Yosef Tikva. Regarding Machine Matzos. First edition. St. Louis 1903. Important approbations!

Yosef Tikva. Regarding Machine Matzos. First edition. St. Louis 1903. Important approbations!

Rare sefer dealing with the permissibility of using Machine Matzah on Pesach, by R. Zecharia Yosef Rosenfeld of St. Louis. With many important wide-ranging approbations, including those of the Aderes, R. Tzvi Hirsch Shapira of Munkacs (Darkei Teshuva), R. Moshe Mordechai Epstein, R. Dovid Karliner and R. Itzele Blazer. The author also corresponded with various academics at notable institutions including The Smithsonian.

The controversy surrounding Machine Matzos was one of the most well-known and fierce rabbinical disputes of modern times. It is interesting that as early as 1903, when orthodoxy in America was in a dismal state, the matter was already a point of contention in America.

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Rabbi Zechariah Rosenfeld was an extraordinary Jew and an unusual person. He distinguished himself not only in religious learning but in his medicinal knowledge as well. He became an expert in medicine in the following way. He was sickly for years, and physicians were unable to cure him. He therefore decided to help himself: he learned Latin and began studying books of medicine. Naturally, this distracted him from devoting himself completely to religious learning. Because of this, his father, the deceased Rabbi Gabriel (may his memory be for a blessing) was often annoyed with him; first, for reading secular books, and secondly, for not devoting all his time to religious study. Once, he screamed at him: “I already have one water barrel at home, and I don't need two!”[3]

But his son did not obey the commandment “Honor thy father” in this case, and continued on his own way, until he was confident that he was a “complete doctor.”[4] He then began treating other patients in addition to himself. As he had no license to dispense prescriptions, he would produce his own medications, and the town admired him immensely.

People recounted was that physicians from Kovel sometimes could not make an accurate diagnosis, but Rabbi Zechariah was able to diagose the illness.[5] For example, when a girl from Kovel was sick and the local doctors couldn't determine the nature of her illness, she was taken to see Rabbi Zechariah. He gazed at her, and suddenly asked whether she had been washing and scouring old dishes. When the girl confirmed this, he said: “She has been poisoned by the rust.” The Kovel physicians accepted his diagnosis. The sick girl began to recover, and finally healed completely.

Later, he moved to America, where he became rabbi in St. Louis. He published two religious books there, one about machine-made matza and the other about the mikveh.[6]

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He was followed as Rabbi of Turiysk by his son-in-law, Rabbi Yehoshua Glazer, may his memory be for a blessing. He was highly learned and very righteous, who constantly studied sacred books and prayed. He often carried on a responsa-type correspondence with the greatest scholars of the time, such as Rabbi Meir Simcha of Daugavpils (author of Or-Same'ach) and Rabbi Sholem Mordechai of Brzezany.[7] These rabbis held him in great esteem. He would be called in to serve as a third party in a court of Jewish law, but declined to mediate because a mediator must withstand the temptation to prefer one party over the other, God forbid, even when one party is clearly in the wrong.

The last Rabbi of Turiysk was his son-in-law Rabbi Moshe. He was one of the prize students at the Krynki yeshiva, who studied with the great Rabbi Zalmen Sender Shapira. He was very learned and an extremely righteous man. Rabbi Moshe and his wife, the righteous Libeh, along with their six children, were murdered by the Nazis, may their name be blotted out, may God avenge their memory. One of their children, Shmuel, survived, as he had gone to Palestine before the war. However, the tragic news of his parents' murder caused him to lose his mind, may it not happen to us. He died of starvation, yet another victim of the Nazi beasts.