Early Life
He was born in Slutsk, Russia, to Rabbi Aharon Kotler and his wife, Rivka Chana Perel, the daughter of Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer, Rav of that town. Of his parents' children, only he and his sister, Sarah, survived infancy. He was named after his father's father, Shneur Zalman Pines.
Shneur was educated in his youth by his father. He later learned in the Kaminetz yeshiva in Poland and became one of the leading students of Rabbi Baruch Ber Leibowitz.
In 1940, when most yeshivas in Lithuania fled to Vilna—including the yeshiva in Kletzk (to where Rabbi Aharon Kotler had moved the Slutsk yeshiva)—Shneur also came to Vilna. There he became engaged to Rischel, the daughter of Malkiel Friedman. The two were able to escape Europe and get to Mandatory Palestine in 1940. (His father escaped to Japan and from there to America in 1941.) Throughout the war years, he studied in the Eitz Chaim Yeshiva led by his grandfather, Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer, who had also emigrated to Palestine, and attended shiurim given by Rabbi Yechezkel Sarna, rosh yeshiva of the Hevron yeshiva in Jerusalem, and Rabbi Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik, the Brisker Rav.
In 1946 Rabbi Kotler was able to rejoin his father in America, where he enrolled in the kollel division of the Lakewood Yeshiva which his father had founded. Although he was the son of the rosh yeshiva, he eschewed any honor or special position, but acted like any other kollel member. Sixteen years later, he accepted the mantle of leadership with his father's death in 1962.
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