הרב שמואל אליעזר הלוי איידלס

Rav Shmuel Eliezer HaLevi Eidels (5315/1555–5 Kislev 5392/1631), the Maharsha, known in English sources as Samuel Edels, is one of the pillars of Gemara learning: his Chiddushei Halachot is printed in nearly every edition of the Shas. He was born in Kazimierz in the kingdom of Poland to Rav Yehuda HaLevi, a descendant of Rav Yehuda HaChasid, and to Gitel, of the family of the Maharal of Prague; one tradition holds that his father and the father of the Taz were brothers. An illui from childhood, he married the daughter of Eidel Lifschitz of Posen, widow of Rav Moshe Lifschitz, the rav of Brisk — and it was this mother-in-law who carried him and his yeshiva in Posen on her own means for more than twenty years, seeing to the needs of every bachur. In thanks he took her name, and is called for all generations Eidels — “of Eidel.”

After her passing in 5368/1608 he took up the rabbanut of Chelm, and afterward served in Lublin, in Tiktin, and finally in Ostroh, where he founded a yeshiva. He sat in the Vaad Arba Aratzot at Jaroslaw and signed its takanah against the buying of rabbinic office for money. On the door of his house was written the words of Iyov, “my doors I opened to the traveler,” and beside his chesed he wrote kinot for Jews killed through a libel.

He wrote two chibburim spanning the Shas: the Chiddushei Halachot, on the sugya with Rashi and above all with Tosafot — the saying goes that one who has understood the Maharsha has understood Tosafot — and the Chiddushei Aggadot on the aggadot of Chazal, drawing on a wide command of machshavah and Kabbalah. He asked that the two be printed as one, and so they stand in the printed Shas, interwoven page by page with the aggadah set in smaller type; his son-in-law, Rav Moshe ben Yitzchak Bonems of Lublin, arranged the Mahadura Batra with additions of his own. The Chazon Ish in his igrot directs that Maharsha be learned as a main part of the seder, and Rav Ezra Attieh fixed in Yeshivat Porat Yosef that the whole Maharsha be learned immediately after Tosafot; in Yiddish, “a shverer Maharsha” simply means a hard sugya. The Maharsha was niftar on 5 Kislev 5392/1631 in Ostroh and was buried there, and the city’s great shul bore his name for generations — the Maharsha Shul.