Yosef Leib Bloch

Rabbi Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch (February 13, 1860 – November 10, 1929) was a prominent rabbi and rosh yeshiva in Telshe (Telšiai), Lithuania.

Early life

Bloch was born on February 13, 1860, in Raseiniai, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Mordechai and Sara Basya Bloch. When he was eleven he left home to learn in the yeshiva Rabbi Moshe Charif in Vekshena, and at the age of thirteen (or fifteen), his parents sent him to Kelmė to study in the yeshiva of Rabbi Eliezer Gordon. Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel (Slabodka), was living in Kelmė at that time, and brought Yosef Leib to study by Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv. In 1881 he married Gordon's oldest daughter, Chasya.

Rabbinic career

In 1884, Gordon brought Bloch to the Telshe Yeshiva, which he headed, and in 1886, Bloch became a teacher in the yeshiva. When he and his father-in-law introduced the study of mussar (Torah ethics) into the curriculum, and then appointed Leib Chasman, a strong proponent of mussar, as mashgiach ruchani, many of the students rebelled, and Bloch left the yeshiva.

Return to Telshe

In 1910 Gordon died and Bloch returned to Telshe where he succeeded his father-in-law as community rabbi and rosh yeshiva. In the 1920s, to counter the influence of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) on the city's youth, he founded elementary schools for boys and girls which incorporated secular studies, as opposed to a strictly Torah study-based curriculum; some criticized him for this initiative; he was backed by the Chofetz Chaim, one of the leaders of European Jewry at the time.

Aside from his leadership role as rabbi and rosh yeshiva in Telshe, Bloch also served as the head of the Agudas HaRabbonim of Lithuania, and was a member and supporter of the organization, Agudath Israel.

Family Bloch had eight children, among them rabbis Avraham Yitzchak Bloch, the last rosh yeshiva of Telshe in Lithuania before the Holocaust, and Eliyahu Meir Bloch, co-founder of the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland. His daughter, Perel Leah, married Rabbi Chaim Mordechai Katz, later the co-founder of the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland with Eliyahu Meir Bloch. His granddaughter (daughter of Avraham Yitzchak) was Rochel Sorotzkin, a teacher in Cleveland's Yavneh Seminary and wife of Rabbi Boruch Sorotzkin, rosh yeshiva of Telshe in Cleveland.