Eliezer Waldenberg

Eliezer Yehuda Waldenberg (הרב אליעזר יהודה וולדנברג; December 10, 1915 – November 21, 2006) was a rabbi, posek, and dayan in Jerusalem.

He is known as a leading authority on medicine and Jewish law and referred to as the Tzitz Eliezer after his 21-volume halachic treatise covering a wide breadth of halacha, including Jewish medical ethics, and daily ritual issues from Shabbat to kashrut.

Waldenberg was born in Jerusalem in 1915 to Rabbi Yaakov Gedalya who immigrated from Kovno, Lithuania to pre-Mandatory Palestine in the early 1900s.

He studied in the Etz Chaim Yeshiva and was a student of the rosh yeshiva, Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer.

Waldenberg wrote his first book, Dvar Eliezer, at age 19 in 1934.

For many years, Waldenberg served as a community rabbi at a small synagogue on Jaffa Road adjacent to the Shaare Tzedek Hospital.

Many doctors prayed at the synagogue and brought their questions to the rabbi.

Waldenberg began to answer their questions about Jewish law and its application to medical ethics, and would come to teach a weekly medical ethics class to the hospital's doctors and nurses.

He was close to Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Hai Uziel, and was the head of the Shaarei Zion Yeshiva, founded by him.

In 1957, Waldenberg became president of the District Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem,.

He was later appointed to the Beit Din Hagadol in Jerusalem where he sat with Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv.

In 1976, Waldenberg was awarded the Israel Prize for Rabbinical studies.

Waldenberg died on 21 November 2006 at Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and was buried later the same day at Jerusalem's Har HaMenuchot cemetery.

His major work Tzitz Eliezer is an encyclopedic treatise on halachic questions, viewed as one of the great achievements of halachic scholarship of the 20th century.

Though he wrote numerous books and articles in all fields of halacha, he was best known for his decisions on medical dilemmas.

He addresses in his volumes complex medical questions including fertility, abortion, organ transplantation, euthanasia, sex reassignment surgery, autopsies, smoking, cosmetic surgery, and medical experimentation.

His halachic opinions are valued by rabbis across the religious spectrum.

Waldenberg forbade performing elective surgery on someone who is neither sick nor in pain, such as cosmetic surgery.

He argues that such activities are outside the boundaries of the physician's mandate to heal.

Notably, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein disagreed with this opinion.

He allowed first trimester abortion of a fetus which would be born with a deformity that would cause it to suffer, and termination of a fetus with a lethal fetal defect such as Tay–Sachs disease up to the end of the second trimester of gestation.

He ruled that a child conceived outside the womb, through in vitro fertilization, has no parents and bears no halachic relationship either to the biological parents or the "surrogate mother," the woman who carries the child to term.

He was one of a small but growing number of rabbis to forbid smoking.

Many of his medical opinions were recorded by his student Avraham Steinberg, and then translated into summary volumes.

In the chapter entitled "On the treatment which exposes the physician to danger," Waldenberg wrote:

In principle, a person may not place himself in possibly life-threatening danger in order to save his neighbor's life… It is permitted for a physician to assume the risk of treating patients with any type of contagious disease.

Indeed, he is credited with the fulfillment of an important religious duty.

When preparing to treat a patient with a contagious disease, the physician should pray to G-d for special guidance and protection since he is endangering his own life.

A military physician is permitted to render medical care to a wounded soldier in a combat zone although he is endangering his own life.

This applies even if it is doubtful whether the wounded soldier will live, die, or be killed.

Similarly, another soldier is allowed to place his own life in danger in order to rescue a wounded comrade from the combat zone.

Waldenberg ruled sex reassignment surgery to be permissible in the case of a baby born androgynous where one set of organs were more developed.

After careful halachic and medical consideration, Waldenberg ruled that a transsexual woman following sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is a halachic woman.

He wrote, "The external anatomy which is visible is what determines the halakha" in the present tense.

Nonetheless, he affirmed the universal position in Orthodox Judaism that voluntary SRS is prohibited by Halacha.

Waldenberg permitted hearing Torah reading, Shofar blowing and Megillah reading by means of a loudspeaker, telephone, or radio, if no other options were available.

(Responsa Tzitz Eliezer, 8:11.).

However Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach strongly disagreed on this.

(see Minchas Shlomo I:9).

Waldenberg held that voices replicated by electronic devices generally have the status of noise from musical instruments, rather than that of actual voices.