Pnei Yehoshua—Rabbi Yaakov Yehoshua Falk רבי יעקב יהושע פאלק

Born at Cracow in 1680; great-grandson of Rabbi Yehoshua Heshel, author of Maginei Shlomo. He held the seats of Lvov, Berlin, Metz and Frankfurt—a road across half of Europe.

On 3 Kislev 5463 (1702) a powder cellar blew up in Lvov: houses came down and thirty-six people were killed. Among them were his wife, his young daughter and his wife's kin. He himself, at twenty-two, was left under the rubble of his own house, and there he vowed that if he came out alive he would not leave the walls of the beit midrash and would write his own analysis of the Talmud. He tells of it in the introduction to the book, first printed at Amsterdam in 5499 (1739).

The Pnei Yehoshua is novellae on the Talmud still learned in every yeshiva: he takes up the questions of the Tosafot against Rashi and answers them anew. In the Emden–Eybeschutz dispute he stood against Eybeschutz—and in 1750 had to leave Frankfurt. Not to be confused with his namesake: Rabbi Yehoshua Falk, author of the Sema, lived a century earlier and stands separately on this ribbon.