הרב גרשון אדלשטיין

Rav Yerachmiel Gershon Edelstein (2 Iyar 5683/1923–10 Sivan 5783/2023) was the rosh yeshiva of Ponevezh, president of the Vaad HaYeshivot and of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of Degel HaTorah, and in his last years the leader of the Litvish Torah world. He was born in Shumyachi, near Smolensk in Soviet Russia, to Rav Tzvi Yehuda Edelstein, the town’s rav — son of Rav Yerachmiel Gershon, author of the Ben Aryeh on Shas — and to Miriam, daughter of Rav Mordechai Shlomo Movshovitz. His mother obtained falsified birth papers marking her sons three years younger, to keep them out of the schools of the Yevsektsiya, and the boy learned Torah in hiding with Chabad chasidim; his mother passed away of typhus while he and his younger brother Yaakov were sheltering with an aunt in Klimovich.

In Nisan 5694/1934 his father obtained an exit permit with the help of Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, and on Lag B’Omer the family reached Eretz Yisrael by ship from Odessa. They settled in Ramat HaSharon, where the father became rav of the town; as there was no religious school, he taught his sons himself at a table of orange crates — Gemara with the Rosh and the Rif, on some masechtot Tur and Beit Yosef, and Rambam on Shabbat. In Elul 5702 the brothers walked to the Lomza yeshiva in Petach Tikvah and joined the chaburah of Rav Shmuel Rozovsky, and in the winter of 5704, when Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman founded the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, they were among its first six talmidim — lodging in the single bedroom that Rav Michel Yehuda Lefkowitz rented out to the yeshiva.

Rav Kahaneman set him first over the orphaned survivors of the churban of Europe at “Batei Avot,” and from 5706/1946 over shiurim in the yeshiva itself; in 5708/1948 he married Henya Rachel, daughter of Rav Yehoshua Zelig Diskin, rav of Pardes Chana, and was appointed a ram. He was close to the Chazon Ish. For close to eighty years he taught in Ponevezh: from Iyar 5760/2000 he carried the shiur klali as rosh yeshiva alongside Rav Baruch Dov Povarsky, and he served as the yeshiva’s baal tokeah from 5706 until the last Rosh Hashanah of his life. From the passing of Rav Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman in 5778/2017 he led the Litvish community together with Rav Chaim Kanievsky, and from 5782/2022, alone. In chinuch his voice never varied: only b’darchei noam — with kindness, without coercion — and those who left observance are to be drawn close within the family with honor and friendship, as tinokot shenishbu.

His shiurim are learned in Shiurei Rabbi Gershon on the masechtot of the yeshiva, and his weekly words of chizuk in Darchei HaChizuk. He was niftar on 10 Sivan 5783/2023 at the age of one hundred; some 200,000 accompanied him from the heichal of Ponevezh to the yeshiva’s beit hachaim in Bnei Brak, and the shofar of Ponevezh passed to his son, Rav Yisrael Edelstein.