Chatam Sofer החתם סופר

Rabbi Moshe Sofer was born in Frankfurt in 5523, studied with Rabbi Nathan Adler and Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz, and from 5566 until his death served as rabbi of Pressburg — Bratislava, the capital of Hungarian Jewry. His yeshiva became the largest in Europe, with up to five hundred students at once.

He lived at the moment of rupture. The Reform movement proposed shortening the prayers, translating them into German, removing the hope of return to Zion, and introducing an organ. The Chatam Sofer answered with a slogan: «chadash asur min haTorah» — a phrase from the law of the new harvest turned into a principle: the new is forbidden. He barred the smallest change in custom because he saw behind it a chain leading to the abandonment of everything.

This was strategy, not rigidity. He was the first to grasp that tradition was no longer self-evident: it had become a choice and had to be defended consciously. Hence his second idea — the yeshiva as a fortress producing rabbis for a whole country.