Rabbi Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss is the Chief Rabbi, or Gaavad, of Jerusalem for the Edah HaChareidis. He was appointed to this post in 2004, after having served as a dayan of the Machzike Hadass community of Antwerp, Belgium. Rabbi Weiss is a British national. According to his late brother, he was born in Slovakia to Salomon Weiss, a timber merchant. He attended the localsecular school in the mornings, and studied with a private melamed in the afternoons. Before World War II, he escaped Slovakia on a Kindertransport, leaving his parents and family behind. He arrived with the Kindertransport at London after Shavuos in 1939, where he celebrated the Shabbos of his bar mitzvah at the home of a British woman who took him in. The only sefer he received for his bar mitzvah was a copy of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, which he studied many weeks until he mastered it. He also received a pair of tefillin, sent to him from his father through the Red Cross before he was murdered. By the time the tefillin arrived, neither of his parents were alive. He continued his education at Yeshivas Toras Emes in Stamford Hill, London, where he studied under Rabbi Moshe Schneider. One of his peers at the Yeshiva was Rabbi Moishe Sternbuch, who currently serves alongside him as the Raavad of Jerusalem. After his marriage, he studied at the Gateshead Kollel under Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, who served as rosh kollel. A few years later, Rabbi Weiss moved to London, where he was hired as a maggid shiur at a yeshiva, and as a posek and rav of a shul. Later, he moved to Antwerp, where he served as a maggid shiur at a yeshiva in Wilrijk, and where he was appointed as dayan in 1967. When he accepted his new role as Gaavad, he also adopted the traditional Jerusalem mode of dress. In 2019, a collection of Weiss' novellae on the books of Genesis and Exodus was published, titled Shaarei Tuviah.
Edah HaHaredis
Weiss became the head of the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox group known at 'Edah HaHaredis,' in 2004. When the Israeli government first came out with certain restrictions on citizens to protect the country from the worst results of the coronavirus pandemic, such as limiting prayer quorums and other large gatherings of people, Weiss, at first, opposed those decisions. Later, when made aware of the extreme danger the novel virus place communities in, he reversed his opposition. On 2 April 2020 the Rabbi was diagnosed with COVID-19 after having been already admitted to Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital on the previous day with high fever and low blood pressure. A few days later, on 5 April, the Rabbi was released from the hospital after his condition improved, to remain in isolation while continuing to recover.
