem Froman and Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg in 1984 and the yeshiva in Tekoa in 1999. In 1989 he opened a yeshiva in Moscow, the first there after the Iron Curtain fell, and the Chief Rabbi of Russia named him the spiritual leader of Russian Jewry in 1995. He received the Israel Prize for Jewish studies in 1988. A stroke in 2016 left him unable to speak. Rabbi Steinsaltz was niftar in Jerusalem on 17 Av 5780 (August 7, 2020) and is buried in the Chabad section on Har HaZeitim.

ביוגרפיה © 2026 TorahSages · CC BY-SA (בחלקה מוויקיפדיה) · torahsages.com/he/sages/rabbi-adin-steinsaltz · זכויות יוצרים ורישוי