Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor - Relations With The Russian Government

Relations With The Russian Government

Together with Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, he bravely fought the harsh decrees of the Russian government and was active in confronting the numerous issues affecting Russian Jewry. Twice Spektor visited St. Petersburg to take part in the conferences held there to consider the situation of the Jews after the riots of 1881. During his second visit, in the summer of 1882, Kovno was partly destroyed by fire, and Spektor collected in the capital a large sum for those who had been ruined by the conflagration. He succeeded in his opposition to the proposed establishment of a new rabbinical school on the plan of those in Vilna and Zhitomir, but he failed in his attempt to induce the government to recognize as the real head of the Jewish communities the synagogue rabbi instead of the government rabbi, who was in reality only a civil functionary and a layman.

In 1889 Spektor was elected an honorary member of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia; in the same year he declared himself emphatically opposed to the proposed celebration of his rabbinical jubilee. His efforts to save the Volozhin yeshiva from being closed by the government proved unsuccessful, but his sponsorship of the institution known as "Kovnoer Perushim" assisted to provide a substitute. His other varied activities included participation in the Kovno kollel and membership of the Hovevei Zion movement. He corresponded with the leading rabbis of western Europe, and was the anonymous friend who induced Samson Raphael Hirsch to write Ueber die Beziehung des Talmuds zum Judenthum. In his later years he was revered by the Jews of Russia, and came to be considered the pre-eminent Halachic authority of his time; his death caused mourning in Orthodox communities throughout the world.

R. Yitzchak Elchanan died at Kovno on March 6, 1896. Various institutions were named after him, including the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), part of Yeshiva University. He had three sons: Chayyim, who was the son-in-law of R. Joseph Böhmer of Slutzk, and died in Kovno in 1874, aged forty; Benjamin Rabinovich; and Hirsch Rabinovich, who was maggid or preacher of Wilna, and later succeeded his father as rabbi of Kovno. An only daughter, named Rachel, died at an early age in 1876.