Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman—the Ponevezher Rav הרב יוסף שלמה כהנמן — הרב מפוניבז'

A Lithuanian town, the year 5646; his schooling was Telz—Rabbi Eliezer Gordon and Rabbi Shimon Shkop—half a year of Novardok and three years of Radin, under the Chofetz Chaim and Rabbi Naftali Trop. From 5679 he was rabbi of Ponevezh, where he built three yeshivot, a school and an orphanage.

The war. It caught him on a journey to the Land of Israel. He could not return: Lithuania was occupied, and then the Germans came. The community of Ponevezh was murdered, the yeshivot destroyed, the students killed. He was left holding the name of a town that no longer existed.

The hill in Bnei Brak. In 5704 he began to build the yeshiva again—on an empty hill, in the middle of the war, when European Jewry was all but gone. They tell of him that when asked where the students would come from he answered briefly: they will come. The Ponevezh yeshiva became one of the largest in the world, and a whole Kiryat ha-Yeshiva grew up around it.

The orphans. He gathered children—those brought out through Tehran, those who had survived in Europe—and set up for them the Batei Avot, "fathers' houses": not orphanages but families. He gave this no less of himself than the yeshiva, and said that one without the other was worth nothing.

He died in 5729 in Bnei Brak.