Yissocher Frand

Who is Yissocher Frand?

Rabbi Yissocher Frand is an American Charedi Orthodox rabbi and author. He is a senior lecturer at Yeshivas Ner Yisroel in Baltimore, MD. Raised in Seattle, Washington, he attended Ner Yisrael as a student and progressed to become a maggid shiur. He is well known within the Orthodox Jewish community as a skilled orator, and has given thousands of invited lectures over the past decades.

Rabbi Frand is best known for his popular parsha shiurim. His weekly lectures, started in the late 1980s, are hosted live at the Agudath Yisrael synagogue in Baltimore, and are broadcast all over the world by the Torah Conferencing Network in synagogues or Jewish community centers in over 70 cities in North America, Europe, Israel, South Africa, and Australia. The wide distribution of his lectures make them one of the best attended Jewish lectures in the world. Building on points from the weekly Torah reading, his lectures generally follow a particular style. He typically addresses a matter of halakha/Jewish law for the bulk of his lecture, while reserving the closing portion for a midrashic/homiletic talk which evinces an ethical or religious character. The Yad Yechiel Institute was founded to distribute audio recordings of Rabbi Frand's lectures, and they are sold over the Internet and in Jewish bookstores everywhere. Project Genesis publishes the midrashic portions of his weekly talks online, and the distribution of these transcriptions via email have added to his popularity. Revised versions of these shiurim have been collected and republished in book form. Rabbi Frand also gives a popular yearly lecture before Yom Kippur known as his annual "Teshuva Drasha."