The Head of the Hevron yeshiva in the Jerusalem Geula neighborhood, Rabbi Ya’acov Haim Sarna has passed away at the age of 82, after a prolonged illness.
Rabbi Ya’acov Haim Sarna was the son of the late Rabbi Yehezkel Sarna and grandson of the late Rabbi Moshe Epstein, heads of the famed Slabodka, later called Hevron ‘Knesset Yisrael’ yeshiva.
Rabbi Sarna studied in the Lomje yeshiva for young students in Petach Tikva, and was a classmate of Rabbi Haim Kanievsky, the leading Lithuanian Torah authority, who resides in B’nei Brak.
In 1962, at the young age of 33, Rabbi Sarna began teaching at the Hevron Yeshiva, following the instructions of the head of the Mir yeshiva, Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel.
With the passing of his father in 1969, Rabbi Sarna became co-head of the Hevron yeshiva, along with his uncle Rabbi Moshe Hevroni and Rabbi Simcha Zissel Brody.
The Hevron Yeshiva is a highly prestigious institution for hareidi-orthodox students from teenage to adulthood. Originally founded in 1877 in Slabodka, a town near Kovno, LIthuania, and called by that name, one of its most famous rabbinic personalities was the "Saba miSlabodka", Rabbi Natan Tzvi Finkel, a head of the "mussar" [stringent ethics, ed.] movement.
The yeshiva moved to Hevron in 1924 where its name became the Hevron Yeshiva.
After several of its students were massacred in the 1929 Hevron pogrom, the yeshiva moved to the Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem.
A few years after the growing institution moved from Geula to a spacious building in the Jerusalem Givat Mordechai Neighborhood, Rabbi Sarna returned to the old Geula neighborhood buildings, where he reinstated the old yeshiva, called “The Geula Hevron Yeshiva” and stood at its head from that time on.