Bio: “TCHERNOWITZ, CHAIM (pseudonym Rav Za’ir; 1871–1949), talmudic scholar and Hebrew author. Tchernowitz, born in Sebesh (district of Vitebsk), Russia, studied in Lithuania and obtained semikhah from Isaac Elchanan *Spektor of Kovno in 1896. Moving to Odessa the following year, he founded his own yeshivah, eventually transforming it into a rabbinical seminary (1907) which attracted many students from the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia, including Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik and Joseph Klausner. Tchernowitz’s ambition was to combine traditional study with modern research in order to rejuvenate Jewish learning. His pseudonym Rav Ẓa’ir (young rabbi) reflects his aims. Tchernowitz received a Ph.D. from the University of Wuerzburg in 1914. Settling in the United States in 1923, he taught Talmud at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.”
In his second lecture on R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinksi for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: Chaim Tchernowitz was the non-religious candidate for the post of crown rabbi of Vilna.
He gives the most famous hespedim for Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor. He functions as an Orthodox rav and Av Beis Din (head of a Jewish law court) in Odessa.
He later comes to America. He really leaves Orthodoxy. You see pictures of him not even wearing a yarmulke. He starts teaching at the Jewish Institute of Religion, started by Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise. He has no involvement with Orthodox Jewish life.
“To have the Orthodox rav of a big city and then to give it all up and become a scholar and to leave the Orthodox world is unusual. The case that comes to mind is that of the Chief Rabbi of Rome who apostatized after the Holocaust. He was a strange character. He abandoned the community during the Holocaust.”
