הרב אריה ליב פרומקין

Rav Aryeh Leib Frumkin (5605/1845–5 Sivan 5676/1916) was a rav and teacher, an author and chronicler of the history of Eretz Yisrael, and one of the founders of Petach Tikva. He was born in Kelm in Lithuania to Rav Shmuel Kalmer and his wife Fruma, a son of their old age after seven daughters; his father and his uncle Rav Eliyahu Ragoler, author of the responsa Yad Eliyahu, taught him Torah and saw his gifts early. His father went up to Eretz Yisrael in his last years and was niftar there within the year, and from the day the news reached him Aryeh Leib looked for a way to reach his father’s grave and settle in the Land. He arrived in 5631/1871.

Finding the graves on Har HaZeitim in a poor state, he set himself to copy the inscriptions from the matzeivot of the rabbanim of Yerushalayim and to research their lives — the beginning of Toldot Chachmei Yerushalayim, his chronicle of the Jewish presence in the city. He wrote up the year-long journey as Masa Even Shmuel, then returned to Lithuania to raise funds for the work, serving there as rav and av beit din of Aleksot outside Kovno, where people came from across the region to hear his drashot. He preached for aliyah rather than emigration to America, and in Germany, Ovadiah Lachmann and Rav Azriel Hildesheimer, took up his plan of a farming estate whose income would pay for a school.

In 1884 he came with his wife and four children, bought about a thousand dunam of the lands of Umlabes (Arab village), and built there the first winery of Petach Tikva. Others held the place too sick with malaria to live in, so he built the first house himself and moved his family into it alone; only after many months did other families follow, and that walled house was one of the two positions the settlers held during the attack of 1886. His school opened the same year, the first outside Yerushalayim and the first to teach general subjects beside limudei kodesh; in its best days it had sixty-three talmidim under thirteen teachers, with all the kodesh learning conducted in Hebrew.

After ten years a break with his patron left him with nothing: he gave up his rights in the estate against his debts and left the country, and in London’s East End he kept a family wine business while giving himself to his writing. He returned in 5671/1911 to Petach Tikva and was niftar there on 5 Sivan 5676/1916, buried in the Segula cemetery, since the war made it impossible to bring him to Yerushalayim as he had wished. He edited and published Seder Rav Amram HaShalem; his planting of the first tree in Petach Tikva is on the seal of the city, and among his descendants was Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom.