Avrohom Bornsztain

Avrohom Bornsztain (14 October 1838 – 20 February 1910), also spelled Avraham Borenstein or Bernstein, was a leading posek in late-nineteenth-century Europe and founder and first Rebbe of the Sochatchover Hasidic dynasty. He is known as the Avnei Nezer ("Stones of the Crown") after the title of his posthumously published set of Torah responsa, which is widely acknowledged as a halakhic classic. His only son, Shmuel, author of Shem Mishmuel, succeeded him as Rebbe.

Early life Born in Będzin, Poland on 14 October 1838, Bornsztain was a descendant of the Rema and the Shach. He was the first child of Dobrish (or Doba/Dobela) Erlich, and Rabbi Zev Nachum Bornsztain. to 1855 and Rabbi of Biała Podlaska from 1855 till his death in 1885. Zev Nachum was the author of Agudat Eizov,

Jewish cemetery in Sochaczew, with the restored, red-brick ohel in background. In 1991, after the fall of Communism, Yehuda Vidavski, a Sochatchover Hasid from Łódź, who now lived in Tel Aviv, set out to find and restore the ohel. He successfully petitioned the local authorities for permission to erect a fence around the perimeter of the original cemetery, and asked Rabbi Aharon Yisrael Bornsztain, a son of the Shem Mishmuel who also lived in Tel Aviv, for his recollections as to the location of the ohel. Rabbi Aharon Yisrael recalled that it lay 35 meters from the entrance to the cemetery. But although Vidavski hired Polish workers to dig in that area, he uncovered no signs of the ohel. He was similarly unsuccessful in employing a professional who used different kinds of machines to locate graves.

Then Vidavski found an older woman who had lived in that area all her life. When he brought her to the cemetery and asked her if she remembered where the ohel had been, she looked around at all the digging going on and said, "Why are they looking there when the tzadik is buried here?" Digging anew, Rabbi Videvski's workers unearthed remnants of wooden boards, which they later realized was the grave of the Avnei Nezer. Beside this they found pieces of wood from the grave of the Shem Mishmuel. The graves were restored and a new ohel built over them, which was inaugurated in a ceremony led by the present Sochatchover Rebbe, who traveled to Poland from Israel for the occasion in 1993.

Rebbes of Sochatchov Avrohom Bornsztain, the Avnei Nezer (1838–1910) Shmuel Bornsztain, the Shem Mishmuel (1856–1926) Dovid Bornsztain (1876–1942) Chanoch Henoch Bornsztain (d. 1965) Menachem Shlomo Bornsztain (1934–1969) Shmuel Bornsztain (b. 1961)

Notable Students Yoav Yehoshua Weingarten Meir Dan Plotzky Aryeh Tzvi Frumer Shlomo Sztencl