Rav Avraham Yaffen רב אברהם יפה'ן
head of the Beit Yosef Novardok network after the Alter; he carried it into Poland and then to America
Born near Pinsk, he learned in Slabodka and in Kovno, and at twenty came to the Alter of Novardok, becoming his student and his son-in-law. When the Alter died in 1919, the Beit Yosef network was left in his hands.
The Soviet authorities arrested him in 1921; on his release he moved the network to Poland and led it from Bialystok. By the late thirties Novardok yeshivot stood across the country, and their measure was the old severe one: to break in oneself whatever keeps a man from acting by the truth. The war left nothing of it.
He got out to America and in 1941 opened the Beit Yosef yeshiva in Brooklyn—from the beginning again, with a handful of students, as his father-in-law once had. In 1962 he founded a Novardok kollel in Jerusalem as well. His books are Derech Eitan on the Talmud and HaMussar veHaDaas. He died in Jerusalem in Nisan 1970.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Derech Eitan and HaMussar veHaDaas by Rav Avraham Yaffen — his teaching and the musar of Novardok
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years (sources give 1886 or 1887—we set 1887), Slabodka, the Beit Yosef network, Bialystok, Brooklyn from 1941
Basis: documents and evidence.