Chalitzah Via Emissary

While American Jewry saw a substantial population boost post-Holocaust, Orthodox Jewry in the United States has a long and colorful history. With the influx of immigration in the late 1800s from Eastern Europe, different rabbinical authorities that would have had little interaction with each other in their native lands suddenly found themselves sharing space with different worldviews and differing halachic opinions. It was inevitable for halachic disputes to develop, most of which have faded to obscurity with time.

One major halachic dispute, though, has left its mark in literature and history. The impetus was a publication which I recently acquired, titled Av Bachochma, authored by Rabbi Avraham Aaron Yudelovitz and published in New York in 1927. R’ Avraham Aharon Yudelevitch, z”l, was born in Novardok, in 1850. He served as rabbi locally until his move to Manchester, where he served for several years before finding himself in Boston. Rav Tzvi Hirsch Orliansky, a famed traveling maggid of the era, described Yudelovitz’s preaching:

In 1878, when I was learning in Sokolka, I heard a lot about the rav of Kuzhnetza; that he is a Torah giant who studied constantly, and over and above that is a wonderful preacher whose mouth produces pearls of wisdom. Erev Shabbos Chazon the word got out that Rav Avrohom Aharon, the rav of Kuzhnetza, was coming to Sokolka for Shabbos, and the gabba’im of the New Beis Hamidrash (where all the finest scholars and the wealthy men davened) invited him to preach there. By 3 p.m. on Shabbos the new beis hamidrash was full, with people standing crowded, waiting for the darshan to begin.… His powerful voice and the tune through which he poured out his soul, as well as his lofty ideas and extraordinary explanations of the verses of Eicha – I will never forget as long as I live.

He later made his way to New York, where he served as rabbi until 1930. He wrote prolifically, with five volumes on the Torah, several of response, and his most famous, the Av Bachochma. Av Bachochma deals with the mitzvah of yibbum, where a man who dies childless leaves his widow with two halachic options: to either marry or perform a chalitzah ceremony with her deceased husband’s brother. In the 1920s, when this book was written, there were multiple cases where the brother, who was required to perform the chalitzah ceremony, was stuck behind the iron curtain. Rabbi Yudelovitz permitted the chalitzah act to be performed via an emissary.

Many leading rabbis of the day firmly opposed the permissibility of chalitzah via an emissary. Condemnations came from many directions, and in 1930, an entire book titled Im Nekudot Hakesef was published in Jerusalem to refute Av Bachochma. Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer as well as the Rogatchover Gaon opposed it, among many other notable names. The enmity caused was so palatable that was when R. Yudelovitz passed away in Bayonne, N.J., in 1930, his funeral was boycotted by most of the New York rabbinate, though thousands of laymen attended.

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