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Broadsheet prohibiting the participation of women in elections by the gaon R. Hayyim Ozer Grodzinski. The broadsheet has a header that it is being issued by Rav Raphael Katzenellbogen. The text begins announcing the prohibition and that it is from R. Grodzinski, the gaon and Av Bet Din of Vilna. It informs that he was asked concerning women joining with men in the selection of the leadership of the community or related organizations. R. Grodzinski’s response is that all rabbis and all knowledgeable persons realize that this is against the spirit of the Torah and the holy traditions of the Jewish people, violates the laws of modesty, and against the custom of the Jewish people throughout the generations (the last underlined). “The daughter of the king is all glorious within” (Psalms 45:14). The broadsheet continues, stating that this from those who wish to make the Jewish people a nation without Torah and mitzvot like the other nations.
R. Hayyim Ozer Grodzinski (1863–1940) was one of the spiritual leaders of Lithuanian Jewry. He studied in the yeshivot of Eisheshok and Volozhin, where he was known as an illui (prodigy). In 1887 he was appointed one of the dayyanim of the bet din of Vilna, and he came to be regarded as its leading dayyan. R. Grodzinski was one of the initiators of the Vilna Conference of 1909, which resulted in the formation of the Orthodox Keneset Israel organization, participated in the founding conference of the Agudat Israel at Katowice in 1914, served as a leading member of that party’s Council of Sages, and was the prime force for spreading its influence in and around Vilna. An initiator of the conference of rabbis at Grodno in 1924 which founded the Va'ad ha-Yeshivot for the spiritual and material support of yeshivot and their students, he was the moving spirit behind the Council. R. Grodzinski was a vehement opponent of Zionism and of secular education for Jews, his aim being to preserve the Torah milieu of the Lithuanian yeshivot and townlets intact. In 1934 he prevented the transfer of the Hildesheimer rabbinical seminary from Berlin to Tel Aviv. Grodzinski's responsa were published in three volumes under the title of Ahi'ezer (1922, 1925, 1939). In the introduction to the last volume, written on the eve of the Holocaust, he spoke of the fear and dismay that was rapidly descending upon the entire Jewish people, both in the Diaspora and (in a reference to the 1936–39 riots) in Erez Israel. He wrote about the spiritual disintegration of the Jewish community, and its laxity in the observance of the Sabbath, kashrut, and the laws of marital purity. All this he blamed on the Reform movement in the West and on secular education in the East. His sole consolation was in the important work of preserving and strengthening Torah education and in the fact that “the large and small yeshivot were the strongholds of Judaism in Poland and Lithuania.”
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