Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg
Personal
Born	Judka Rozenberg (1860-12-24)24 December 1860 Gębarzów, Poland
Died	23 October 1935(1935-10-23) (aged 74) Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Religion	Judaism

Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg (Yiddish: יהודה יודל ראזענבערג, Hebrew: יהודה יודל רוזנברג; 24 December 1860 – 23 October 1935) was a rabbi, author, and Jewish communal leader in Poland and Canada. He is best known for his Hebrew translation of the Zohar, and for popularizing the tale of the Golem of Prague.^[1]

Biography

Rosenberg was born Judka Rozenberg on 24 December 1860 in Gębarzów, Poland (near Radom), the son of Maria Gitla (née Cygielman) and Izrael Icek Rozenberg.^[2] He grew up in the nearby town of Skaryszew, Poland. As a young boy, he was known as "the Illui of Skaraschev".^[3]

At age 17, he married Chaya Chava, the daughter of Shlomo Elimelech of Tarlow, granddaughter of the Otrovtzer Rav, Rabbi Liebish Zucker. After receiving his rabbinic designation from such great rabbinical authorities of the time as the Ostrovtzer Rebbe, he served as rabbi in Tarlow (and thus became known in Poland as Rebbe Yudel Tarler), Lublin, Warsaw, and Lodz.^[1]

In 1913, Rosenberg immigrated to Canada, where he became the spiritual leader of Toronto's Beth Jacob Congregation, which was founded in 1899 by a group of Polish-born Jews.^[4] During his close to six years in the city, Rosenberg founded the Eitz Chaim Talmud Torah on D'Arcy Street, in a building which once was an Italian club. He moved to Montreal in 1919,^[5] where he became the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Orthodox Congregations, a group of synagogues serving immigrant Ashkenazi communities, and vice-chairman of the Jewish Community's Rabbinic Council, which he served as until his death in Montreal at age seventy-five on October 23, 1935.^[6]

Among Rosenberg's notable descendants are Shlomo-Yisrael Ben-Meir, Meir Yehoshua Magnes, Mordecai Richler and Rabbi Michael Rosensweig.^[7]

Work

Rabbi Rosenberg was a prolific author. Besides numerous halakhic works, his writing ranged from an anthology of the sciences (Sefer ha-Berit), which was a source of scientific knowledge for Jews unfamiliar with European languages,^[8] to a Hebrew translation of the Zohar, which he hoped would revive interest in Kabbalah.^[9]

He is perhaps most famous for his stories about the Golem of Prague, which he attributed to the Maharal of Prague, published in Hebrew as Niflaʼot Maharal (1909).^[10] Rosenberg himself later translated the Hebrew text into a rather different Yiddish version, also available in English translation.^[11] Rosenberg's text claims to be an edition of a three-hundred-year-old manuscript found in an imperial library in Metz, but recent scholarship recognises the text as a work of fiction by Rosenberg.^[12][13]

References