Leshana Tova Card by Atarah and Yizchak Twersky - Daughter and son-in-law of R' Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Boston ...

Leshana Tova Card by Atarah and Yizchak Twersky - Daughter and son-in-law of R' Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Boston 1977.  

R' Prof. Yitzchak Twersky was born in Boston in 1930, and attended Boston Latin School[1] and Hebrew College, which was then known as Hebrew Teachers' College. Much of his Torah knowledge was acquired through private study under the tutelage of his father Meshullam Zushe Twersky (his predecessor as the Talner Rebbe of Boston) and his future father-in-law Joseph B. Soloveitchik, rather than through formal yeshiva instruction (Hacker 2005). He then graduated from Harvard in 1952, where he majored in history. In 1949, he spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Upon his graduation from Harvard, he began studies toward a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, under the guidance of the scholar of medieval philosophy, Harry Austryn Wolfson. The subject of his doctorate was the twelfth century Provençal Talmudist, Abraham ben David of Posquières (Rabad). Published under the title Rabad of Posquières: A Twelfth-Century Talmudist, it was one of the first academic portraits of a Talmudist written at an American university (Septimus 2005).

Prof. Twersky succeeded his father Meshullam Zalman Twersky as the Talner Rebbe of Boston for the last twenty years of his life, serving as the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth David, known colloquially as the Talner Beis Medrash ("the Talner study hall"), which was located in a renovated house in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. Twersky's lectures in the synagogue on Tuesday nights and late Saturday afternoons were known for their erudition and originality, in the tradition of elite religious Torah study, with the vocabulary and worldliness of a Harvard historian. Twersky and his wife Atarah (née Soloveitchik) played a prominent part in the leadership of Maimonides School. Twersky took on the role of spiritual leader for the school in 1993, after the death of Atarah's father Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who had founded the school in 1937. Atarah was the long-time chair of the School Committee, until 2006, nine years after Twersky's death.