יהודה יודל רוזנברג

Rav Yehuda Yudel Rosenberg (1860–26 Tishrei 5696/1935), whose name appears in Yiddish print as Razenberg, was a rav, posek and author in Poland and afterward in Canada. He was born near Radom and grew up in Skaryszew, a son of Yisrael Yitzchak Rosenberg and Maria Gitla Cygielman, and as a boy was already called the illui of Skaryszew. At seventeen he married Chaya Chava, daughter of Shlomo Elimelech of Tarlow and granddaughter of Rav Leibish Zucker, rav of Ostrovtza; after receiving semichah from the leading poskim of the day, among them the Ostrovtzer, he served as rav and dayan in Tarlow — where he became known as Reb Yudel Tarler — and then in Lublin, Warsaw and Lodz.

In 1913 he crossed to Canada and became the spiritual leader of the Beth Jacob Congregation in Toronto, founded in 1899 by Jews of Polish birth. In his nearly six years in the city he founded, on D’Arcy Street, the Eitz Chaim Talmud Torah, housed in a building that had once housed an Italian club. In 1919 he moved to Montreal as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Orthodox Congregations, a body of shuls serving the Ashkenazi immigrant kehillot, and as vice-chairman of the community’s rabbinical council, posts he held until he was niftar there at seventy-five.

In his teshuvot Yechaveh Da’at he broke ground on questions thrown up by the new conditions of his day — kindling and extinguishing electricity on yom tov, on which he corresponded with Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, and mikveh water drawn through municipal piping. He also printed a Hebrew rendering of the Zohar, Zohar Torah on the sidrot of the Chumash, which carried haskamot from leading rabbanim including Rav Chaim Chizkiyahu Medini, and Niflaot HaZohar, stories culled and translated from it.

He published story-books that he ascribed to earlier authors and that were taken up widely: Niflaot Maharal (Piotrkow 5669/1909) on the Golem of Prague, attributed to the Maharal; Tiferet Maharal MiShpoli on the Shpoler Zeide; Refael HaMalach, a collection of segulot and kameot; and a Haggadah with two peirushim ascribed to the Maharal, drawn largely from the Maharal’s own sefarim and printed to this day in sets of his writings. Prof. Shneur Leiman observed that in a list of his works the author himself sorted them by type and placed such books under aggadot am — folk tales — written to give the Jewish youth of Poland Torah reading material, in the manner of Meir Lehmann. His Yadot Nedarim, on the difficult passages of Rashi and the Ran in masechet Nedarim, is learned in the yeshivot to this day as a foundational sefer on that masechet.