Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits
was one of the greatest
Jewish scholars and thinkers
of the 20th century.
His main writings concern the Shoah,
the future of the Jewish People,
Israel and Halakhah.

Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits  (8 September 1908, Nagyvárad, Austria-Hungary – 20 August 1992, Jerusalem), was a rabbi, theologian, and educator in the Tradition of Orthodox Judaism.

He was the son of Dov Bernat Berkovits and Beila (Koos) Berkovits. His father (1885, Malčice in Slovakia - 1944, Oradea in Romania) was a rabbi and merchant. His mother died in 1944 in Auschwitz.

He was one of six siblings: Rabbi Moshe David Berkovits (1909, Romania - 1977, Israel), Victor Berkovits (1911, Romania - 1990, Israel), Myriam (Meidi) Berkovits (Romania - 1944, Auschwitz), Rachel Ḥanna Berkovits (Romania - 1944, Auschwitz) and Shmuel Berkovits (Romania - 1944, Auschwitz).

Rabbi Berkovits received his rabbinical training first under Rabbi Akiva Glasner, son of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner, the Dor Revi’i, including semicha, and then at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin as a disciple of Rabbi Yechiel Weinberg, a great master of Jewish law, and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Berlin. He served in the rabbinate in Berlin (1934–1939), in Leeds, England (1940–1946), in Sydney, Australia (1946–50), and in Boston (1950–1958). In 1958 he became chairman of the department of Jewish philosophy of the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie. At the age of 67, he  immigrated to Israel in 1976 where he taught and lectured until his death in 1992...