The Hafla'ah—Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz רבי פנחס הלוי הורוביץ — ההפלאה

He was born in Czortkow in 1731, in a house where Torah was studied the old way. Together with his brother, Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg, he came to the Maggid of Mezeritch—and both left him as chasidim who took great rabbinical seats outside the chasidic world: the brother in Moravia, he in Frankfurt.

Frankfurt. From 1772 until his death—rabbi of Frankfurt am Main. The community was old, learned and cold to Chasidut; he held it by Talmud, not by the chasidic word, and held it firmly. In his yeshiva studied the young Moshe Sofer—the future Chatam Sofer, who all his life called him his teacher and took from him both his way of study and his firmness.

Books. The Hafla'ah on tractate Ketubot—by it he is named; Panim Yafot on the Torah; Sefer HaMikneh on Kiddushin. These are the books of a scholar, not a preacher, and they are read in yeshivot without anyone asking whether the author was a chasid.

In the dispute over the Haskalah, when in 1782 Naphtali Herz Wessely called for the Jewish school to be changed, Rabbi Pinchas spoke against it from the pulpit—one of the first rabbinical speeches against the Enlightenment.

He died on 4 Tammuz 1805 in Frankfurt.