Rabbi Eliezer Gordon רבי אליעזר גורדון
head of the Telz yeshiva; he died in London raising money to rebuild it
He studied under Rabbi Yisrael Salanter in the Kovno kollel; Salanter saw his quality early and set him to give a shiur.
In 5643 he took the rabbinate of Telz, and from 5644 headed its yeshiva—and led it until his death. Under him Telz became one of the three or four places to which men came to learn from all over Lithuania, and it had a method of analysis of its own.
How he died. In 5668 the yeshiva burned down. He went to London to raise the money to rebuild it. The doctors warned him: his heart had already failed once, and an English winter was against him. He went, and died there of a heart attack with the collection unfinished.
Sources give his year of birth as 1840 or 1841, and do not give the month of his death at all; the years here are therefore marked as approximate.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Responsa of Rabbi Eliezer Gordon — his halakhic responsa
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Gordon, Eliezer” — the years, the rabbinate and yeshiva in Telz, the death in London
Basis: documents and evidence.