HILEWITZ, ALTER

HILEWITZ, ALTER (1908–1995), talmudic scholar. Hilewitz was born in Zembin, Russia. He studied at the Minsk University while studying the Talmud clandestinely and received his rabbinic diploma in 1929 from Rabbi Menaḥem Gluskin, the chief rabbi of Minsk. He was active in the struggle for the rights of Russian Jews to immigrate to Israel, for which he was imprisoned five times, but in 1936 he received permission to immigrate as part of an exchange scheme of Polish Communists for Jews. In Israel he was a member of the editorial board and literary secretary of the Talmudic Encyclopedia and editor of the section on Talmud in the first five volumes of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica and was responsible for the punctuation of the El Ha-Mekorot edition of the Talmud (1948–52). In 1951 he was appointed rabbi to the Ḥasidic synagogue in Johannesburg (which he relinquished in 1970) and in 1954 principal of the Rabbinical Seminary there, heading it until his return to Israel in 1975. In 1951 he received the Rabbi Kook Prize for rabbinic literature from the Municipality of Tel Aviv. His publications include Leshonot ha-Rambam (1951) and Meḥkerei Zemanim (Part 1 – 1976; Part 2 – 1980).