Zedah la-Derekh [“Provision for the Way”]

An important super-commentary to Rashi, the most famous Jewish Bible exegete. The author, R. Issachar Baer Eilenburg (c.1570-1623) studied under R. Judah Löw in the latter’s yeshivah in Prague. He later studied in Posen in the yeshivah of Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe, author of the Levush. Eilenburg’s most famous work is Be’er Sheva (Venice, 1614), to this day a favorite commentary on several tractates of the Talmud. At the time of his premature death, Eilenburg served as rabbi of Austerlitz, Moravia. JE, Vol. 5, pp. 77-78. R. Nachum Katz stands in the shadows of his illustrious brother R. Shabtai Cohen and father-in-law R. Aaron Samuel Koidonover. The latter two served together as judges in the Beith Din of R. Moses Lima in Vilna. At the time of the Swedish invasion of Poland and the hardships that followed in its aftermath, Koidonover was forced to flee to Kurow near Lublin, where two of his daughters were slaughtered. Eventually he reached safety in Nikolsburg, Moravia, and later served as rabbi and Chief Justice of Fürth. R. Nachum Katz wrote the preface to his father-in-law’s Birchath ha-Zevach (Amsterdam, 1669). See Isaak Markon, ”Bemerkungen…über die Wilnaer Flüchtlinge im XVII. Jahrhundert,” in Studies in Jewish Bibliography in Memory of A.S. Freidus (New York, 1929); JE Vol. VII, p. 414; EJ Vol. 10, cols. 1153-1154; Vol. 14, cols. 1217-1219.