Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, known to his students simply as "the Rav", was born in Pruzhany, in today's Belarus, in 1903, a grandson of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk, whose analytical method of Talmud study he inherited from his father, Rabbi Moshe. He also earned a doctorate in philosophy in Berlin in 1932. That year he emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston, where he led the Orthodox community and in 1937 founded the Maimonides School in Brookline. From 1941 he succeeded his father as head of the rabbinical seminary of Yeshiva University in New York, commuting there each week, and ordained some 2,000 rabbis.

In works such as Halakhic Man (1944) and The Lonely Man of Faith (1965) he joined Talmudic rigour with modern philosophy, and he became the guiding figure of Modern Orthodoxy. As honorary president of the Mizrachi movement in America he embraced religious Zionism: in Kol Dodi Dofek ("My Beloved Knocks"), delivered on Israel's Independence Day in 1956, he described the State of Israel as God knocking at the door of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. He died in Boston in 1993.