CINCINNATI, OH — Associates of Rabbi Zelig Sharfstein, the chief rabbi of Cincinnati, Ohio's Vaad Hoeir rabbinical authority who died on Monday, remembered him as a brilliant authority on Jewish law who spent hours each day responding to questions from around the globe. Sharfstein, a New Yorker by birth, was 79.
Legal Scholar and Rabbi to Rabbis Passes Away at 79
CINCINNATI, OH — Associates of Rabbi Zelig Sharfstein, the chief rabbi of Cincinnati, Ohio’s Vaad Hoeir rabbinical authority who died on Monday, remembered him as a brilliant authority on Jewish law who spent hours each day responding to questions from around the globe. Sharfstein, a New Yorker by birth, was 79.
Born Ezriel Zelig Sharfstein on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1929, his father, Avraham Zev Sharfstein, was a Latvian immigrant who served as the unofficial rabbi in New York City’s first Lubavitch synagogue.
Trained as a ritual slaughterer, Sharfstein’s father came to the United States in 1911 and lived a modest life. After his spouse suddenly passed away, he married Esther, a Polish immigrant, in the mid-1920s.
In was his mother’s family who introduced Sharfstein’s father to Chasidism, which her brother, Isser Yaffe, would study with him every Shabbat morning before prayers. In one of his visits, Rabbi Ezriel Zelig Slonim, a traveling emissary of the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, saw the pair learning, a novelty in a country then considered by the Jewish world to be treif, or not kosher.
