Chaim Hirschensohn was a Jewish clergyman. He was known as a prolific author, rabbi, thinker, and early proponent of Religious Zionism.
Background
Chaim Hirschensohn was born on August 31, 1857 in Safed, Israel. He was the younger son of Rabbi Jacob Mordecal and Sarah Beile (Shartkes) Hirschensohn. His father had come to Palestine from Russia in 1847. The son's education was that of the intensive rabbinic tradition of the Talmudical academy Succath Shalom founded in Jerusalem by his father.
Education
Hirschensohn's education was that of the intensive rabbinic tradition of the Talmudical academy Succath Shalom founded in Jerusalem by his father.
Career
Hirschensohn began his career as teacher in the Laemel School for orphans. Then for a short time he traveled in Hungary and Germany raising funds for the support of Talmudic learning in Jerusalem. On his return he founded and edited the scholarly review ha-Misderona. He early saw the need for expanding the Jewish settlement in Jerusalem beyond the city's cramping walls, and became active in organizing associations for purchasing land and establishing Jewish settlements in what were then dangerous open suburbs. When the Turkish Government prohibited this, he lost everything and was compelled to leave.
He went to Constantinople in 1893, where, in Haskeui, he founded and headed a Hebrew-speaking school, Tifereth Zevi, compiling the necessary textbooks himself. For a year he headed the rabbinical seminary in Constantinople. In 1903 he emigrated with his family to the United States and was appointed rabbi of a group of congregations in Hoboken, New Jersey, and its vicinity, which he served until his death.
In 1908 he organized in New York City the first Hebrew kindergarten in the country, and he was one of the moving spirits of the Federation of Palestinian Jews of America and in every movement for popularizing the Hebrew language. He was a prolific but profound and stimulatingly original writer. On principle he wrote only in Hebrew. The modern restoration of Zion was to him the fulfilment of God's word, and he dated all his letters and writings from the new era initiated by the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917.
His masterly knowledge of Bible and Talmud was directed to the harmonizing of modern Jewish life in Palestine and the diaspora with Jewish tradition. To this theme he devoted his Malki Bakodesh. Though receiving a very meager salary, he made it a practice not to sell his books, but to give them away to Hebrew scholars all over the world. His wife gave sustained encouragement to his literary activity, even helping in setting the type for some of his early work in Jerusalem.
He died in New York City of ailments incident to his age.
Achievements
Views
Hirschensohn interpreted the function of rabbi primarily as that of scholar and teacher and obtained worldwide recognition in the rabbinate as a savant. The overriding ideal of his life was to make Palestine once more the national home of the Jew and Judaism, with Hebrew its living tongue, and its laws and customs a synthesis between the scholastic traditions of the past and the exigencies of modern conditions.
Personality
Hirschensohn was a well-built, handsome man and was endowed with a quick humor and a deep, warm-hearted compassion. He had few personal needs and was extremely unworldly; yet there was dynamically creative vision in his writings.
Connections
At seventeen Hirschensohn married Eva Sarah Cohen of Jerusalem. His wife and their five children constituted one of the first two Hebrew-speaking households since ancient days.