Rabbi Israel Salanter

Rabbi Israel Lipkin, known as Rabbi Israel Salanter, was born in Žagarė, Lithuania, in 1809 and took his name from Salantai, where he studied under Rabbi Zundel of Salant, a disciple of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin. Rabbi Zundel taught him that knowing the Torah is not enough without constant work on one's character. In the 1840s, as head of a yeshiva in Vilna, Rabbi Israel began the Mussar movement: the study of works of ethics such as Mesillat Yesharim with feeling and repetition, self-examination, and the founding of "Mussar houses" where ordinary Jews came to study them. During the cholera epidemic of 1848 he told the Jews of Vilna to eat on Yom Kippur to keep up their strength, and is said to have eaten in the synagogue to set an example. He later taught in Kovno and spent his last decades in Germany and Paris, and died in Königsberg in 1883.

His students, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv of Kelm, Rabbi Yitzchak Blazer and Rabbi Naftali Amsterdam among them, brought Mussar into the Lithuanian yeshivot of Slabodka, Novardok and Telz. Through them it shaped the yeshiva world that continues today.