Yeshiva College of South Africa - History

History

The yeshiva was co-founded in the mid-1950s by Rabbi Michel Kosovsky, an Eastern European Talmudic scholar who had settled in South Africa during the Holocaust, and Rabbi Joseph Bronner, an alumnus of the Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, New York, who had settled in South Africa after World War II and was active in the business world. The yeshiva was named for Rabbi Kosovsky's father, Rabbi Yitzchak Kosovsky, who has preceded him and had served as one of the heads of Johannesburg's Beth Din ("religious court".)

The first full-time instructor of Talmud at the yeshiva was Rabbi David Sanders (rabbi), who was brought out from the Telz yeshiva in the United States to teach the young students Talmud in the traditional style of the Lithuanian yeshivas -- of the non-Hasidic Jews. He in turn helped to bring Rabbi Avraham Tanzer, also an alumnus of the Telz yeshiva in the U.S., to teach at the yeshiva. Eventually Rabbi Tanzer was appointed the Rosh yeshivah ("dean") of the school, a position which he has retained.

Rabbi Tanzer in turn brought out Rabbi Azriel Goldfein (again, a fellow Telz yeshiva alumnus) to be a co-Rosh yeshiva; Rabbi Goldfein eventually left to establish the Yeshivah Gedolah of Johannesburg.