Pinchas Kehati

Pinchas Kehati was born in 1910 in Volhynian Governorate

Kehati was born Pinchas Gechtman in 1910 in Volhynia, to Kehat and Malka Gechtman. His parents were killed in the Holocaust, and he later took the name Kehati in memory of his father.

He studied at the Tachkemoni school and received rabbinical ordination in Warsaw. He was a leader of the Hashomer Hadati youth movement in Poland.

He immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1935 and began studies at the Hebrew University, but left them for financial reasons. He worked for many years as a bank clerk at Bank Mizrachi and was active in Hapoel HaMizrachi and Bnei Akiva. In 1953 he joined a working committee of Hapoel HaMizrachi and took charge of its youth division.

From 1955 he published a weekly pamphlet explaining 14 mishnayot, two for each day, with about 5,000 copies. The commentary on the whole Mishnah was finished in 1963 and later appeared as books, including an English translation in 1994. In 1967 he received the Rav Kook Prize for this work.

Kehati also composed tunes for traditional texts, and one was performed at the first Hasidic Song Festival in 1969. He died on December 21, 1976. A street in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul neighborhood is named after him.