Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm

Elijah Ba'al Shem or Eliyahu Ba'al Shem of Chełm (government of Lublin) (born 1550; died at Chelm, 1583) was a Polish rabbi who served as chief rabbi of Chełm. He also studied Kabbalah, and, according to his descendant Tzvi Ashkenazi, created a golem. He is credited with creating the first golem with a "shem" (that is, using a combination of letters from one of the names of God to form a name; Elijah used "Sefer Yezirah"), so he was known as a "Ba'al Shem." He is the first rabbi in history to be known by this title.

He was born Eliyahu ben Aharon Yehudah ("Elijah son of Aaron Judah"). About 1565 he entered the yeshiva of Rabbi Solomon Luria of Lublin, and, after receiving his rabbinical ordination, became rabbi of Chełm, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. In 1564, he gathered with other prominent rabbis, including his teacher, to co-sign the "piske dinim" (laws) which allowed an agunah to remarry.

His great-granddaughter was married to Rabbi Ephraim ha-Kohen (1616–1678), author of "Sha'ar Efrayim" and grandfather of Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi.

According to Jacob Emden, the son of the aforementioned Tzvi Ashkenazi, the Golem is said to have grown so that the rabbi feared that he might destroy the world. Finally, the rabbi extracted the Shem from the forehead of his Golem, which returned to dust, but the Golem scratched his master's face in the process. An anonymous 1630 manuscript (the earliest known written legend of a contemporary figure creating a golem) recounts that the golem continued to grow that the rabbi had to destroy it by erasing the Hebrew letter aleph, first letter from the word emet (truth) thereby rendering it met (dead).

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