חיים פישל אפשטיין

Rav Chaim Fishel Epstein (21 Iyar 5634/1874–20 Tammuz 5702/1942) was a Lithuanian-American rav and posek, chief rabbi of Estonia and later of St. Louis, and the author of the responsa Teshuvah Shelemah. Born in Tavrig in the Kovno district to Rav David Shlomo, a melamed descended from the Noda BiYehuda, he learned mostly under his two grandfathers. A child prodigy, he was sent young to the Telshe yeshiva and wrote his first work, Chinuch leNa’ar on the Sefer HaChinuch, at sixteen. At Volozhin the Netziv called him “the great young man from Tavrig,” and at eighteen he was ordained by Rav Chaim Soloveitchik and Rav Shlomo Cohen of Vilna.

He served as rav of Hrozova in the Minsk district, then of Seiny, and during the First World War fled to Dorpat, where refugees had gathered; when Estonia became independent he was named its chief rabbi, and the university there gave him a doctorate. After a term as rav of Libau in Latvia, he emigrated to America in 5683/1923. There he held one post after another — Bayonne, Cleveland, the Orthodox kehillah of Cincinnati, and Beth Sholom in Brooklyn — and from 5690/1930 served twelve years as av beit din and chief rabbi of the United Orthodox Jewish Community of St. Louis.

He was vice-president and then president of the Agudath HaRabbonim of the United States and Canada, and a founder of Mizrachi; throughout his years in Europe and America he worked for the yishuv of Eretz Yisrael, which he held to be a mitzvah of the Torah. His Teshuvah Shelemah, on the four parts of the Shulchan Aruch, appeared in two volumes — the first in Seiny in 5674/1914, the second in St. Louis in 5701/1941 — and took up new questions such as the standing of electricity in halacha; he also published Midrash HaChaim, a volume of derashot. He was niftar of a heart attack at sixty-eight and buried in the Chesed Shel Emeth cemetery; in the year after his passing the Jews of St. Louis founded a yeshiva in his name.