Yechiel Michel was the son of the
gaon Rabbi Eliezer of
Zlatschov. Said to know the entire
Torah by heart, Yechiel was known for his mastery of
talmudic, kabbalistic, and secular knowledge. Yechiel at first regarded the
Khmelnytsky persecutions as a presage of the coming
messianic era. In a
sermon on the
Shabbat before the
Cossack riots, he admonished members of the Jewish community to be
martyred rather than forcibly converted to
Christianity. When the hordes of Khmelnytsky, taking Nemirov, began the work of pillage and massacre, a Cossack concealed Yechiel, hoping that the latter would disclose where the Jews had hidden their wealth. Yechiel was found by a Ukrainian shoemaker and clubbed to death in the Jewish cemetery on 10 or 12 June 1648. He was mourned by Rabbis
Shabbatai HaKohen and
Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller in their elegies for the victims of the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648–1649. Yechiel was the author of a work entitled
Shivrei luḥot ('Fragments of the Tablets'), containing
kabbalistic commentary on several Sabbatic sections and the weekly
Torah readings given in the
Talmud. The work was published posthumously at Lublin in 1680 by Yechiel's nephew, whose introduction includes Jewish accounts of the Cossacks' Uprising. A new edition of the work was published by Rabbi Abraham Baruch Alter Rosenberg in 1913. ==See also==