Rav Shimshon Pincus רב שמשון פינקוס
rabbi of Ofakim; Shaarei Tefillah—a book on what it is to pray
He was born in America, studied in Brisk under Rav Berel Soloveitchik and in Israel, and could have stayed in any of the great yeshivot. Instead, in 1981 he took the rabbinate of Ofakim—a poor small town in the Negev—and stayed twenty years, because he held that a rabbi is needed where there is none.
From Ofakim he travelled the country giving lessons, and his lessons filled halls. His chief theme was prayer: not as a duty but as a conversation with its own laws, like any conversation between people who are close. Shaarei Tefillah—Gates of Prayer—is the book about this, and it became one of the most read Hebrew books on prayer of the last fifty years. His talks later appeared in many volumes under the common title Tiferet Shimshon.
In Nisan 2001 he was killed in a road accident together with his wife Chana and daughter Miriam, returning from a lesson. He was fifty-seven.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Shaarei Tefillah and Tiferet Shimshon of Rav Shimshon Pincus — his teaching on prayer
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years 1944-2001; Ofakim from 1981; his death in Nisan 2001
Basis: documents and evidence.