הרב משה פיינשטיין

Rav Moshe Feinstein (7 Adar 5655/1895–13 Adar II 5746/1986) — Reb Moshe — was the posek hador of the generation after the churban of Europe: the address to which the halachic questions of a transformed world were carried, from every corner of the Torah world, for half a century. He was born in Uzda, near Minsk, on 7 Adar — the day of Moshe Rabbeinu’s birth and passing — and was named for him. His father, Rav Dovid, the town’s rav, was a descendant of the family of the Vilna Gaon‘s brother; his mother’s line carried the yichus of the Shelah HaKadosh.

It is told that by ten he was fluent in the three Bavot (kamma, metziah, batra). Before his bar mitzvah he was sent to learn in Slutsk, in the yeshiva of Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, and he became the foremost talmid of the mashgiach Rav Pesach Pruskin, following him to his yeshiva in Shklov; his semicha came from his father and from Rav Pruskin. After his father’s passing he became rav of Uzda, and from 5681/1921 rav of Luban — sixteen years of rabbanut under Soviet rule, holding a kehillah to Torah and mitzvot under a regime bent on erasing them, at constant personal risk. In 5682 he married Shima Kustanovich, and in Shevat 5697 the family finally left the Soviet Union for America.

He settled on the Lower East Side of New York, and for nearly fifty years stood at the head of Mesivtha Tiferes Jerusalem. From that narrow building his Torah reached everywhere: he served as president of the Agudat HaRabbanim of the United States and Canada, as head of Ezras Torah, and from the 1960s until his passing as chairman of the Moetzet Gedolei HaTorah of Agudas Yisrael of America — but his authority never rested on office. It rested on some two thousand teshuvot, written in a clear, fearless hand, gathered in the Igrot Moshe — seven volumes printed in his lifetime, from 5719/1959 on, with further volumes after his passing.

The questions of the century passed across his desk, and his rulings shaped the daily life of American Jewry. He permitted government-supervised milk in America — the heter behind what the world calls chalav stam — holding the government’s oversight to satisfy the halachah’s requirement (see Igrot Moshe, Yoreh Deah I:47–49). He fixed the halachic parameters of the shul mechitzah, ruling on its required height while resisting demands to require more than the din (see Orach Chaim I:39). He held marriages performed by Reform clergy or civil authorities not to create kiddushin — a ruling of immense consequence, sparing countless children the shadow of mamzerut. He answered the new questions of medicine: opposing the early heart transplants when they could not succeed (see Yoreh Deah II:174), forbidding abortion as bloodshed except to save the mother’s life (see Choshen Mishpat II:69), and weighing the treatment of the dying with a sensitivity that founded the field now called halachic medical ethics — consulting physicians and scientists, among them his son-in-law Rav Moshe Dovid Tendler. Some of his heterim — artificial insemination among them — drew fierce opposition in parts of the chassidic world; even his opponents called him a gadol in psak. Of his adopted land he wrote that America is a malchut shel chessed, “a kingdom of kindness whose whole purpose is to benefit all the inhabitants of the land” — in a teshuvah warning mosdot haTorah never to take from the government beyond what its law allows.

In the introduction to his teshuvot he set out his derech: to rule from the depth of the sugya itself, from the Gemara and the rishonim, rather than from the accumulation of later opinion — joined to a rare readiness to carry responsibility. Beside the Igrot Moshe stands the crown of his lomdut, the Dibrot Moshe, volumes of shiurim across Shas said at Tifereth Jerusalem; his Torah on Chumash and the moadim in Darash Moshe and Kol Ram; and the rulings his grandson gathered from his daily conduct in Mesorat Moshe. His earliest writings, including a commentary on the Talmud Yerushalmi, were lost in Soviet Russia.

He was niftar on the night of 13 Adar II 5746 (1986). Tens of thousands filled the streets of New York on Taanit Esther to accompany him; in Yerushalayim, on Shushan Purim, between two hundred and two hundred fifty thousand Jews — one of the largest levayot the city had ever seen — brought him to Har HaMenuchot, where he rests near his rebbe, Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer. His sons Rav Dovid and Rav Reuven continued his yeshivot, and his teshuvot are opened wherever a posek sits down to answer a hard question — the surest sign that Reb Moshe’s shoulders still carry a generation.