Rav Mordechai Gifter רב מרדכי גיפטר
head of Telz in Cleveland—a Lithuanian yeshiva on American soil
He was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, studied in New York under Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik—and in 1932, at seventeen, went to Lithuania, to Telz. An American youth in a Lithuanian yeshiva was a rarity; he learned so well that Rav Avraham Yitzchak Bloch, head of the yeshiva, gave him his niece in marriage.
In 1939 he returned to America—a year before Telz ceased to exist: in 1941 his teachers and companions were murdered with the community. Two surviving heads of the yeshiva, Rav Eliyahu Meir Bloch and Rav Chaim Mordechai Katz, opened Telz anew in Cleveland; Rav Gifter joined them and after their deaths led the yeshiva—for almost forty years.
He was among those who carried the Lithuanian training across the ocean whole: the Telz manner of analysis, the Telz order of the day, the exactingness about words. And he was a preacher—his Pirkei Torah and his talks are read in yeshivot that know Lithuania only from books.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Pirkei Torah of Rav Mordechai Gifter — his teaching and his voice
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years 1915-2001, Telz in Lithuania from 1932, Telz in Cleveland
Basis: documents and evidence.