Isaac Elḥanan Spektor

Isaac (Yitsḥak) Elḥanan Spektor was the chief rabbi of Kovno in the Russian Empire (today Kaunas, Lithuania) and head of its kollel (advanced study circle). By the late nineteenth century, he was recognized by observant Jews across Eastern Europe as one of the great halakhic authorities of the region and accorded the honorific “rabbi of all the exile’s children.” In his communal work, Spektor, who was involved in the charitable and civic affairs of Russian Jewry, opted for a diplomatic path, putting to use his rabbinic stature and charismatic personality. While he served in the traditional rabbinate, he made sure not to instigate open conflicts with maskilim. He was willing to work with nontraditional Russian Jewish circles for the Jewish commonweal, as when he helped discourage panicked emigration following the pogroms of 1881–1882 in the Russian Empire. He was similarly moderate in his halakhic writing, taking an activist approach to freeing agunot, women “anchored” within marriages after spousal abandonment. Recognized by the tsarist authorities as a representative of traditional Russian Jewry, Spektor attended state-sponsored conferences of Russian rabbis in 1879 and 1885. Yet secretly, as his 1881 “Secret Letter to London” attests, Spektor pursued a more critical line. Amidst the pogroms of 1881, he worked with his secretary and confidante, R. Ya‘akov ha-Levi Lipshitz (1838–1921), to collect reports of the attacks and have them smuggled to London, then the center of the global liberal and progressive press. In response to nascent Zionism in Russia, Spektor supported the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and produced a dispensation to perform agricultural labor in Palestine during the sabbatical year of the Jewish calendar. The Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University in New York City is named after him.