מקור השם ברויאר

Isaac (Isaak) Breuer (1883-1946), lawyer and leader of the German Orthodoxy, born in Papa, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary), where his father, Solomon Breuer was rabbi. Breuer was taken as a child to Frankfurt am Main, where he studied in the yeshiva founded by his father. Breuer studied law and philosophy at the Universities of Strasbourg, France, and Marburg, Germany. He practiced as a lawyer and became involved in communal life, becoming a leader of Agudat Israel.

While rejecting secular Jewish nationalism, he advocated reconstruction activities in Eretz Israel. In 1936 he settled in Jerusalem where he headed the Poalei Agudat Israel movement. A prolific author, his writings developed the religious thought of his grandfather, Shimshon Rafael Hirsch. Breuer's early works were in German but after settling in the Land of Israel, wrote in Hebrew.

His publications include "Lehre, Gesetz und Nation" ("Teaching, Law, and Nation"); "Die Welt als Schoepfung und Natur" ("The World as Creation and Nature"); "Kampf um Gott" ("Fight for God"); "Das Judenproblem; Messiasspuren" ("The Jewish Problem", 1921), in opposition to political Zionism, and expressing his religious ideal of Jewish restoration. In 1939 he contributed a chapter, "Challenge to Israel," to Leo Jung's "Judaism in a Changing World".

Breuer was a member of the Kant Society

Solomon (Shlomo Zalman) Breuer (1850-1926), rabbi, born in Pilisvörösvár, Hungary (then part of the Austrian Empire) into a family of German-speaking businessmen. Breuer at first studied under his maternal grandfather Rabbi Simon Wiener and then enrolled at the yeshiva of Pressburg (now Bratislava, in Slovakia), which was at the time headed by the Ktav Sofer, Rabbi Samuel Benjamin Sofer. He entered the University of Mainz, Germany, where he gained a doctorate and met some of the leaders of German orthodox Judaism.

In 1876 he was appointed rabbi of Papa in Hungary. However, in 1888 his father in law, Samson (Simshon) Raphael Hirsch died and in 1890 Breuer was chosen to succeed him as the rabbi of the Frankfurt on the Main Austrittsgemeinde (Independent) synagogue. He was involved in the activities of the representative organization of German orthodox communities and helped to establish the union of German orthodox rabbis (from which any rabbi who collaborated in communal work with Reform rabbis was excluded). An opponent of political Zionism and the concept that a Jewish state could in some way replace the need for Jewish religious practice, he was one of the founders of the Agudat Israel movement. He was president of the Freie Vereinigung [“Free Union”] for the advancement of Orthodox Judaism. In 1893 Breuer established in Frankfurt the Torah Lehranstalt Yeshiva which was modeled on the yeshivot which he had attended in Hungary. He directed the yeshiva for 36 years.

Three of his sons continued his work with Agudat Israel in Germany and then, after the WW I, in New York, USA.