Rav Gershon Edelstein רבי גרשון אדלשטיין
the rosh yeshiva of Ponevezh who taught there seventy years running
The family fled Soviet Russia in 1934; the father became rabbi of Ramat haSharon and taught his sons himself—that Jewry had no schools yet. In 1944 Gershon entered Rav Kahaneman's newly opened Ponevezh—the fourth student by count—and eight years on was giving a shiur there.
Then came the constancy of which epochs are made: the same hall, the same hour, seventy years. Generations of Israel's Lithuanian world passed through his shiur, and when Rav Shteinman was gone in 2017 and Rav Kanievsky in 2022, the eldership was his.
He led quietly: spoke more of working on one's traits than of wars, and damped the generation's quarrels rather than fanning them. He died in Iyar 5785, a year short of his hundred and first.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Rav Edelstein's shiurim and talks, the Ponevezh records — seventy years of the shiur; the leadership after 2022
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Shklov, Ramat haSharon, Bnei Brak; 1923–2025
Basis: Talmud and midrash.