Avrohom Eliyahu Kaplan

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Rabbi Avrohom Eliyahu [Avraham Elya] Kaplan was a prominent Orthodox rabbi. He was born around the year 1890 in Kėdainiai, a town in the Kaunas County in Lithuania. He was born an orphan, and named Avrohom Elya for his deceased father, who had passed away suddenly at the age of 33 several months before his son's birth. At about this time, Reb Avraham Elya's mother remarried a man from Telshe (Reb Avraham Elya was very close to his stepfather, and called him "The Father".

Rabbi Avraham Elya studied for several years in the renowned Yeshiva of Telshe. His poetic and pasionate nature became legendary even at a young age. At 16, Avraham Elya was drawn to the spirit of the Mussar movement, and went to learn in the "Talmud Torah" in Kelm, the yeshiva founded by Rabbi Simcha Zisel Ziv He left Kelm, however, shortly after his arrival. He then went to the famed yeshiva in Slabodka headed by Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, known as the "Alter of Slabodka", and Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein, known by his penname, "Levush Mordechai". Avraham Elya studied in Slabodka for seven years, until the outbreak of World War I left him stranded in his mother's home in Telshe. In Slabodka, Reb Avraham Elya found the path that he had sought, in triying to reconcile the Mussar philosophy of Lithuanian Haredi Judaism with the philosophy of Hasidic Judaism. At the age of 30 he was appointed as Rosh Yeshiva of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin.

He died suddenly when he was only 34 years old, about the same age as his father. In his youth (at the age of seventeen), his fiery nature induced him to compose a poem portraying impending doom and angst. This famous poem, Shak'a Chama, contains a sense of depression and searching. It begins: "The sun has set... my soul has set / In the depth of its sorrow as great as the sea..." (B'Ikvot, p. 171).