Binyamin Zeilberger

On October 10, 2005, at the age of 84, Rabbi Zeilberger died in Brooklyn, leaving behind his wife, brother, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Rabbi Zeilberger soon joined the Beth Hatalmud Rabbinical College in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The yeshiva had been established in 1950 by older students from the Mir Yeshiva who had also escaped from Europe. Known as eltere Mirrers (older students of Mir), these included Rabbi Aryeh Leib Malin and Rabbi Chaim Vysokier. After the deaths of Rabbis Malin and Vysokier, Rabbi Zeilberger, one of the few remaining eltere Mirrers in Beth HaTalmud, became one of rosh yeshivas. In his position, he was recognized as a talmid chacham with an "encyclopedic knowledge" of the Talmud. Altogether, he served on the yeshiva faculty for over fifty years.

In 1947, after World War II, the yeshiva emigrated tp New York where the yeshiva resettled. It was around this time that Binyamin married his wife, Sara Rochel Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Yisrael Chaim Kaplan who in turn was the son-in-law of Rabbi Yeruchom Levovitz.

When World War II broke out in 1939, the Mir Yeshiva (as well as many other yeshivas in Poland) fled to Lithuania, which although part of the Soviet Union, was promised to be granted independence. Binyamin remained with the yeshiva in Lithuania, and in 1941 as well, when the yeshiva left Europe for Japan via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. From Japan, the Mir Yeshiva was relocated to Shanghai in Japanese-occupied China where they remained for several years. It's said that it was during his years in China that Binyamin grew into a gadol.

Rabbi Zeilberger was born in Koenigshaufen, Germany near Würzburg on March 14, 1921, to Yehuda (Julius) and Chana (Johanna) Zeilberger. In 1935, when he was fourteen years old, Rabbi Dr. Samson Raphael Weiss of the Wurzburg Seminary convinced him as well as another fourteen-year-old boy, Naftoli Neuberger, to enroll in the Mir Yeshiva, then in Poland. In Mir, he shared a stanzia (room in a boarding house) with students much older than himself, namely Aryeh Leib Malin, Yonah Minsker, and Michel Feinstein. He would later attribute his growth in learning to his relationships with these students, who were known as "worthy of being rosh yeshivas in their own right." He was similarly influenced by the talks of Rabbi Yeruchom Levovitz, who died only two months after Binyamin's arrival in Mir.