New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  It was the spring of 2004.  Frum women everywhere faced a quandary. In Brooklyn many of them set curbside bonfires of their own sheitels. In Beit Shemesh, women who had spent two thousand dollars on a sheitel traded it for a five-dollar kerchief overnight. In Far Rockaway, the Moros of the Beis Yaakovs went home as the schoolday began and changed their sheitels to tichels.  In Cleveland, a frum girls’ school actually closed for a day because the teachers did not know what to put on their heads.

The question racing through the community was simple and terrifying: was the sheitel on my head tikroves avodah zarah — an offering to idolatry, from which no Jew may derive any benefit at all?

More than two decades later, most of those women are again wearing sheitelach, many of them made from Indian hair. Perhaps the main reason for the turn around in the frum community has been the ruling from one of today’s leading Gedolim: Rav Dov Landau, citing the Chazon Ish.

Who Is Rav Dov Landau?

Rav Ephraim Dov Landau was born in Zgierz, Poland, in 1930, grandson of the Strikover Rebbe, Rav Elimelech Menachem Mendel Landa. His family made it to Eretz Yisroel before the war, settling in Rechovot, where young Dov learned first at Yeshivas HaYishuv HeChadash and then at Ponevezh, where his chavrusos included Rav Yaakov Edelstein zt”l and his rebbeim included Rav Dovid Povarsky zt”l and Rav Shmuel Rozovsky zt”l.

He married Rebbetzin Adina Sher, a granddaughter of Rav Yitzchak Isaac Sher, the rosh yeshiva of Slabodka. In the early 1980s he was appointed to the roshei yeshiva of Slabodka in Bnei Brak, a position he holds to this day, together with his cousin Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch.

With the petirah of Rav Gershon Edelstein zt”l in 2023, Rav Landau became, along with Rav Hirsch, the chairman of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of Degel HaTorah, and is widely regarded today as one of the zekeinim of the Lithuanian yeshiva world.

Although he was still a bochur when the Chazon Ish was niftar in 1953 — he considers the Chazon Ish his Rebbe Muvhak. He is today the rav of Chug Chazon Ish, and his halachic method is built, brick by brick, on Chazon Ish foundations. It was one of those foundations that he used to save the sheitels.

The Problem with Indian Hair

Much of the world’s supply of long, high-quality hair for wigs comes from India, and much of that hair is shorn in or near Hindu temples — most famously the Venkateswara temple at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh — where pilgrims submit to tonsuring as a religious act. The hair is then auctioned on the international market and eventually finds its way into sheitelach worn in Lakewood, Flatbush, Gateshead, and Yerushalayim.

In 2004 the question detonated. Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv zt”l, re-examining a teshuvah he had written in 1989 in light of new information about what actually happens at Tirupati, issued a ruling assuring that sheitels made from such hair were forbidden. Rav Moshe Sternbuch shlita ruled similarly. If the hair is tikroves avodah zarah, no benefit may be derived from it — not wearing it, not selling it, not even giving it away. The sheitel on one’s head would have to be destroyed.

Other poskim — Rav Dov Landau among them — reached a different conclusion. To understand how, we need to travel first to the town of Tzaidan in the days of the Tannaim, and then to Bnei Brak in the days of the Chazon Ish.

A Tree in Tzaidan

The Gemara in Avodah Zarah (48a) tells of a tree in Tzaidan (Sidon) that was being worshipped as an avodah zarah. The townspeople were afraid to come near it. Rabbi Shimon instructed them: go examine the pile of offerings lying beneath its branches.

They did. And buried in the pile they found a small tzurah — a carved form, an image.

Rabbi Shimon’s ruling was immediate and counterintuitive: the tree is permitted. You may use its wood, sit in its shade, benefit from it however you wish. The worshippers, he explained, were never really worshipping the tree. They were worshipping the form. The tree was merely furniture.

The Rishonim explain that the form itself, of course, remains forbidden to derive any benefit from — but the tree is free.

