THE BALTIMORE JEWISH HOME
AUGUST 13, 2020
18
The Week In News
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, z”l
Rabbi Adin Even Yisrael Steinsaltz, world-famous Talmudist, religious leader, and writer, passed away on Friday at the age of 83. Steinsaltz had been battling a slew of different ailments ever since suffering a stroke in 2016. He was buried shortly before Shabbat on Har Hazeisim in Jerusalem. Born in 1937 to a secular communist family in Jerusalem, Rabbi Steinsaltz became frum while in high
school and became Chabad. Later, he went on to become a noted educator and social critic, authoring more than 60 books on an assortment of different topics. Rabbi Steinsaltz is famous for becoming Israel’s youngest-ever principal at the age of 24 and later founded the Religious Zionist Makor Hayim high school along with the first yeshiva in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, his lifetime work was indisputably the 41-volume translation of the Talmud into modern Hebrew, a project that he dedicated four decades to before completing it in 2010. The feat made him a household name in yeshivot across the world and led Time magazine to crown him “a once in a lifetime scholar.” Rabbi Steinsaltz later said that he began the effort to translate the Jewish text from its original Aramaic into easy-to-read Hebrew in order to make it more accessible to the Jewish people. He had received immense opposition from the charedi world for bucking tradition, with the late Rabbi Elazar Shach, zt”l, banning his work
completely. However, his translation was endorsed by other leading scholars of the day, including Reb Moshe Feinstein, Hacham Ovadiah Yosef, and the Grand Rebbe of Gur. Despite the pushback, Rabbi Steinsaltz maintained that budding Torah scholars wasted years attempting to simply read the Talmud instead of understanding what it said. “My translation not only doesn’t reduce the Gemara, but rather in a certain sense it allows for greater in-depth [study] and advancement,” Rabbi Steinsaltz told the Israeli Yediot Aharonot daily in 2010. “In the end, my explanations primarily try to resolve the technical problems: the language difficulties, the associative problems, the problems that stem from the fact that the Talmud is not an organized text with a gradual build-up… Unfortunately, many times the traditional [method of] study dedicates so much time to overcoming the technical problems that, in practice, there is not much time left for in-depth and innovative [study].” Rabbi Steinsaltz was awarded the Israel Prize, Israel’s highest civilian
honor, in 2012 for his efforts, along with the President’s Medal the same year and was designated a “Yakir Yerushalayim” in 2017.
Infamous Terrorist Nabbed
The Shin Bet internal security agency announced that it had arrested the terrorist responsible for killing Major Eliraz Peretz a decade ago on the Gaza border. The Shin Bet had arrested Abdullah Daghmah, 38, in July after he tried to enter Israel at the Erez Crossing in order to donate bone marrow to his brother. During the interrogation, he
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