[2] פp., 280:225mm., wide margins, light age staining, handwritten, signed and dated.

Responsa pertaining to a divorce R. Dr. Yaakov Avigdor (Jacob) (1896–1967) was a Polish-Mexican rabbi, author and Holocaust survivor. Prior to the Holocaust he served as Chief Rabbi of Drohobych - Boryslav in Poland, and after the war, as rabbi of the Ashkenazi community in Mexico.

He was born into a rabbinic family in Tyrawa Wołoska, a shtetl in the Austrian province of Galicia between the cities of Sanok and Przemyśl (now southeast Poland) in 1896. He excelled in religious studies, and being considered a prodigy, was ordained at the young age of 16 years. Later he studied at the universities in Kraków and Lviv, obtaining a PhD in Philosophy. Acquiring a high reputation as an orator and Talmudist, he was named Chief Rabbi of Drohobych and Boryslav, then in southeast Poland (now western Ukraine) in 1920 (age 24), where he officiated until the Nazi occupation. Being District Rabbi of about 80 surrounding villages, he also served as head ("Av") of the Beth din. He officiated at the wedding of future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin and Aliza Arnold in May of 1939 which took place at the Eden Hotel in Truskavets, Poland, which was a summer resort near Drohobych.

During the Holocaust, he lost his wife, his two daughters and his brother David the Rabbi of Andrychów, among many family members. After his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp, R. Avigdor became extremely active in the efforts of rescue and rehabilitation of Jewish refugees in postwar Europe. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1946, he accepted a pulpit in Brooklyn, New York, and six years later he was offered the rabbinate of Mexico, holding that position until his death in Mexico City in 1967.

R. Avigdor was much consulted on religious and ethical questions by worldwide peers. A prolific writer, his topics included religious philosophy, Jewish history and traditions, and commentary on Biblical text. Most of his prewar works were lost. In Mexico, he became a regular contributor to Yiddish periodicals, and published books in that language, Hebrew and Spanish. The Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem holds a Hebrew calendar written by him from memory during his internment at Buchenwald

Hebrew Description