Telshe Yeshiva
Yeshiva located in Telšiai, Lithuania
Telshe Yeshiva (Yiddish: טעלזער ישיבה; Lithuanian: Telšių ješiva; also spelled Telz) is a yeshiva in Wickliffe, Ohio, formerly located in Telšiai, Lithuania. During World War II the yeshiva relocated to Cleveland, Ohio in the United States and is now known as the Rabbinical College of Telshe, commonly referred to as Telz Yeshiva, or Telz for short. In 1957, the yeshiva moved out of Cleveland proper to the Wickliffe suburb.
It is a Haredi (ultra-orthodox) institution of Torah study, with additional branches in Chicago (which eventually became its own institution, no longer associated with the Cleveland Yeshiva) and in New York. It is the successor of the New Haven Yeshiva of Cleveland.
History
The yeshiva was founded in 1875 in the town of Telshi (Lithuanian: Telšiai, Russian: Тельши, Yiddish: טעלז, romanized: Telz) in Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire. By 1900 it was "one of the three largest yeshivot in Imperial Russia."
The yeshiva was established by three Orthodox rabbis and Talmudists:
Meir Atlas, later the rabbi of Shavli and the father-in-law of Elchonon Wasserman and Chaim Ozer Grodzensky;
Zvi Yaakov Oppenheim, who later became the rabbi of Kelm; and
Shlomo Zalman Abel, the brother-in-law of Shimon Shkop.
Rabbi Zvi Yaakov Oppenheim
Zvi Yaakov Oppenheim (Hebrew: צבי יעקב אופנהיים; 1854–1926) was Chief Rabbi of Kelm, Lithuania, and one of the founders of the yeshiva. Oppenheim was born in 1854 in the small village of Yakubowe (now Jokūbavas, Kretinga district, Lithuania). He showed extraordinary talents from his earliest youth and at age nine could already study a page of Talmud with commentaries on his own.
“Telshe Yeshiva” enters the record as yeshiva located in Telšiai, Lithuania. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Telshe, Yeshiva and located can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 May 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2898551. VIAF identifies the subject as 158335782. Authority coordinates are 41.594, -81.483. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1875, 1900 and 1854.
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This entry incorporates text from “Telshe Yeshiva” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.