The Soloveitchik Heritage: A Daughter's Memoir

Generation after generation, members of the Soloveitchik family have constituted an integral and influential part of traditional Judaism's learning aristocracy. Among the scions of this illustrious family was the man known familiarly to thousands as the Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, kmz, who served for more than forty years as the preeminent authority of centrist Orthodoxy. This memoir by his daughter, Shulamit Soloveitchik Meiselman, describes the life of the family of Rabbi Moses Soloveitchik before they emigrated to the United States in order to allow Rabbi Moses to assume a post at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Rabbinical School of Yeshiva College and until his life was tragically cut short and he was succeeded by his son, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. She also recounts the story of the family's antecedents, its connection with R. Hayyim of Volozhin and the Volozhiner Yeshiva, as well as those of her mother's family, the Feinsteins, of whom R. Moshe Feinstein, ztl, was an eminent representative. This daughter's eye view, which contains many personal glimpses of the family's life over a period of almost forty years, will be of great interest to anyone studying the history of this preeminent family and the history of Eastern European and American Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth century, as well as rabbinic life on both continents. The book contains twelve pages of family photographs and memorabilia.