Most important was his ruling that situations of sexual abuse of kids must be reported to the civic authorities and never dealt with completely inside the Haredi neighborhood. This was a pointy departure from a practice below which those that reported crimes by fellow Haredim have been seen as traitorous informers.
Chaim Kanievsky was born on Jan. 8, 1928, in Pinsk, a metropolis that as we speak is in Belarus however was then in Poland. On the time, Jews made up three quarters of town’s 28,000 inhabitants. His household was Orthodox aristocracy. His father, Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, was referred to as “the Steipler Gaon” (the Steipler genius), after the Yiddish shortening of the title of his Ukrainian village, and esteemed as a posek, a decider of fantastic factors of Jewish legislation.
His mom, Miriam Karelitz, was the daughter of a notable rabbinical decide. An uncle, Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, was identified broadly because the Chazon Ish (“Imaginative and prescient of Man”), after the title of his masterwork, and revered worldwide as an authority on Jewish legislation.
Chaim was considered a prodigy as a toddler, memorizing complete sections of Torah and analyzing their which means and significance in remarkably mature trend.
The household migrated to the British mandate of Palestine in 1934, settling in Bnei Brak, simply east of Tel Aviv, which was rising into a middle of Haredi Jews; as we speak, with 205,000 folks, it is likely one of the world’s 10 most densely populated cities.
Chaim’s father was appointed head of a yeshiva for older teenage boys whereas Chaim studied on the Lomza Yeshiva, within the close by city of Petach Tikva. It provided a “Mussar” schooling, which emphasised moral in addition to mental improvement and the cultivation of traits like modesty, accountability, compassion and self-discipline.
Rabbi Kanievsky served within the military, stationed as a guard within the Jaffa space, throughout Israel’s 1948 struggle to cement its independence. He married Batsheva Elyashiv, a daughter of Rabbi Yosef Sholom Elyashiv, who till his dying in 2012 was considered the unofficial chief of the Lithuanian Haredim.
