Pinchas Hirschsprung

Rabbi Pinhas Hirschprung (1912 – 1998) was a Polish rabbi of Hasidic ancestry, who later emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where he served as Chief Rabbi.

Rabbi Pinhas was born to Rabbi Chaim Hirschprung in the city of Dukla, in Poland (Galicia) in 1912. He first studied with his grandfather, Rabbi Dovid Tzvi Seeman (Yiddish: זעהמאן‎) (who was also the teacher of the Rebbe of Klausenburg, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam), and later became a student of Rabbi Meir Shapiro, Dean of the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva and founder of the Daf Yomi movement. Rabbi Shapiro once said about him that already as a youth, Rabbi Hirschprung knew all 2,200 folio pages (4,400 column pages) of the Talmud by heart. After he reached the age of bar-mitzvah, he wrote his first book of Torah novellae, "Pri Pinchas", and then went on to write another book, "Ohel Torah", soon after. After Rabbi Shapiro died in 1933, Rabbi Hirschprung would test prospective students for admittance to the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, where entry required the memorization 200 Talmudic folio pages (400 column pages). He was endowed with an eidetic memory which enabled him to memorize the hundreds of volumes of rabbinic literature verbatim. Only a few other known scholars of the post World War II generation attained such a level of vast Talmudic fluency: Rabbi Chaim Kreiswirth, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky.

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