יוסף יוזל הורוביץ

Rav Yosef Yozel Horowitz (5607/1847–17 Kislev 5680/1919), the Alter of Novardok, was among the great spreaders of the mussar movement, a talmid of Rav Yisrael Salanter, and the founder of the Novardok yeshivot. He was born in Plungyan, Lithuania, where his father, Rav Shlomo Zalman Horowitz, was rav; he learned in Kelm while still young, and at sixteen was already saying the shiur in the shul of Kurtuvian. At eighteen he married the daughter of Rav Yaakov Stein of Shvekshna; his father-in-law passed away just before the wedding, and the young chatan took upon himself the business and the support of the almanah and her eight children.

His trade brought him often to Memel, and there, at twenty-seven, he met Rav Yisrael Salanter, then rav of the city. After sitting before him he closed the business and gave himself wholly to Torah and mussar in Kovno, in the Kollel Perushim of Rav Yisrael’s talmidim, Rav Yitzchak Blazer and Rav Naftali Amsterdam. When his wife passed away in childbirth, he placed the children with relatives and shut himself away in a room near Kovno for more than a year and a half, the doorway bricked shut except for two small windows — through one he was passed milchig meals, through the other fleishig. Forced at last out of that seclusion, he remarried on condition that he might continue in hitbodedut, coming home for Shabbat and Yom Tov, and for twelve years a retreat built for him in the forests near Zetl served his avodah.

It was the Alter of Kelm, Rav Simcha Zissel Ziv, who persuaded him that the hour demanded not seclusion but building. He went out and founded kollelim and batei midrash in some twenty towns — Dvinsk, Minsk, Warsaw, Berdichev, Lida, Zetl — and in 5656/1896 the yeshiva in Novardok itself, mother of the “Beit Yosef” network that at its height counted some four thousand talmidim. His torah of mussar stood on bitachon — he would sign himself “B.B.,” Baal Bitachon — and his maamarim were printed in Madregat HaAdam.

In the First World War he moved the yeshiva to Homel (5675/1915) and then onward to Kiev. In the pogroms of Succot 5680/1919 he had his talmidim dance the hakafot as usual while rioters fired at the windows; everyone dropped to the floor except the Alter, who remained standing at the head of the table, kos in hand. In the typhus epidemic that followed, his house filled with the sick, whom he tended with his own hands until he took the disease himself; he was niftar in Kiev on 17 Kislev 5680/1919, and his son-in-law and main successor, Rav Avraham Yoffen, carried Novardok onward in Bialystok. In the summer of 5723/1963 his talmidim brought his aron to Yerushalayim, and he rests on Har HaMenuchot; the Gateshead yeshiva carries the official name “Yeshivas Beis Yosef” to this day, and Novardokers still gather every 17 Kislev, the day of his petirah, to strengthen one another.