הרב מרדכי פוגרמנסקי

Rabbi Mordechai Pogramansky (5663/1903 – 25 Shevat 5710/1950) was a notable figure in the yeshivot of Lithuania and a rosh yeshivah in Latvia and in Belgium. He was born in Taurage in Lithuania to Eliyahu Pogramansky; his mother was the daughter of Rabbi Chaim Segal of Janova. He learned at first in the local Hebrew gymnasium, and following a meeting with Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian he moved to his yeshivah in Kelm. He learned afterwards in the yeshivah of Telz, where he became known as an illui and as exacting in halachah. Later he settled in Kovno, coming from time to time to Telz to give shmuessen in mussar and shiurim.

In the summer of 1932 he was appointed by Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn to head the yeshivah Tomchei Temimim that he founded that year in Riga. The yeshivah closed about a year later, and Rabbi Mordechai went to head the Heide yeshivah in Antwerp in Belgium for several years. At the end of the 1930s he returned to Kovno, and he passed through the Holocaust in the Kovno ghetto.

After the war he came to France, where he founded yeshivot for young men from among the survivors, establishing together with Rabbi Avraham Eliyahu Meizes a yeshivah in the Paris suburb of Bailly, which the two of them headed. He married in Adar 5709/1949, after which his health declined and he was niftar in Switzerland almost a year later. His coffin was brought to Eretz Yisrael and he was buried in the Shomrei Shabbat cemetery in Bnei Brak. Collections of his Torah as heard from him in the Kovno ghetto and afterwards in France have been published.