Dow Ber Meisels

Dow (Dov, Dob) Ber (Beer, Berisz, Berush) Meisels (1798 – 17 March 1870) was a Chief Rabbi of Kraków (Cracow) from 1832 and later, Chief Rabbi of Warsaw (from 1856). He was active in the Polish nationalist movement, and was a politician in the Austrian partition of Poland and (later) in the Russian partition. A vocal supporter of Polish-Jewish cooperation, he supported the cause of Polish independence, for which he was persecuted by the Russian government.

Biography Dow Ber Meisels was the son of Isaac from the Silesian town of Szczekociny, and a descendant of Mordecai Maisel of Prague, though the Meisels family came from Kraków's Jewish community; he also lived as a youth in Kamianets-Podilskyi, where his father was a rabbi. After marrying the daughter of the wealthy Solomon Bornstein of Wieliczka, he settled as a banker and rabbi in Kraków. providing weapons for the insurgents in the November Uprising; some sources even describe him as a Polish patriot or nationalist. In 1832 he would become Kraków's Chief Rabbi, though he was not recognized by the entire community, a considerable part of which adhered to his opponent, Saul Landau.

Meisels was the author of novellæ on the Sefer ha-Miẓwot of Maimonides, which appeared together with the text as Ḥiddushe MaHaRDaM. One of his sons, Israel Meisels, was dayyan in Kraków and rabbi of Siedlce, Poland, from 1858 to 1867. A second son, Salomon Meisels, lived in Vienna.