Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel—rosh yeshiva of the Mir in Jerusalem רב נתן צבי פינקל — ראש ישיבת מיר בירושלים

Not to be confused with the Alter of Slabodka: he bore the same name and was kin to this family, but lived a century earlier.

Born in Chicago in 1943, he grew up in an ordinary American family and came to Jerusalem at seventeen—to learn in the Mir under his great-uncle, Rav Eliezer Yehuda Finkel. He stayed. In 1990, thirty years after his arrival, on the death of his father-in-law Rav Beinish Finkel, he took the yeshiva, and led it for twenty-two years.

Under him the Mir grew from a large yeshiva into the largest in the world: by the end of his life several thousand men learned there, from every country where Jews live—Russian-speakers among them. At the same time Parkinson's disease ran in him for many years: he could barely speak or hold himself, yet he did not stop his lessons, and in that men saw more than in any lesson.

He died on 11 Cheshvan 2011; some hundred thousand people came to the funeral in Jerusalem. He wrote no books; what appears under his name was gathered by students after him.