Shatzkes, Moses
SHATZKES, MOSES
SHATZKES, MOSES (1881–1958), rosh yeshivah. Born in Vilna, Shatzkes was raised by his stepfather, Isaac *Blaser, a foremost exponent of the *Musar movement. Shatzkes studied at the *Telz yeshivah where he became a leading disciple of its rosh yeshivah, Eliezer Gordon. In 1909 Shatzkes was appointed rabbi of Lipnishki, and in 1915 of Ivo, both in the province of Vilna. After World War i, he was active in guiding Vilna's Jewish relief organization and the Va'ad ha-Yeshivot. In 1930 he was elected to the important position of the rabbi of Lomza, and in this capacity served as one of the leaders of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry until the war forced him to flee to Vilna in 1939. There he was appointed the head of the Grodno yeshivah after the death of its previous rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Simeon *Shkop. He immigrated to the United States in 1941, and became a senior member of the faculty of the Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary of the Yeshiva University. Shatzkes' annotations to Blaser's works were published under the title Anaf Peri as an appendix to the second volume of the latter's Peri Yiẓḥak (Jerusalem, 1913).
bibliography:
O.Z. Rand, Toledot Anshei Shem (1950), 132.
[Aaron Rothkoff]