יצחק בלאזר

Rav Yitzchak Blazer (1 Adar 5597/1837–11 Av 5667/1907), known to all as Rav Itzele Peterburger, was among the first leaders of the mussar movement and among the greatest talmidim of Rav Yisrael Salanter. He was born in Shnipishok, at the edge of Vilna; at fourteen his father printed a kuntres of his sharp chiddushim on masechet Bava Kamma, and in those years he learned together with Rav Naftali Amsterdam. At fifteen he married and moved to Kovno, entering the beit midrash of Rav Yisrael Salanter, who took him under his personal care. He wished to live from the work of his hands and learned the dyer’s trade, but his rebbe forbade him the trade and set him toward rabbanut.

In 5622/1862, at twenty-five, he was received as rav of Petersburg, the capital of Russia, and carried the position sixteen years, building the kehillah and the life of Torah in a city that was then the center of the haskalah in Russia. There he wrote his Pri Yitzchak, teshuvot in halachah; in its introduction he wrote that having no children, he called the sefer his fruit, to leave a remembrance after him. At fifty his wife insisted, against his will and through a din Torah, that they divorce so that he might yet father children; he married again and was given a son, Shlomo, and three daughters, and all the while watched over the needs of his first wife. Back in Kovno he lived from a tavern his wife managed, taught in the batei mussar his rebbe had founded, and from 5640/1880 stood about a decade at the head of the Kovno Kollel, which under his hand was a fortress of the mussar movement. He printed his rebbe’s letters, with maamarim of his own on mussar and teshuvah and on his rebbe’s life, in Or Yisrael, and wrote also Kochvei Or.

When the great machloket against the mussar derech broke out, he laid down his official posts and gave himself to spreading mussar privately, traveling among the yeshivot of Kelm, Slabodka, and Novardok to guide their talmidim and helping Rav Yosef Yozel Horowitz, the Alter of Novardok, in founding the Novardok yeshivot. After the petirah of the Alter of Kelm in 5658/1898 he became the spiritual father of the Kelm yeshiva. In 5664/1904 he went up to Yerushalayim, where he met again the friends of his youth, refused all support, and in his old age earned his bread in the offices of the Vaad HaKlali, laboring beside Rav Shmuel Salant in communal and tzedakah work. He was niftar on 11 Av 5667/1907 and was buried on Har HaZeitim at the right hand of the Aderet; a street in the Beit Yisrael neighborhood of Yerushalayim carries his name.