The name of the yeshiva is an acronym for Israel Torah Research Institute, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit. From its founding, the yeshiva was officially called Yeshivas Midrash HaTalmud Tiferes Avraham – Itri. After the death of its founder, Rabbi Mordechai Elefant, in 2009, the name was changed to Yeshivas Midrash HaTalmud Zehav Mordechai – Itri.
History
Yeshivas Itri was founded in 1968 by Rabbi Mordechai Elefant, an American-born educator who was a close student of Rabbi Aharon Kotler, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Malin and Rabbi Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik. He married the granddaughter of Yaakov Yosef Herman. The initial student body comprised 60 kollel students, but enrollment soon expanded with unmarried yeshiva students. The yeshiva met for several years in the Orient House hotel in East Jerusalem. Elefant successfully relocated it to the premises of an old British Mandate hospital in the southeast of the city, near the Arab village of Beit Safafa, in the 1970s. Students were housed in adjacent apartments. By 1971, enrollment was at 250 students, the majority from the United States. The yeshiva received funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, government sources, and private donations. Over time, the institution grew to encompass a kollel, yeshiva gedola, yeshiva ketana, and Talmud Torah. Branches of the yeshiva were also opened in Hadera and in the United States.
Fraud investigation
In 1999 yeshiva administrator Rabbi Chaim Weiss and businessman David Appel were suspected of embezzling NIS 9 million from yeshiva coffers during Elefant's medical leave. The police investigation carried on for years; by 2014, police theorized that the stolen money was meant to pay for the defense of Aryeh Deri, who was convicted on charges of fraud and bribery in 2000.
Offshoots
Several educational programs for Diaspora Jews were spun off from Yeshivas Itri. They include:
Shvut Ami Center for Russian Jews, founded in 1976 as a branch of Yeshivas Itri by Shimon Grilius, a former Prisoner of Zion; it later became an independent program.
Bruria, founded in 1976 by Rabbi Chaim Brovender as a spinoff of Yeshivas Itri's women's program.
Shapell's/Darche Noam, was a spinoff of the Yeshivas Itri program for English-speaking men.
Elefant founded the Kiryat Itri neighborhood in northern Jerusalem in 1967, the year before he established the yeshiva. This Orthodox Jewish housing development, adjacent to Kiryat Mattersdorf and designed for 250 families, was undertaken in cooperation with the Jewish Agency for Israel to encourage American Jewish immigration to Israel. Rabbi Nathan Kamenetsky, an instructor at Yeshivas Itri, lived in Kiryat Itri with his family.
