ר׳ יצחק הוטנר

ר׳ יצחק הוטנר (1906–1980) was a Polish-born American rosh yeshiva and religious thinker whose teachings joined Lithuanian Talmudic learning, mussar, Hasidic motifs and the thought of ר׳ יהודה ליוואי and ר׳ אברהם יצחק הכהן קוק. Born in Warsaw, he studied at the Slabodka yeshiva under ר׳ נתן צבי פינקל and accompanied its new branch to Hebron in 1925. He survived the 1929 Hebron massacre because he was away that weekend. He later studied philosophy at the University of Berlin while maintaining an intensive rabbinic intellectual life. After travels in Mandatory Palestine and Europe, he settled in the United States in the 1930s and became the dominant teacher and, from the early 1940s, rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn. His festival discourses were edited as the multi-volume פחד יצחק, a distinctive synthesis of conceptual analysis and spiritual teaching. In September 1970 he, his wife, daughter and son-in-law ר׳ יהונתן דוד were among the passengers held in Jordan after the hijacking of TWA Flight 741; they were released later that month. In his final years he established Yeshiva Pachad Yitzchok in Jerusalem. He died there in 1980 and was buried on the Mount of Olives.