Rav Yosef Yozel Horowitz—the Alter of Novardok רב יוסף יוזל הורוביץ — הסבא מנובהרדוק

He traded, and traded well, until in Kovno he met Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. After that he left business, spent several years learning in seclusion—and came out with a clear plan. In 1896 he opened a yeshiva in Novardok, then began sending students out to open new ones: by the World War the Beit Yosef network numbered dozens of yeshivot across the Pale of Settlement.

Of the three schools of musar—Slabodka, Kelm, Novardok—his was the most severe. Slabodka spoke to the student of his greatness, Kelm of order and attention; Novardok demanded that he break his self-regard, his shame before people, his fear of poverty—everything that keeps a man from acting by the truth. Students were sent on "exercises": asking for nails at the pharmacy, going about in rags—to stop depending on what people say. His book Madregat HaAdam, "The Level of Man," is about this.

In the revolutionary years he moved with his students to Kiev, where he nursed typhus patients in the yeshiva, caught the disease and died in Kislev 1919. His students—Rav Avraham Yaffen, his son-in-law, and others—moved the network to Poland; it stood until the Holocaust, and after it Novardok yeshivot opened in France and in the Land of Israel.