Chofetz Chaim

Born Israel Meir Pupko ha-Kohen (Kagan) in Zhetl in the Russian Empire (today Diatlovo, Belarus), the scholar who came to be called the Chofetz Chaim received his early religious education at home. Kagan’s father died while Kagan was young and his mother moved the family to Vilna, where he entered yeshiva. After moving to Radun (Yiddish, Radin), a town in the Grodno region, he married and opened a store, which his wife managed. By 1869, students from across the region would gather at his home to study. Eventually, he became known by the title of his first book—Chofetz Chaim (Ḥafetz Ḥayim, 1873), on the laws of libel and gossip—and his Radun yeshiva and kollel gained prominence as the Yeshiva Ḥafetz Ḥayim. Antagonistic to the secularism of the early Zionist movement (an antagonism he later extended to all forms of secular Jewish outlook, including socialist activism and secular cultural activism of any sort), the Chofetz Chaim helped found the Agudas Yisroel Party and aligned himself with the Musar movement. He vehemently opposed the emigration of Jews to America on religious grounds, as evidenced in his booklet Nefutsot Yisra’el (The Dispersion of Israel). By the interwar period, the Chofetz Chaim was one of the most uncompromising voices for and a living symbol of Orthodox Jewish opposition to any sort of Jewish embrace of modernity.