BLOCH, ISSACHAR BAER BEN SAMSON

BLOCH, ISSACHAR BAER BEN SAMSON (1730–1798), Austrian rabbi. Bloch was born in Hamburg and studied under Jonathan *Eybeschuetz and Ezekiel *Landau. After serving as rabbi in several communities he was rabbi in Boskovice (1793–96), and later in Mattersdorf where he died. He wrote Binat Yissakhar (Prague, 1785), a collection of his sermons with a rhymed appendix on the precepts of the priestly benediction and the redemption of the firstborn. He also wrote glosses on the Mishnah (published in the Lemberg edition, 1869) under the title Benei Yissakhar. He carried on a halakhic correspondence with some of the renowned contemporary scholars, to which reference is made in Ezekiel Landau's Noda bi-Yhudah (1928, pp. 87–89; cf. also Eleazar b. Aryeh Loeb, Shemen Roke'aḥ, (1902), 181–2; and Moses *Sofer, Ḥatam Sofer, 7 (1912), nos. 17, 18, 21). Bloch, who was childless, adopted Jacob Patraselka, ancestor of the rabbinical family of Duschinsky and the first rabbi in Nádasd (Hungary), who also carried on a correspondence with Moses Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer, oḤ, nos. 104, 106, 139; yd, nos. 243, 305; Ḥm, no. 206).

bibliography:

E. Duckesz, Chachme Ahw (1908), 24 no. 33 (Heb. section); Eisler, in: Das juedische Centralblatt, 11 (1892), 117–8; J.J. Greenwald, Ha-Yehudim be-Ungarya (1913), 43 no. 24; idem, Pe'erei Ḥakhmei Medinatenu (1910), 94 no. 190; Mandl, in: Magyar Zsidó Szemle, 17 (1900), 142; Richtmann, ibid., 22 (1905), 335–6; M. Stein, Magyar rabbik, 2 (1905), 103; 3 (1906), 145.

[Samuel Abba Horodezky]