David Tevel Katzenellenbogen

He served as rabbi in Virbalis, now in Lithuania, beginning in 1876.^[5] In 1894 he became the rabbi in Suwalki, Suwalki guberniya. In 1907 he was invited to Saint Petersburg, where he later became the chief rabbi.^[6]

In his youth he was advised to study Russian. This became very valuable for him, as he was respected by Czarist officials^[5] and frequently acted as an intermediary between the Russian government and Yiddish speaking Jews on matters of importance. He was instrumental in overturning a ban on Kosher slaughter in Finland after the sejm outlawed it in 1908.^[3] During World War 1, he was in charge of getting kosher food to Russian Jewish soldiers, and initiated an American fund for Jewish refugees.^[5]

Katzenellenbogen went to St. Petersburg as a "community spiritual rabbi." After Rabbi Eisenstadt left for Paris in 1923, he became the chief rabbi and the only Jewish religious leader in the city. He retired because of age in the late 1920s. This was a difficult period and by the late 1920s the Bolsheviks had closed all public Jewish institutions.^[1] He tried to do his best for the Jewish community until his 1931 death.^[7] He was not replaced until 1934.^[1]

He was a member of the directorate of Hoveve Tsiyon, a forerunner of modern Zionism.^[5] A contributor to Talmudic scholarship at a time when Hebrew books in Russia were rare,^[4] he wrote two books, Divre David (1928) and Ma'yam Mei Neftorah (1923);^[3] the latter was published by the official Russian press.^[4]

Katzenellenbogen family