Yom Tov Lipman Halpern

Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Halpern (Heilpern), often given the fuller name Raphael Yom Tov Lipman, was a nineteenth-century Lithuanian halakhic authority. Born in 1816 in Rozan, where his father served as rabbi, he took up his first rabbinate in Krewo in 1836 and afterward led the communities of Kieidany, Ciechanowiec, and Mezhirech. In 1859 he was called to Bialystok, where he served as rabbi until his death in 1879. He is remembered chiefly for the responsa collection Oneg Yom Tov, published in two parts in 1880 and edited by his son Chaim Naftali Herz; a homiletical work of the same title appeared later. His years in Bialystok were not untroubled: after opposing communal figures who favored wealthier families over the poor in military conscription, he was accused of disloyalty to the Russian authorities and briefly imprisoned.