Bidspirit auction | A rare and personal letter

A rare and personal letter from the eminent Gaon R. Yitzchak Zvi Amsel, dayan of Stropkov and rabbi of Zbarov - A letter from the Gaon Rabbi Yitzchak Zvi [Itzik Hersh] Amsel, one of the great rabbis of his generation. The addressee was unknown even to the writer. In the letter, Rabbi Yitzchak Zvi recounts the story of his life and his history from the day of his birth, the places where he studied and his teachers, as well as the places where he served in the rabbinate and the turbulent periods of his life. He describes his immense investment in composing books that he had prepared for print, but then the First World War broke out, and in the Russian occupation all his labor was lost and the manuscripts disappeared. The letter was written nearly thirty years later, apparently with the aim of securing funding for the publication of the books he had rewritten. The renowned Gaon Rabbi Yitzchak Zvi Amsel was born in Stropkov in 1861. At the age of thirteen he traveled to study under the author of Chatan Sofer, and also studied under Rabbi Yechezkel Seginer in Dukla. He was taken as a son-in-law by R. Shlomo Yosef Weinberger of his city Stropkov. He was accepted as dayan and Av Beit Din of the city at a time when Rav Rabbi Moshe Yosef Teitelbaum had already been serving there in the rabbinate, who had previously been Av Beit Din of Zbarov. A controversy broke out. The qualified scholars would forbid his rulings, and I too was among the forbidders, and from then until now I write to him and to those who support him, etc. As stated there in Zikhron Stropkov, p. 27, R. Avraham Avish HaKohen Weinstein writes that he was born then in the midst of the fire of the controversy, and indeed close to his birth the head of the community summoned rabbis and they made peace between them, and at the meal of his circumcision they were already seated together. A short time afterward the holy Rav R. Moshe Yosef was accepted in Ohel, and in Stropkov the holy Rav R. Avraham Shalom son of the holy Rav of Shinova was then accepted, and in time they greatly wondered about what the controversy had been and why, for both were tzaddikim and sages and none knew any claims. And the elder chassidim said that when the Stropkov community accepted upon themselves R. Moshe Yosef, two Jews from Stropkov traveled to Shinova and the holy Rav asked them for news from their town, and they told him that they had accepted a rabbi. The holy Rav wondered: And did they not ask me? And he said: I thought that my Shalom would be the rabbi in Stropkov; now that you already have a rabbi, there will not be peace for you. And he meant his son, and it was as an unintentional word that emerges from the mouth of a ruler… Afterward Rabbi Yitzchak Zvi was accepted as Av Beit Din of Zbarov, where he taught Torah to students, among them Rabbi Yeshayah Kleinman, dayan in Satmar. He authored Choshen Ve’Efod on the laws of neighbors, and on his tombstone it was written that he left a composition on the entire Shulchan Aruch. Part of it survives, on the laws of Shabbat and the laws of blessings, comprising five hundred pages still in manuscript.