Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung (1912–1998)

Pinchas Hirschprung was born to a family of Hasidic Jewish rabbis in the small village of Dukla, Galicia, then part of Poland. His parents were Leah and Rabbi Chaim Hirschprung. He first studied Jewish religious texts with his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Dovid Tzvi Zehmin, and then enrolled in the yeshiva in Lublin. He was gifted with an extraordinary memory, and it was said about him that as a young man, he had learned all of the Talmud by heart. At age 13, he wrote his first book of Torah commentary. He also became fluent in Polish, German, and Latin. In 1941, during World War II, Rabbi Hirschprung and his wife Alta Chaya managed to flee Nazi and Soviet-occupied Poland via Lithuania to Kobe, Japan. They then traveled on to Shanghai, China, and reached Canada in October 1941, settling in Montreal. He served as the Chief Rabbi of Montreal from 1969 until his death in 1998. His memoirs were first published in Yiddish in 1944 and translated into Hebrew in 1948. The English-language version, The Vale of Tears, was published posthumously in 2016 as part of The Azrieli Foundation Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.