Rabbi Azriel Rosenbaum, one of the longest-serving teachers at Gateshead Yeshiva in northeast England, died on Shabbos, Saturday, November 14. He was 85.
Word of his death spread through the yeshiva world in Britain and Israel after Shabbos ended on Saturday night.
Rabbi Rosenbaum spent decades teaching at the yeshiva, formally known as Beis Yosef, and taught several generations of students there. A stroke in his later years left him largely confined to his home, but he kept teaching, and students came to his house for his classes until the end of his life.
Born in Budapest, he survived the Holocaust as a child and later came to Britain as a refugee. His family descended from the Chasam Sofer, the leading Hungarian rabbinic authority of the 19th century.
As a young man he went to study in Gateshead under the yeshiva’s head, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Gurwicz, author of the Talmudic work “Rashei Shearim.” He became one of Rabbi Gurwicz’s closest students.
Several of his sons and sons-in-law are Torah teachers. Among them are Rabbi Moshe Rosenbaum, who heads the Nesivos HaTorah yeshiva in Gateshead, and Rabbi Avraham Rosenbaum, the m
