Avraham Aharon Price
Abraham Aharon Price was a renowned Torah scholar, writer, educator, and a community leader in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was one of the city's most influential rabbinic figures.
Early life
Abraham Aharon Price was born on December 10, 1900, in Stopnica, a town in Busko County, Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, in south-central Poland, to Rabbi Joseph and Basia Price. At the age of 7, he studied with Rabbi Jerusalimski in Kielce. At the age of 9, he was sent to study with Rabbi Avrohom Bornsztain, founder of the Sochatchov Hasidic dynasty and author of Avnei Nezer. He was ordained by Rabbi Sillman at the Rabbinical Seminary in Sochaczew, Poland in 1919. In 1923, Price moved to Berlin, where he became a banker. In Berlin, he studied with Rabbi Chaim Heller after business hours. In connection with rise of Nazism, he fled Berlin for Paris in the early 1930s, and lived there before arriving in Toronto, Canada, in 1937.Career
In Toronto, Price was named dean of the Torat Chaim yeshiva and was rabbi of several congregations. In 1941 he ordained the first three rabbis to be ordained in Canada. Initially, Yeshiva Torat Chaim was based in a crowded room on College Street. Then, it moved to a house at Ulster and Markham Street, Toronto, and seven years later, to his yeshiva building at the corner of Montrose Avenue and College Street.Notable students
Many prominent rabbis were ordained at Price's yeshiva and many students received their Hebrew and Talmudic educations there. A number of Price's students became influential community leaders in their own right.- Michael Rosensweig – Rosh Yeshiva at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University and the Rosh Kollel of the Beren Kollel Elyon
- Gedaliah Felder, in addition to succeeding Price as Chief Rabbi of Toronto, also led the Shomrai Shabos Synagogue of Toronto
- Albert Pappenheim led Beth David B'nai Israel Beth Am Congregation of Toronto
- Erwin Schild led Adath Israel Congregation of Toronto
- Benjamin Hauer led Congregation Chevra Kadisha – B'nai Jacob of Montreal
- Phillip Rosensweig led the Beth Jacob Congregation of Kitchener-Waterloo; and Joseph Kelman led Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue of Toronto. .
World War II refugees
Library
Rabbi Price was known for his impressive collection of rabbinic materials. By 1950 The Toronto Daily Star reported on his library:As Rabbi A. A. Price works in his study on Palmerston Blvd., he is surrounded by what is probably the largest private library of Hebrew books on this continent, a total of 2,200 volumes. Among them is one published in Italy 416 years ago and written by Benjamin Zev, a physician and scholar. There is only on other copy of Zev's book know to exist and it is in the British Museum....
Rabbi Price's present library represents less than half of the original collection owned by the Polish-born, 51-year-old rabbi. He had them brought over after he decided to extend a visit to Toronto in 1935 into a permanent stay. The rest of his books were destroyed in Paris by the Germans a week before the French capital was liberated. His brother and sister were killed in France by the Nazis, and recently an orphaned niece arrived in Toronto.
After his death, more than 3,000 items from his collection of rabbinical works, some of them very old, were donated to the University of Toronto Library. Many of his older books are now held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto in the Price Collection of Rabbinics.