It is with great sadness that Matzav.com reports the petirah of Rav Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss zt”l, gaon av bais din of the Badatz of the Eidah Hachareidis of Yerushalayim. He was 96. Rav Weiss was niftar on Friday night at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center in Yerushalayim.
Born in August 1926 in Slovakia, he was a son of R’ and Mrs. Shlomo Weiss. R’ Shlomo was a timber merchant. Rav Tuvia attended the local secular school in the mornings and learned with a private melamed in the afternoons.
Before World War II, he escaped Slovakia on a Kindertransport, leaving his parents and family behind. He arrived with the Kindertransport in London in late May of 1939, after Shavuos.
He celebrated the Shabbos of his bar mitzvah at the home of a British woman who took him in. The only sefer he received for his bar mitzvah was a copy of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, which he studied for many weeks until he mastered it. He also received a pair of tefillin, sent to him from his father through the Red Cross before he was murdered. By the time the tefillin arrived, neither of his parents were alive.
He continued his learning at Yeshivas Toras Emes in Stamford Hill, London, also known as Schneider’s Yeshiva, where he learned under Rav Moshe Yehuda Schneider. One of his peers at the yeshiva was Rav Moshe Sternbuch, raavad of the Eidah Hachareidis today.
After his marriage, he learned at the Gateshead Kollel under Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, who served as rosh kollel.
A few years later, Rav Weiss moved to London, where he was hired as a maggid shiur at a yeshiva, and as a posek and rav of a shul. Later, he moved to Antwerp, where he served as a maggid shiur at the yeshiva in Wilrijk, and where he was appointed dayan in 1967.
He became gaavad of the Eidah Hachareidus in Yerushalayim in 2004.
The levayah is slated to take place at 10 o’clock Sunday morning in Yerushalayim.
Yehi zichro boruch.