Shut Rivash Vilna 1879 Copy of Rav Yaakov Yosef Preil Rav of krakes Missing front cover Last 2 pages torn at bottom corner Rabbi Yehoshua Yosef Preil was born in Birzai. Various articles about him and obituaries give his year of birth as 1856, 1858 and 1865. According to his sister, Golda Miriam Schwartz: "He was born on 12 Tevet 5619 in Birzai" which is equivalent to 19 December 1858. While yet a youth he stood out for his intellectual abilities and was referred to as the ilui (genius) of Birzai. In those days Rabbi Asher Nissan, one of the great scholars of that generation, whose wife was a relative of the Preils', was Rabbi of Birzai. The Rabbi composed many novellae [new insights into the Talmud] but was unable to record them, which the Preil lad did for him. Rabbi Asher Nissan was continually amazed by the young lad's quick grasp of difficult and complex issues. His book Gan Na'ul was written this way, in clear and appropriate language, by the young Preil. At that time he, together with some other boys his age, edited a Hebrew weekly. They received 5 kopeks per copy and they used the profits to buy cigarettes which they smoked in secret. The famous writer, Yosef Leib Zusnitz who lived in Birzai, got hold of a copy which so impressed him that he placed a standing order for 50 copies which he distributed. When Yehoshua Yosef's father heard that Zusnitz, who was known as a freethinker, was buying the weekly, he ordered his son to stop issuing it. At the age of eleven Yehoshua Yosef studied in Wabalnik and Vitebsk under the supervision of Rabbi Zalman Landau. At the age of fourteen he returned to Birzai and became engaged, but the engagement was broken, possibly because the bride had the same middle name as his mother. When he was sixteen he married a girl named Devorah Bracha in Sventsyany (Svencionys, in the Vilna district) where Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, the first of the religious Zionists and first head of the Mizrachi movement, was rabbi at the time. Rabbi Preil became a close friend and confidant of Rabbi Reines and they remained friends until his last day. In 1884 Rabbi Preil was appointed Rabbi of Krakes, a post which he held until his untimely death twelve years later. Rabbi Preil wrote his philosophical book Eglei-Tal in 1886, a book which reveals not only the depth of his knowledge of the Jewish sources but also a broad knowledge of the non-Jewish world. When his book evoked a strong reaction from Judah Leib Rosenthal, one of the leaders of the haskalah [enlightenment] movement, in the journal "Hamelitz", Rabbi Preil responded with a number of articles in the same journal. The Orthodox eagerly looked forward to his articles and even those who did not agree with him honored him because he did not distort the truth. He wrote what he felt was true and while he wrote against the "enlightened" authors he also criticized his rabbinical colleagues when he thought them intellectually dishonest. Rabbi Preil was not a well man and there were times that he was bedridden for days and weeks, which did not prevent him from acquiring an in-depth knowledge of Russian and German and, toward the end was studying French. These studies did not detract from his study of Torah and he wrote many responsa [decisions on questions of Jewish law submitted to him by other rabbis], novellae and homiletical materials.