Pinchas Hirschprung
Polish rabbi of Hasidic ancestry (1912–1998)
Pinchas Hirschprung (Hebrew: פנחס הירשפרונג; 13 July 1912, Dukla, Galicia – 25 January 1998, Montreal, Canada) was a Polish-Canadian rabbi, posek, and rosh yeshiva, who served as Chief Rabbi of Montreal from 1969 until his death.
Biography
Early life
Pinchas Hirschprung was born in 1912 to Leah (née Zehmin) and Rabbi Chaim Hirschprung in the Galician shtetl Dukla (now located in Poland). His grandfather, Rabbi Dovid Tzvi (Tevli) Zehmin, a Chortkov Ḥasid best known for his work Sefer Minḥat Solet, served as the town's av beit din. Zehmin was the teacher of Rebbes Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam and Yaakov Leiser of the Klausenburg and Pshevorsk Ḥasidic dynasties, respectively. Through his maternal great-grandfather, Yosef Moshe Teicher, Hirschprung was a direct descendant of Solomon Luria and Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen.
Hirschprung received his early religious education from his grandfather, later becoming a student of Rabbi Meir Shapiro at Yeshivat Ḥakhmei Lublin. He purportedly wrote his first sefer, Pri Pinchas, at the age of 13, and, according to Rabbi Shapiro, knew all 2,711 folio pages of the Talmud by heart as a youth. He also became proficient in Polish, German, and Latin. Hirschprung began teaching at the Yeshiva after his ordination in 1932, and became its head of admissions upon Shapiro's death the following October.
At the beginning of World War II, Rabbi Hirschprung smuggled himself from Nazi-occupied Poland into Lithuania.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2896783. VIAF identifies the subject as 24452926. The Library of Congress control number is nr91002893. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912, 1998, 1969 and 1932.
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