Yosef Shalom Elyashiv (; 10 April 1910 – 18 July 2012) was a Haredi rabbi and posek (arbiter of Jewish law) who lived in Jerusalem. Until his death at the age of 102, Rav Elyashiv was the paramount leader of both Israel and the Diaspora Lithuanian-Haredi community, and many Ashkenazi Jews regarded him as the posek ha-dor, the contemporary leading authority on halakha, or Jewish law.
He spent most of his days engaged in Talmudical study, and delivered lectures in Talmud and Shulkhan Arukh at a local synagogue in the Meah Shearim area in Jerusalem where he lived. He received supplicants from all over the world, and answered the most complex Halakhic inquiries. He was an only child, born to his parents after 17 years of marriage.
At the suggestion of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, Yosef Shalom married Sheina Chaya (died 19 June 1994), a daughter of Rav Aryeh Levin.
The couple had five sons and seven daughters. Six of their daughters married significant Rabbinic figures. During Elyashiv's lifetime, six of his children died. Two died in their youth: a son who died of illness as a child, and a daughter killed by Jordanian shelling in 1948. Four other children died over the course of his lifetime. At the time of his death, he had approximately 1,400 descendants, including two sixth-generation descendants. He had seen the beginning of a sixth generation in 2009, when a grandson was born to one of his great-grandchildren. and was buried on Har HaMenuchot after a late-night funeral procession that attracted an estimated 250,000 people.
Spiritual and political leader
In contrast to his later positions vis a vis the State of Israel, Rav Elyashiv began his Rabbinic career as a judge in the government's religious court system, and was a protégé of Israel's Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog. In the early 1970s, he left the state court system. He came to the major public gatherings of Degel HaTorah, currently part of the umbrella United Torah Judaism list in the Israeli Knesset (parliament), and shared in the task of rendering decisions. While Rav Elyashiv held no official title, neither as head of a congregation, yeshiva, or particular community,
Yossi Elituv, editor of the influential ultra-Orthodox paper Mishpacha, remarked: "Rav Elyashiv will be remembered as the ultimate assiduous yeshiva scholar of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He was not seen as a political leader or as the head of group or party. He was a man who made Torah study his entire life, and this will remain an inspiration."
Published works
The Halakhic rulings and sermonic insights of Rav Elyashiv have been recorded in several books. The 6 volume Kovetz Teshuvos Elyashiv contains responsa resulting from questions asked of him over many years. Many of his ethical and sermonic comments on the Torah, most dating from the 1950s, were collected and published as Divrei Aggadah.