MENAKHEM-TSVI-HIRSH TAKSIN

MENAKHEM-TSVI-HIRSH TAKSIN (1850-1918)

            He was born in Kamenets-Litovsk.  At age eighteen he settled in Pruzhane (Prużana) where he turned to business, later becoming an itinerant tutor in the homes of the wealthy.  He subsequently moved to Brisk (Brest), Lithuania and there wrote his religious works.  During WWI he wandered deep into Russia and after the war returned to Brisk.  He was the author of a series of Hebrew-language texts, some of which with archaic Yiddish explanations, such as: Hegyon levar mitsva (Logic of the Bar Mitzvah) (Vilna, 190-8), 56 pp.; Ḥizuk emuna (Strengthening of faith), written in 1917 (Warsaw, 1925), 101 pp., second edition (Brisk, 1926).  In the preface to the latter work of etiquette, the author wrote that he wanted “this religious work to be in the vernacular as well, so as to strengthen the ‘weak hands’ of the Jewish people whose existence was their faith.”  He died in Brisk.  Taksin was the father of Falik Zolf.

Sources: B. Ts. Ayzenstadt, Dor rabanav vesofrav (A generation of rabbis and authors) (New York, 1913), p. 17; Bet sefarim eked, “A-D.”; F. Zolf, Af fremder erd, bletlekh fun a lebn (On foreign soil, pages from a life) (Winnipeg, 1945), pp. 77-82.

Khayim Leyb Fuks