הרב יוסף שלמה כהנמן

Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman (5648/1888–20 Elul 5729/1969), the Ponevezher Rav, was the builder of Torah whose name is carried by one of the largest yeshivot in the world. Born in the small Lithuanian town of Kul, he learned in Telz under Rav Eliezer Gordon and Rav Shimon Shkop, then in Novardok — where Rav Yechiel Michel Epstein, author of the Aruch HaShulchan, gave him semicha in the last months of his life — and for three years in Radin under the Chofetz Chaim and Rav Naftoli Trop. He married the daughter of Rav Aryeh Leib Rubin, rav of Vidzh, and succeeded his father-in-law there; in 1916 he headed the yeshiva of Grodno, and in 1919 became rav of Ponevezh.

In Ponevezh he built with both hands — a yeshiva, a school, an orphanage — and served the broader community as a member of the Lithuanian parliament for Agudat Yisrael. The outbreak of the war caught him abroad; he reached Eretz Yisrael in 1940, and from there watched the churban take everything: the yeshiva destroyed, its talmidim murdered, and his own wife and children among the kedoshim — only his eldest son, already in Eretz Yisrael, survived.

From that loss he built. In 1944 he founded Yeshivat Ponevezh anew on a hill in Bnei Brak, in the name of his destroyed kehillah, bringing Rav Shmuel Rozovsky, and in time Rav Dovid Povarsky and Rav Elazar Menachem Shach, to stand at its head. Around it he raised the Batei Avot orphanages for the children of the churban — fighting fiercely in the affair of the Yaldei Tehran that orphans of murdered religious parents be raised as their parents would have wished — along with Kiryat Ponevezh in Ashdod and other institutions, traveling the world tirelessly to sustain them. He served on the Moetzet Gedolei HaTorah, and his Torah was gathered after his passing in the volumes Divrei HaRav. He was niftar on 20 Elul 5729 (1969) and rests on the yeshiva’s hill in Bnei Brak, opposite the Chazon Ish; some forty thousand accompanied him.