Yitzchak Eizik Greishaber
1745 CE–1823 CE · Acharonim · Krakow (Cracow)
Rabbi Yitzchak Eizik Greishaber (1745–1823) was born in Kraków and later served as rabbi of Paks, in Hungary. He studied under Rabbi Yechezkel Landau, the Noda BiYehudah of Prague, and in his own years of communal service exchanged halakhic correspondence with Rabbi Moshe Sofer, the Chatam Sofer. Greishaber is chiefly remembered for a published halakhic exchange over the sturgeon, a scaled fish plentiful in Hungary's rivers, and whether it met the Torah's criteria for a permitted species. When Rabbi Aharon Chorin of Arad defended its use in his Imrei No'am, Greishaber set out the case against it in Makel No'am (c. 1799), a work that carried an approbation from Rabbi Mordechai Banet. His son, Rabbi Moshe, studied under the Chatam Sofer and likewise entered the rabbinate.
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Krakow (Cracow)Poland
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Krakow (Cracow) in this era
In the centuries after 1500, Krakow became one of the crown jewels of Jewish life in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even as the wider Polish kingdom flourished under the Jagiellonian dynasty and later the elected kings who succeeded them. The Jewish quarter (the Kazimierz district, across the Vistula River) grew dense with scholars, merchants, and artisans, its narrow streets echoing with Talmudic debate and the rhythms of Yiddish commerce. Though the community faced periodic expulsions and restrictions—and endured the catastrophic Chmielnicki massacres of 1648, which devastated Polish Jewry—Krakow remained intellectually vibrant, a stronghold of halakhic learning and mystical study. The Rema (Moses Isserles, 1520–1572), whose glosses on the Shulchan Aruch became canonical for Ashkenazi practice, lived and taught here, cementing the city's reputation as a beacon of legal and spiritual authority. By the 1700s, as Hasidic fervor spread across Eastern Europe, Krakow's yeshivas and synagogues hummed with both traditional rigorous study and the newer devotional movements, making it a crossroads where old and new forms of Jewish piety could coexist and compete.
About Krakow (Cracow)
Kraków, on the Vistula in southern Poland, was the seat of Polish kings from the eleventh century until the court moved to Warsaw in 1596. Copernicus studied in the 1490s at its Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364. Jews lived in the city from the late thirteenth century, and after 1495 they were concentrated in neighbouring Kazimierz, which became the main spiritual and cultural centre of Polish Jewry, a leading seat of Ashkenazi learning; Moses Isserles, born in Kraków, founded a yeshiva there in 1549. Under German occupation its Jews were forced into a ghetto in 1941, and most were murdered. Karol Wojtyła was archbishop of Kraków when he was elected Pope John Paul II in 1978.
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