GRAJEWSKI, ARYEH LEIB

GRAJEWSKI, ARYEH LEIB (1896–1967), talmudic scholar, jurist, and journalist. Grajewski was born near Lomza in Poland and studied in the yeshivah of Israel Meir Ha-Kohen (the "Ḥafeẓ Ḥayyim"), in Radin and at Slobodka. At the age of 16 he was ordained rabbi by outstanding scholars. He left for Ereẓ Israel in 1913, but at the outbreak of World War i in 1914 he and his family were compelled to move to Egypt because of their Russian citizenship. On the initiative of Joseph Trumpeldor he participated in the founding of a school for the children of the refugees and exiles from Ereẓ Israel then in Alexandria. He assisted his father Simeon Ḥayyim, who was appointed Jewish chaplain to the British expeditionary force in the Near East. In 1919 he returned to Jerusalem where he taught Talmud in the Hebrew Gymnasium. In 1921 he went to Paris, completing his legal studies in the following year, taught Talmud at the Rabbinical Seminary of Paris, and was a member of the central council of the Federation of French Zionists, chairman of the Union of Jewish Students, director of a school preparing young refugees for teaching, president of the Paris union of Hebrew teachers, etc. He published poems, stories, and articles on Jewish and general topics in French newspapers (in L'Intransigeant, in which he ran a special section on Hebrew and Yiddish literature, in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, and in the Revue du Levant), in Jewish French-language newspapers, and in Hebrew papers in Ereẓ Israel and elsewhere; and he edited the French column of the Paris Yiddish paper, Parizer Haynt. He devoted himself mainly to research in Hebrew law and Talmud. His first articles in this field were published in Hebrew in Ha-Toren (no. 11, 1945), and in French in Hamenora. He was a regular contributor to the Jerusalem periodicals Ha-Mishpat and Ha-Mishpat ha-Ivri. In 1935 Grajewski returned to Ereẓ Israel and for two years was engaged in teaching, after which he devoted himself to law, practicing also as a rabbinic lawyer. He published a monograph on Joseph ibn Migash (1953, 1963²). He published Dinei Perudin u-Ketatot ba-Mishpat ha-Ivri (1948). He died in Jerusalem and bequeathed his library to the library of Hechal Shlomo in Jerusalem.

bibliography:

Tidhar, 3 (1949), 1465f.

[Zvi Kaplan]