A distinguished rabbi who lived to the remarkable age of 104 has died.
Rabbi Elyakim Schlesinger, who founded Yeshivas Harama in Stamford Hill in 1961, died last Wednesday. During the final years of his life, he was believed to be the world’s oldest rosh yeshivah.
Crowds gathered at the yeshivah to eulogise him as the news of his passing broke.
According to the Jewish News, the Jewish Community Council of London said in a statement that “our community has lost a towering leader who was universally respected as a Talmid Chacham [Torah scholar] of extraordinary stature, a man of integrity, humility, vision, wisdom, and depth.”
They added: “He leaves behind an extraordinary legacy of Torah, leadership, and accomplishment, as well as hundreds of grandchildren who carry his values forward. The loss to our community is truly incalculable.
“Rabbi Schlesinger consistently sought to promote achdus – unity – throughout the Jewish world, touching countless lives through his guidance, example, and unwavering commitment to Klal Yisrael.”
On his final Shabbat, he delivered a Torah shiur, before falling ill with pneumonia and kidney issues.
In recent years, he was active in protests against the government’s proposed Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, whose propositions included making local authorities compile a register of children being educated in out-of-school settings, like yeshivot and those being home-schooled.
In his capacity as president of the Rabbinical Committee of the Traditional Charedi Chinuch, Rabbi Schlesinger said in October 2024: “The Department for Education is not merely seeking regulation, they are attempting to fundamentally reshape who we are. If they receive the unequivocal message that we will never change, they will have no choice but to abandon this persecution.”
A few months later, he said that the bill’s “consequences will be the closure of all Torah institutions and yeshivahs”.
Schlesinger was born in Vienna in 1921 and raised in a rabbinic family who emigrated to the then-British Mandate Palestine in the 1930s, studying at various yeshivot before and after he got married in 1944.
He moved to London in the late ‘40s, where he then founded Yeshivas Harama, frequently delivering lectures to students and acting as a pillar of the UK’s strictly Orthodox community for many decades.
He is survived by nine children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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