Avrohom Eliyahu Kaplan

Who was Avrohom Eliyahu Kaplan?

Avrohom Eliyahu Kaplan was a prominent Orthodox rabbi. He was born in Kėdainiai, a town in the Kaunas County in Lithuania. He was born an orphan, and named Avrohom Elya for his deceased father, who had died suddenly at the age of 33 several months before his son's birth. At about this time, Reb Avraham Elya's mother remarried a man from Telshe.

Avraham Elya studied for several years in the renowned Yeshiva of Telshe. His poetic and pasionate nature became legendary even at a young age. At 16, he was drawn to the spirit of the Mussar movement, and went to learn in the Talmud Torah in Kelm, the yeshiva founded by Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv. He left Kelm, however, shortly after his arrival and went to the famed yeshiva in Slabodka headed by Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, known as the "Alter of Slabodka", and Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein, known by his penname, "Levush Mordechai". Avraham Elya studied in Slabodka for seven years, until the outbreak of World War I left him stranded in his mother's home in Telshe. In Slabodka, Reb Avraham Elya found the path that he had sought, in trying to reconcile the Mussar philosophy of Lithuanian Judaism with the philosophy of Hasidic Judaism. At the age of 30 he was appointed as Rosh Yeshiva of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin.