Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried רבי שלמה גנצפריד
author of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch—the most widely read book of law of modern times
Born at Ungvár in 1804—the month is not recorded, so the year is converted with that reservation. Orphaned early, he studied with Rabbi Zvi Hirsh Heller, 'Hershele the Sharp-witted', and followed him to Bonyhád, where he spent nearly ten years in the yeshiva. From 1830 rabbi of Brezovica, from 1849 a dayan in his native Ungvár until his death in 1886.
The Kitzur Shulchan Aruch appeared at Ungvár in 1864. The design is simple: take the Shulchan Aruch with the later commentaries and put it into one book in plain Hebrew—so that a man who has not been through a yeshiva can read it. He wrote it while still occupied with business as well as law, and that can be heard in it.
Abridgement has its price, and it should be said plainly: to fit into one book one must choose between opinions, and he chose the stringent and the Hungarian ones. So the Kitzur is not a smaller Shulchan Aruch but a code with a face of its own.
And still it became the book from which all Eastern Europe learned: editions in Hebrew and in Yiddish, house after house, generation after generation.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, Ungvár 1864 — the code itself: one book in plain Hebrew for the unschooled reader
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Ganzfried, Solomon ben Joseph" — the dates, the teacher, Brezovica and Ungvár, the stringency of the opinions chosen
Basis: documents and evidence.