הרב אליעזר גורדון

Rabbi Eliezer Gordon (5601/1841 – 4 Adar I 5670/1910), known as Reb Laizer Telzer, was rav of Telz and rosh yeshivah there. He was born in the village of Chernyaty near Svir in the district of Vilna to Avraham Shmuel Gordon, a talmid of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin who made his living in the wine trade. He learned in the talmud Torah of nearby Smorgon, was sent to the yeshivah at Zaretza outside Vilna, and afterwards learned in Kovno in the beit midrash of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who at fifteen appointed him to say a shiur on the Rif before the talmidim. Among his fellow talmidim there were Rabbi Yitzchak Blazer, Rabbi Simchah Zissel Ziv, Rabbi Naftali Amsterdam and Rabbi Yeruchom Perlman.

In 5616/1856 he married the daughter of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Nevyazer, a moreh tzedek in Kovno, and lived there afterwards, declining offers of rabbanut from several communities. In 5634/1874 he was appointed rav of Slabodka and, his father-in-law being niftar that same day, moreh tzedek of Kovno alongside it; half a year later he became rav of Kelm, where he founded a yeshivah for older talmidim. In 5641/1881 he was received as rav of Telz and took the leadership of the yeshivah that had been founded there shortly before by Rabbi Meir Atlas, Rabbi Tzvi Yaakov Oppenheim and Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Abel, and under him it grew.

He is counted among the fathers of the analytic approach to learning Gemara, which sets itself to understand the foundations and the reasoning of a sugya. He directed his talmidim to the sefarim of the Rishonim — the Ramban, the Rashba and the Ritva — together with those Acharonim who held to the same approach, the Ketzot HaChoshen, the Netivot HaMishpat and Rabbi Akiva Eiger. He was the first to give shiurim arranged by subject rather than following the order of the Gemara. He divided the yeshivah into four classes called shiurim according to age, knowledge and ability, with outstanding talmidim rising quickly to a higher one and all of them entering his own shiur after passing through the four — a system that both let each group be taught at its own level and drove the talmidim to excel. Among the maggidei shiur were his son-in-law Rabbi Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch and Rabbi Shimon Shkop. He required his talmidim to take part in the give and take of the shiur, by which their level was measured, and his absorption in learning was such that he once broke his talmid Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman‘s finger without noticing.

In 5670/1910 he traveled to London to raise funds for the yeshivah building, which had burned down shortly before, and was niftar there and buried in London. His teshuvot were published after his passing as Teshuvot Rabbi Eliezer, at the end of whose second volume some of his chiddushim on masechtot of Shas appear. His sons-in-law included Rabbi Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Hirshowitz, Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin and Yeshayahu Kahaneman.