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Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandatory Palestine, the founder of Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav Kook (The Central Universal Yeshiva), Jewish thinker, Halakhist, Kabbalist and a renowned Torah scholar. He is known in Hebrew as הרב אברהם יצחק הכהן קוק HaRav Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook, and by the acronym הראיה (HaRaAYaH), or simply as "HaRav." He was one of the most celebrated and influential rabbis of the 20th century
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Rav Kook was born in Grīva in the Courland Governorate of the Russian Empire in 1865, today a part of Daugavpils, Latvia, the oldest of eight children. His father, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Ha-Cohen Kook, was a student of the Volozhin yeshiva, the "mother of the Lithuanian yeshivas", whereas his maternal grandfather was an avid follower of the Kapust branch of the Hassidic movement, founded by the son of the great Rabbi of Chabad, the "Tzemach Tzedek," known also as Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitch