Rabbi Pinchos Benedict Wolf z'l

 

I am starting with this figure because my grandparents lived in Koln in the 1920s and might have known him. 

 I recently held a small book at a used bookstore. Pinchas Benedict Wolf of Koln seems to have run a publishing house called: Bibliothek des Jüdischen Volksfreundes. In this volume, he was printing the thoughts of his late father Rabbi Zev Wolf who was no longer alive.   

Here is some more information from Geni- quoting the CJH website: 

 

Benedikt (Pinchas) Wolf was born in 1875. His father, Josef (Ze'ev) Wolf, founded the Talmud Thora in Cologne in 1861. Pinchas Wolf studied in Berlin and briefly taught at the Samson-Raphael-Hirsch school in Frankfurt am Main, before he became the director of the Talmud Thora in Cologne in 1900. Rabbi Pinchas Wolf (died 1950 ed. should say 1968!)) has been described as a "goan in Torah wisdom and science, as well as a man of enterprise" (N.Z. Friedmann, Otzar Harabanim, p. 351, no 16988). He held this position until 1936, when he immigrated to Palestine. He died in 1968. 

Rabbi Wolf founded the Mekor Chaim shul in Petach Tikva, which followed German Minhogim- even tiday to some extent. My wife was raised in that shul, incidentally. 

 

Rabbi Pinchos Wolf had a son Rabbi Yosef Avraham Wolf z'l who was born in 1911. He is known in Israel for having opened a Beis Yaakov school in Bnei Brak after being prompted by the Chazon Ish. 

 

When doing simple Google research it is important to Google in Hebrew as well as in English because some people have a Hebrew Wikipedia page that does not appear in English. He is one. 

 

Here is a piece from his Hebrew Wikipedia page: 

In 1939he immigrated to Eretz Israel and lived in Tel Aviv. Like others from neo-Orthodox backgrounds who were disappointed by assimilation and anti-Semitism, he too turned his back on the German method of Torah Am Derech Eretz and became an important Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox ideologue: he was one of the promoters of the society of learners 

 

The seminar he opened is perhaps the largest in Bnei Brak today and has a sterling reputation.  

 

Although he left the ideas of Torah im Derech Eretz, he penned a book that confronts science from the Torah perspective and challenges some of the ideas of the Wissenschaft. See here the book is ironically called "Torah Umada". 

A book of his thoughts on the Parsha was reprinted and is available on eBay.

He is the grandson of Rabbi Auerbach- Rav of Halberstadt, and the great-grandson of Rabbi Zvi Binyamin Auerbach (author of Nachal Eshkol and student of the Kabbalist R' Nosson Adler of FFAM).  

Photo below from Geni website. Did not find a better photo online 

 

 

His son Rabbi Zev Wolf ran the seminary until his sudden demise this past March.