(Rabbi of Radvanka, author of Pnei Chesed, 1872-c. 1930). Autograph Postcard Signed written in Hebrew to Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld.

ADLER, PINCHAS

Wednesday, Parshath Korach

Radvanka, (near Ungvar/Uzhhorod, Czechoslovakia)

1927

Response to a request to sign on a Heter Me’ah Rabbanim to allow a man whose wife went insane to remarry. The writer requests clarification of an interesting detail before signing.

Rav Sonnenfeld (1848-1932), the renowned rabbi of the Old Yishuv (Neturei Karta) community in Jerusalem, requested of Rabbi Adler to sign a Heter Me’ah Rabbanim, a dispensation by 100 rabbis permitting a married man to marry a second wife without divorcing the first, under extenuating circumstances. Rabbi Adler responded that several years earlier, he had written to several rabbis, including R. Sonnenfeld, asking for signatures for a similar dispensation. His requests met with refusal, despite the prima facie similarity of the cases. R. Adler now – quite pointedly – asks why R. Sonnenfeld refused in one case but promoted the procedure in another. Pinchas Adler edited and published the notes of his grandfather Rabbi Isaac Billitzer under the title Be'er Yitzchak (Paks, 1897/98). His father Rabbi Salomon Adler and his uncle Rabbi Lipman Billitzer wrote a foreword to the work.