Yosef Shalom Elyashiv (; 10 April 1910 – 18 July 2012) was a Haredi Rabbi and posek (arbiter of Jewish law) who lived in Jerusalem. Until his death at the age of 102, Rav Elyashiv was the paramount leader of both Israel and the Diaspora Lithuanian-Haredi community, and many Ashkenazi Jews regarded him as the posek ha-dor, the contemporary leading authority on halakha, or Jewish law. He spent most of his days engaged in Talmudical study, and delivered lectures in Talmud and Shulkhan Arukh at a local synagogue in the Meah Shearim area in Jerusalem where he lived. He received supplicants from all over the world, and answered the most complex Halakhic inquiries. Biography Rav Elyashiv was the son of Rav Avraham Elyashiv (Erener) of Gomel, Belarus, and Chaya Musha, daughter of the kabbalist Rav Shlomo Elyashiv (died 1925) of Šiauliai, Lithuania. Born in 1910 at Šiauliai, Yosef Shalom Elyashiv arrived with his parents in Mandatory Palestine in 1922, aged 12. He was an only child, born to his parents after 17 years of marriage. At the suggestion of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, Yosef Shalom married Sheina Chaya (died 19 June 1994), a daughter of Rav Aryeh Levin. Kook also conducted the wedding. The couple had five sons and seven daughters. Six of their daughters married significant Rabbinic figures. During Elyashiv's lifetime, six of his children died. Two died in their youth: a son who died of illness as a child, and a daughter killed by Jordanian shelling in 1948. Four other children died over the course of his lifetime. At the time of his death, he had approximately 1,400 descendants, including two sixth-generation descendants. He had seen the beginning of a sixth generation in 2009, when a grandson was born to one of his great-grandchildren. Death In February 2012, the 101-year-old Rav was admitted into the cardiac intensive care unit of the Jesselson Heart Center at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center under the supervision of cardiology branch head Dan Tzivoni and his personal physician. He was admitted due to an acute condition of edema of the lungs and congestion in the heart. He died on 18 July 2012, aged 102, and was buried on Har HaMenuchot after a late-night funeral procession that attracted an estimated 250,000 people. Spiritual and political leader In contrast to his later positions vis a vis the State of Israel,