Mattityahu Strashun was a rabbi and scholar of Vilna, the son of Samuel Strashun.
Background
Having come from a well-to-do family, the young Strashun, at the age of 13 or 14, married Sarah Hanah, the eldest daughter of the wealthy Joseph Elijah Eliasberg. With the help of his father-in-law, Strashun founded a business, which was managed mostly by his wife and her brother.
Career
The couple had two daughters, Gita and Itta, who both died very young. Strashun remained financially independent throughout his life. By the 1840s Strashun had publicly revealed himself as a Maskil, or supporter of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement.
Around the same time, on the occasion of the visit in Vilna of Max Lilienthal, a representative of the Russian ministry of education, Strashun lent support to Lilienthal"s project for government-sponsored secular and religious education, taking the position of the maskilim in the intensive debates that arose between maskilic and traditional groups about the educational reforms.
The Strashun Library of rabbinical and other works, often spoken of as the largest library of Jewish learning in the world and which he gave to the community, became an important landmark in Vilna. Looted and destroyed by the Nazis from 1941, books recovered after 1945 went to YIVO (20,000 volumes) and the Hebrew University.
All the remaining material will be digitalized by 2020.