A Haredi Attack on Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik: A Battle over the Brisker Legacy from 1984

The Soloveitchik family is one of the most distinguished rabbinic families in modern Jewish history. Despite the fact that the Soloveitchik family includes diverse varieties of Orthodoxy among its members, tensions between the different branches rarely surface publicly. However, in 1984, on the occasion of a publication in honor of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's 80th birthday, this unwritten rule was broken. Unnamed followers of the hard-line Brisk faction in Jerusalem, founded by R. Yitzhak Zev (Velvel) Soloveitchik, fiercely denounced Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, and his supporters, in a venomous broadside that briefly circulated in Israel and then disappeared from sight. It is being published here for the first time, bringing to the light of day sharp divergences in perspective among Orthodox Jews of the same family.