הרב אלעזר מנחם מן שך

Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach (19 Tevet 5659/1899–16 Cheshvan 5762/2001) was rosh yeshiva of Ponevezh in Bnei Brak and, for some three decades, the leader of the Litvishe Torah world in Eretz Yisrael and beyond. He was born in the small town of Vabolnik in Lithuania to Ezriel Shach, a grain merchant, and Basheva of the rabbinic Levitan family. At ten he went to learn in the yeshiva in Ponevezh under Rav Yitzchak Yaakov Rabinowitz, and in 5673/1913 to the great yeshiva of Slabodka, where his place in the beit medrash stood beside that of the Alter of Slabodka, Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, whom he came to regard as his rebbe, and where he heard the shiurim of Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein.

The First World War scattered the yeshiva, and after a stretch back home he traveled in 5675/1915, at the counsel of Rav Yechezkel Bernstein, the Divrei Yechezkel, to the yeshiva of Slutsk. He learned there in bitter want — hunger, a single shirt to his name — until the rosh yeshiva, Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, took him into his own home, gave him a corner to learn and sleep in, and set him to teach a group of bachurim; from Rav Isser Zalman he later received semicha. He became a maggid shiur in Slutsk, fled with Rav Isser Zalman to Kletsk when the Communist authorities closed in, and in 5684/1923 married Gutel Gilmovsky, Rav Isser Zalman’s niece, with the rosh yeshiva himself as shadchan. In the years that followed he headed the yeshiva of Novardok and then, from 5695/1935, the Karlin yeshiva Beit Yisrael in Luninets, where he served until the eve of the Second World War. In 5700 he was in Vilna, close to Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski; offered emigration papers to America, he consulted Rav Chaim Ozer and Rav Yitzchak Zev Soloveitchik and chose Eretz Yisrael instead, arriving in the winter of 5701 (January 1941) and settling first in the Yerushalayim home of Rav Isser Zalman.

In Eretz Yisrael he taught at the Novardok yeshiva Beit Yosef in Yerushalayim at the direction of the Chazon Ish, then delivered the main shiur at the Lomzha yeshiva in Petach Tikva, and afterward taught at the Kletsk yeshiva in Rechovot. In 5712/1952 Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the Ponevezher Rav, invited him to head the rebuilt Ponevezh yeshiva in Bnei Brak alongside Rav Shmuel Rozovsky and Rav Dovid Povarsky — a position he carried for fifty years, to the end of his life. His shiurim and chiddushim are gathered in his sefer Avi Ezri.

From the early 1970s Rav Shach was accepted across the Litvishe world, and far beyond it, as the gadol hador. He stood at the head of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, chaired Chinuch Atzmai and the Vaad HaYeshivot, joined Rav Ovadia Yosef in founding the Shas movement in 5744/1984, and in 5749/1988 founded the Degel HaTorah party of the Litvishe community, along with the newspaper Yated Ne’eman and the Sheiris Yisrael kashrut system. He initiated the founding of many yeshivot in Eretz Yisrael and stood as their nasi and patron. When he was niftar on 16 Cheshvan 5762 (2 November 2001), at nearly a hundred and three years of age, he had taught Torah for some seventy-five years in the yeshivot of Lithuania and Eretz Yisrael.