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Rare halakhic novellae published in remembrance of R. Abraham Isaac Israel ben Zevi Arboz. The verso of the title page has a list of the discourses, twenty-six in number, comprising the volume. All are scholarly halakhic dissertations, on such topics as safek sfeka and safok tumma, witnesses who contradict each other, mourning, wearing the avnet, and others. There is a dedicatory (memorial) page for R. Arboz, a eulogy, and the text.
The Mirrer Yeshiva was founded in 1815, twelve years after the founding of the Volozhin Yeshiva, by one of the prominent residents of a small Polish town of Mir, Belarus (then Russia), Rabbi Shmuel Tiktinsky. After Rav Shmuel's death, his youngest son, Rabbi Chaim Leib Tiktinsky, was appointed rosh yeshiva. He was succeeded by his son, Rav Avrohom, who brought Rabbi Eliyahu Boruch Kamai into the yeshiva. During Rabbi Kamai's tenure the direction of the yeshiva wavered between those who wished to introduce the study of musar and those who were against it. In 1903 Rabbi Kamai's daughter Malka married Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, son of the legendary Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka, the who joined the yeshiva faculty in late 1906. Under his influence the yeshiva joined the musar movement definitively and Rabbi Zalman Dolinski of Radin was appointed as its first mashgiach. The invasion of Poland in 1939 by Nazi Germany from the west and the Red Army from the east meant the yeshiva was unable to remain in Mir, which was now under Communist rule. Many of the foreign-born students left, but the bulk of the yeshiva relocated, first to Vilna, then temporarily in independent Lithuania, and then to Keidan, Lithuania. Not many months elapsed before Lithuania lost its independence to invading Soviet forces, and the future of the yeshiva was again in peril. The yeshiva was split into four sections: The "first division", under the leadership of Rabbi Chaim Leib Shmuelevitz as rosh yeshiva and Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein as mashgiach, relocated to Krakinova; the other three divisions went to the three small towns of Ramigola, Shat and Krak. As the Nazi armies continued to push to the east, the yeshiva as a whole eventually fled across Siberia by train to the Far East, en route to the USA. The yeshiva reopened in Kobe, Japan in March 1941. A short time later Japan expelled the Jews from its mainland, and the yeshiva relocated again, to (Japanese-controlled) Shanghai, China, where they remained until 1947. In Shanghai, Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi, a Lubavitcher chasid who served as the spiritual leader of the Jewish refugees, arranged for the yeshiva to occupy the Beit Aharon Synagogue, built in 1920 by a prominent Jewish Shanghai businessman, Silas Aaron Hardoon. For the first few weeks, until funds could be sourced for provisions, the yeshiva community suffered from malnutrition. Following the end of the war, the majority of the Jewish refugees from the Shanghai ghetto left for Palestine and the United States. Among them were the survivors from the Mir yeshiva, who re-established the yeshiva, this time with two campuses, one as the Mirrer Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Israel and the other as the Mirrer Yeshiva Central Institute in Brooklyn, New York City. The yeshiva's leaders, Rabbi Shmuelevitz and Rabbi Levenstein, left Shanghai for New York in early 1947 with the last contingent of students. Three months later they set sail for Palestine, where the Mirrer Yeshiva had been re-established under the leadership of Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, who emigrated there before World War II.
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