Rabbi Shalom Shachna of Lublin רבי שלום שכנא מלובלין
head of the Lublin yeshiva, teacher and father-in-law of the Rema
He studied under Rabbi Yaakov Polak, who brought the way of learning of the Ashkenazi yeshivot to Poland, and himself headed the yeshiva at Lublin—the first great yeshiva of Poland, from which came a generation of rabbis of Cracow, Poznan and Lvov. The king recognised him as rabbi of Lesser Poland.
His chief disciple was the Rema, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, who married his daughter; the Maharshal learned under him too. The Rema wrote of him as his teacher and in the Mapah leaned on his rulings. Rabbi Shalom Shachna himself left no books: his son, Rabbi Yisrael, related that his father forbade his rulings to be written down and printed—"so that a judge after me should judge by his own understanding and not by mine". So it came about: his teaching reached us through his disciples and not through a book.
The sources do not give the year of his birth. He died at Lublin in 1558 and was buried there; his tombstone stood in the old Lublin cemetery.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- The responsa of the Rema, no. 25 — the son's account of the ban on printing the rulings
- The Shem HaGedolim of the Chida — the disciples and the place in the chain of Polish rabbis
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Lublin, the king's recognition, 1558
Basis: documents and evidence.