הרב רפאל שפירא

Rabbi Refael Shapiro (Adar 5597/1837 – 23 Adar II 5681/1921) was rosh yeshivah of Volozhin and rav of the town. He was born in Smorgon to Rabbi Aryeh Leib Shapiro, rav of Kovno, known as Reb Leibele Kovner. In 5612/1852, at fifteen, he was chosen by the Netziv, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin, as a match for his daughter Sarah Rasha.

In 5630/1870 he was appointed second to the rosh yeshivah in Volozhin alongside his father-in-law and began saying shiurim there three times a week. In 5641/1881 he gave up the position in favor of his son-in-law Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk and went to serve in the rabbanut of Novo-Aleksandrovsk in Lithuania, and in 5646/1886 moved to the rabbanut of Bobruisk. In 5659/1899, when the yeshivah of Volozhin was reopened through the efforts of its trustees in Vilna and Minsk and with the agreement of the leaders of Volozhin, he was invited to serve as rav and rosh yeshivah there. Like all the roshei yeshivah of Volozhin he added a particular closing beside his signature: one who labors in the service of Torah in Volozhin. In 5675/1915, near the outbreak of the World War, the yeshivah dispersed and he moved to Minsk, where he was niftar.

He is the father of a distinctive approach in learning known as l’shitatei, joining breadth with depth: it seeks the correspondence between differing halachot and differing opinions of a tanna, an amora or a commentator, and shows that they rest on a common foundation and an inner closeness to one another, so that contradictions between sources of the same author are settled by uncovering what is uniform in them. Already in his youth he took part in his father-in-law’s work on the Haamek She’elah to the She’iltot of Rav Achai Gaon. Of his many chiddushim there remains his sefer Torat Refael, together with a number of principles of learning known in his name. In writing his chiddushim and his letters he avoided using a metal pen and wrote with a bird’s quill, out of a halachic concern for what is said of lifting iron.

He gave semichah to Rabbi Isser Yehudah Unterman, to Rabbi Moshe Shatzkes and to Rabbi Meir Yehoshua Rosenberg. From his first marriage, to Sarah Rasha the Netziv’s daughter, came Lifsha, wife of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk; from his second marriage, to her sister Dreizel, came Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, who filled his father’s place at the head of the yeshivah of Volozhin and was its last rosh yeshivah.