Yitzchak Hutner

Founded in 1904, it was the oldest elementary yeshiva in Brooklyn.

Over the years he built up the yeshiva's post-high school beth midrash division and became Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin's senior rosh yeshiva (dean).

In this effort he also received the help of Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz who headed Brooklyn's Yeshiva Torah Vodaas.

Hutner was able to construct an environment that produced young Talmudic scholars in the model of their compatriots in Eastern Europe.

In 1925, having obtained a solid grounding in Talmud, Hutner joined a group from the Slabodka yeshiva that established the Hebron Yeshiva in Mandatory Palestine.

He then traveled to Mandatory Palestine where he became a student in the Hebron Yeshiva, and narrowly escaped the 1929 Hebron massacre.

After this, Hutner returned to Europe, where he befriended Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Menachem Mendel Schneerson, maintaining friendships with both long after they had all established their own institutions in the United States.

Hutner was the long-time dean of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, New York, an older institution that grew under his leadership.

Hutner's pedagogic style was a blend of the Hasidic and Misnagdic elements of his own family's origins.

His discourses, called ma'amarim, contained elements of a Talmudic discourse, a Hasidic Tish and a philosophic lecture.

Although his title was rosh yeshiva, Hutner's leadership style more closely resembled that of a rebbe who expected fealty from his followers.

In his later years, Hutner established Yeshiva Pachad Yitzchok in Jerusalem, which is named after his own magnum opus.

On one of his trips there, Hutner's plane was seized by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists in the Dawson's Field hijackings, which he survived.

Hutner was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a family with both Ger Hasidic and non-Hasidic Lithuanian Jewish roots.

As a child he received private instruction in Torah and Talmud.

As a teenager he was enrolled in the Slabodka yeshiva in Lithuania, headed by Nosson Tzvi Finkel, where he was known as the "Warsaw Illui" (Genius of Warsaw).

He studied there until 1929, narrowly escaping the 1929 Hebron massacre because he was away for the weekend.

Hutner then returned to Warsaw to visit his parents.

He then moved to Germany, to study philosophy at the University of Berlin.

In 1932, he authored a book called Torat HaNazir.

In 1933, Hutner married Masha Lipshitz in Kobryn.

She was born in Slutsk and raised in the United States.

That same year, the couple traveled to Mandatory Palestine, where they remained for about a year, and completed his research and writing of his Kovetz Ha'aros on Hillel ben Eliakim's commentary on midrash sifra.

In March 1934 Hutner moved to the United States (his wife having preceded him by six months) and settled in Brooklyn, where Hutner joined the faculty of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School.

Sometime between 1935 and 1936 he was appointed office manager of the newly established high school division of the Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin known as Mesivta Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin.

In 1940, after receiving permission from the rosh yeshiva, Yaakov Moshe Shurkin, he began to give a class to the 4th year of the post high school program.

By 1940 he had established a post-high-school beth midrash with hundreds of students.

At Chaim Berlin, students were allowed to combine their yeshiva study with afternoon and evening classes at college, mainly Brooklyn College and later Touro College.

Hutner took great pride in the secular accomplishments of his students insofar as they fit into his vision of a material world governed by the principles of a spiritual Torah way of life.

Thus, many alumni of Hutner's yeshiva have attained success as attorneys, accountants, doctors, and in information technology.

One of his closest disciples, Israel Kirzner, is an economist who edited Hutner's written works, Pachad Yitzchok.

Many of Hutner's disciples earned doctorates, often with his blessing and guidance.

This includes his daughter and only child, Bruria David, who obtained her PhD at Columbia University's department of philosophy as a student of Salo Baron.

She subsequently founded and became the dean of Beth Jacob Jerusalem, a prominent Jewish women's seminary that caters to young women from Haredi families in the United States.

Her dissertation discussed the dual role Zvi Hirsch Chajes as both a traditionalist and maskil (follower of the enlightenment).

The list also includes Ahron Soloveichik (law) rosh yeshiva, Aharon Lichtenstein (literature) rosh yeshiva, Yitzhak Aharon Korff (law, international law and diplomacy), and Yehuda (Leo) Levi (physics) professor and rector.

In the 1950s, Hutner established a kollel (post graduate division for married scholars) to continue their in-depth Talmudical studies.

This school, Kollel Gur Aryeh, was one of the first of its kind in America.

Yitzchak Hutner (יצחק הוטנר; 1906 – November 28, 1980), also known as Isaac Hutner, was an American Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva (dean).

Originally from Warsaw, Hutner first studied the Torah in Slabodka.