Rav Pinchas Dovid Horowitz, the Bostoner Rebbe, was born in Yerushalayim to Rav Shmuel Shmelke and Sheina Elka Horowitz and was very close to his grandfather, Rav Elozor Mendel of Lelov, until the latter’s passing in 1883. He then became a devoted talmid of his uncle, Rav Dovid Tzvi Shlomo of Lelov. He also became part of a small group of boys who studied mishnayos in depth with Rav Shneur Zalman of Lublin. After his marriage to Rivka, he lived in Tzfas with her parents. When his father died tragically at age thirty-six, he was forced to move to Yerushalayim to care for his mother and younger siblings. His wife, Rivka, died in 1904. Her father, eager to keep his son-in-law in the family, suggested that he marry his granddaughter, Sora Sasha Brandwein, who was still a child. In 1909, at the age of sixteen, she gave birth to a son, Moshe. During World War I, he escaped to the United States as a refugee in 1915, with the help of Rav Yaakov Meir of Salonika, the Rav of Greece. In gratitude to the Jews of Boston, who helped him procure residential rights in America, he settled in Boston.
