שבתי שפטל הלוי הורוביץ

Rabbi Shabtai Sheftel HaLevi Horowitz (5352/1592 – 28 Nisan 5420/1660) was a rav and rosh yeshivah, among the great figures of Ashkenazi Jewry in his generation, darshan of the community of Prague and rav of Furth, Frankfurt, Posen and Vienna. He was the son of Rabbi Yeshayah HaLevi Horowitz, the Shelah HaKadosh, and it was he who edited his father’s Shnei Luchot HaBrit; he is known by the name of his own sefer Vavei HaAmudim and by his ethical will. He learned chiefly from his father and from Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim of Luntshitz. At seventeen he married the daughter of Rabbi Moshe Charif, rav of Kremenets and Lvov, and the couple lived beside her parents while he learned with his father-in-law; after she was niftar in her youth he married Feigel, daughter of Moshe HaLevi Yalish of Krakow.

Before 1620 he founded a yeshivah in his house in Prague, and when his father went up to Eretz Yisrael in 5381/1621 he was appointed darshan of the Prague community, which brought him wide recognition. In 5388/1628 he was appointed rav of Furth, where he led the community four years and headed the yeshivah, until the city was ruined in the course of the Thirty Years’ War in 1632 and he had to leave. He took the rabbanut of Frankfurt am Main and served there nine years, and after Rabbi Moshe was niftar in 5401/1641 he answered the request of the community of Posen and moved there as rav of the city. In 5418/1658 he took the rabbanut of Vienna.

He wrote additions to his grandfather Rabbi Avraham’s Emek Berachah, which first appeared in the Amsterdam edition of 1729, and additions to his father’s siddur, together with tefillot of his own included there, among them a selichah for the twentieth of Sivan. Vavei HaAmudim, his work on mussar, he modestly presented as an introduction to his father’s sefer, with which it is always printed. His ethical will, printed at the end of Yesh Nochalin and often reprinted, holds teachings on tzedakah together with charges to strictness in practice and in the study of kabbalah. He was niftar in Vienna and was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Rossau. His son was Rabbi Yeshayah HaLevi Horowitz the Second, rav of Furth and Frankfurt.