Rabbi Israel of Shklov רבי ישראל משקלוב

Rabbi Israel ben Shmuel of Shklov was among the Vilna Gaon's disciples and among the leaders of the aliyah of the Perushim — the one that came in three waves in 1808–1810: more than five hundred people, fifteen months on the road. He himself arrived in 1809.

They settled not in Jerusalem but in Safed and Tiberias: the old debts of Judah he-Chasid's community barred Ashkenazim from Jerusalem. Then came the calamities: the plague of 1812–13, in which he lost his wife and several children; the peasants' revolt of 1834 and the sacking of Safed; and the earthquake of 1 January 1837, in which more than two thousand of Safed's Jews died. Each time he organised relief and wrote to the diaspora.

Pe'at HaShulchan (Safed, 1836) is a code of the commandments bound to the Land: terumah, ma'aser, shemittah, challah. Karo did not include them in the Shulchan Aruch — they had no application. The Perushim turned out to be the first Ashkenazi community in centuries that actually farmed the land, and the law was needed in earnest. The book was printed in Safed a few months before the earthquake destroyed the press.

In 1830 he sent Rabbi Baruch ben Shmuel of Pinsk to Yemen — to seek the lost tribes, partly in the hope of finding among them an unbroken ordination and restoring the Sanhedrin. The emissary was murdered in Yemen in 1834. Rabbi Israel himself died in 1839 in Tiberias, having spent his last years in Jerusalem.