38 Facts About Yitzchak Hutner

Yitzchak Hutner, known as Isaac Hutner, was an American Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva.

Originally from Warsaw, Hutner was the long-time dean of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, New York, an older institution that grew under his leadership.

Yitzchak Hutner's pedagogic style was a blend of the Hasidic and Misnagdic elements of his own family's origins.

Yitzchak Hutner's discourses, called ma'amarim, contained elements of a Talmudic discourse, a Hasidic Tish and a philosophic lecture.

On one of his trips there, Yitzchak Hutner's plane was seized by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists in the Dawson's Field hijackings, which he survived.

Yitzchak Hutner was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a family with both Ger Hasidic and non-Hasidic Lithuanian Jewish roots.

In 1925, having obtained a solid grounding in Talmud, Yitzchak Hutner joined a group from the Slabodka yeshiva that established the Hebron Yeshiva in Mandatory Palestine.

Yitzchak Hutner studied there until 1929, narrowly escaping the 1929 Hebron massacre because he was away for the weekend.

Yitzchak Hutner then moved to Germany, to study philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he befriended Joseph B Soloveitchik and Menachem Mendel Schneerson, two future rabbinical leaders then studying in Berlin.

Yitzchak Hutner was born in Slutsk and raised in the United States.

In March 1934 Yitzchak Hutner moved to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, where Yitzchak Hutner joined the faculty of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School.

Yitzchak Hutner was able to construct an environment that produced young Talmudic scholars in the model of their compatriots in Eastern Europe.

Yitzchak Hutner took great pride in the secular accomplishments of his students insofar as they fit into his vision of a material world governed by the principles of a spiritual Torah way of life.

One of his closest disciples, Israel Kirzner, is an economist who edited Yitzchak Hutner's written works, Pachad Yitzchok.

Many of Yitzchak Hutner's disciples earned doctorates, often with his blessing and guidance.

Yitzchak Hutner subsequently founded and became the dean of Beth Jacob Jerusalem, a prominent Jewish women's seminary that caters to young women from Haredi families in the United States.

Yitzchak Hutner's dissertation discussed the dual role Zvi Hirsch Chajes as both a traditionalist and maskil.

Yitzchak Hutner stayed in touch with them and was involved in major communal policy decision-making as he worked through his network of students in positions of leadership.

Yitzchak Hutner established Yeshiva Pachad Yitzchok in Har Nof, Jerusalem, which he named for his book of the same name.

Yitzchak Hutner died in 1980, and was buried in the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery in East Jerusalem.

Various pillars of Yitzchak Hutner's thought system were likely the works of the Vilna Gaon and Moshe Chaim Luzzatto.

Yitzchak Hutner initiated a number of changes in Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin that differed greatly from the mussar yeshiva practice in Slabodka.

Yitzchak Hutner abolished the half-hour learning session in mussar and replaced it with one of ten or fifteen minutes.

Yitzchak Hutner viewed secular studies as essential for attending college, learning a profession and becoming self-supporting.

Yitzchak Hutner obtained, together with Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, a charter from the New York State Board of Regents to set up a combined yeshiva and college.

Yitzchak Hutner developed a style of celebrating Shabbat and the Jewish holidays by delivering a type of discourse known as a ma'amar.

Yitzchak Hutner instructed some of his students to do likewise.

Yitzchak Hutner eventually became a member of the non-Zionist Haredi Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of Agudath Israel of America following his immigration to the United States.

Eliezer Waldman said that Yitzchak Hutner told them that "Rav Kook was 20 times as great as those who opposed him".

Yitzchak Hutner referred to Soloveitchik as a gadol and to Schneerson as tzadik hador, while at other times saying some negative things about the latter.

Still, Yitzchak Hutner corresponded regularly with Schneerson throughout his lifetime on a variety of halakhic, Hasidic and kabbalistic subjects, and occasionally sought his blessing.

Yitzchak Hutner appointed Soloveitchik's younger brother, whom he had tutored in Warsaw, Ahron Soloveichik, as head of his own Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin.

Yitzchak Hutner had a number of disagreements with some of the religious scholars who taught in his yeshiva.

Yitzchak Hutner eased out many of the older rabbis who were his contemporaries in favor of his disciples.

Yitzchak Hutner appointed Slabodka yeshiva educated Avigdor Miller as the mashgiach ruchani of the yeshiva.

In 1938 Yitzchak Hutner published a short booklet of halakhic decisions sourced in the Sifra but not cited in the Babylonian Talmud.

Yitzchak Hutner called his outlook Hilchot Deot Vechovot Halevavot and wrote in a poetic modern-style Hebrew reminiscent of his original mentor Abraham Isaac Kook's style, even though almost all of Hutner's original lectures were delivered in Yiddish.

Yitzchak Hutner gave semikhah to Shlomo Carlebach, the musician, during the days that the latter was still with Lubavitch.