What looks like the object of worship is often not the object of worship. It is the basis of the following article.

The Chiddush of the Chazon Ish

The Chazon Ish (Yoreh Deah 62:21) asks a question that sounds almost philosophical but is in fact deeply halachic: when an idolater bows down before his idol, what exactly is he worshipping?

The Chazon Ish drew a line that no one had drawn so sharply before: you cannot make a korban to something that does not exist.

There are, he explained, two fundamentally different cases.

In the first case, a person worships something Hashem actually created — the sun, the moon, a particular star, a malach. This is real avodah zarah in the full halachic sense. All the laws of avodah zarah apply, including the prohibition of tikroves.

In the second case, a person worships a koach mufshat — an abstract power that he has invented in his own mind. This power was never created. It does not exist now, and it never existed. It is purely a figment of his imagination.

In the second case, the Chazon Ish rules, we are not dealing with avodah zarah in the technical halachic sense at all. We are dealing with minus — heresy. A terrible sin, certainly. But a different category, with different halachic consequences.

The Chazon Ish anchors this in the Rambam (Hilchos Avodah Zarah 2:1), whose careful formulation forbids worship of any created being — angel, sphere, star, element. Had the Rambam meant to forbid worship of every imagined power, he would have grounded the issur in “lo saasun lachem elohim.”

He didn’t.

Rather, the Rambam grounded it specifically in the worship of created things. The Chazon Ish finds confirmation in the Rambam in Hilchos Teshuvah, who labels one who attributes an image to Hashem a min — heretic — rather than an oveid avodah zarah.

From Bnei Brak to Tirupati

Rav Dov Landau applied this chiddush to the hair at Tirupati. His teshuvah appears in his sefer Minchas Dvar Mitzvah (ch. 26, in a footnote), and is cited as heter number fourteen in HaKetze’akta and more recently in Me’orei Simcha by Rabbi Simcha Friedman of Lakewood.

The question Rav Landau asked is the question Rabbi Shimon asked in Tzaidan. When a Hindu pilgrim stands before a statue in the Tirupati temple, what is he actually worshipping?

Based on the halachic testimony gathered by the poskim in 2004, Rav Landau understood the answer this way: Hindu theology, as described by its own adherents, posits an abstract spiritual power behind the physical statues. The statues themselves are not the deity; they are artistic representations of a koach mufshat, a power that the worshippers have conceived in their minds. Different statues, different representations — one imagined power behind them.

And that imagined power, Rav Landau argued, was never created by Hashem. It does not exist.

Which places Hindu worship, by the Chazon Ish’s criterion, squarely in the second category. Not avodah zarah but rather heresy.

Why This Permits the Hair

Once the classification shifts, the halachic consequences cascade.

Tikroves avodah zarah — the prohibition of deriving benefit from an offering to idolatry — requires, as a logical prerequisite, that there be avodah zarah to offer to. No avodah zarah, no tikroves. The hair shorn by pilgrims at Tirupati, however the pilgrims themselves may understand it, cannot halachically be an offering to something the halacha does not recognize as an object of worship in the first place.

Rav Landau adds a second point that strengthens the conclusion. Even within the temple complex, the shaving takes place in a separate area — not before the idol itself. So even one who disputes the first argument and maintains that Hindu worship does qualify as avodah zarah still has to contend with the fact that the hair was never placed before the idol as a formal offering.

The sheitel industry — and by extension, tens of thousands of women’s daily donning had a halachic foundation to stand on.

A Subtle Distinction That Matters

The Chazon Ish’s line is sharper than it first appears. It turns on a single criterion: was the object of worship ever actually created?

This means that worshipping the soul of a person who really lived is real avodah zarah. A soul is a created thing — it exists, it continues to exist after death (see Koheles 3:21 and Nazir 48a). To worship it is to worship something Hashem made.

But worshipping the soul of someone who never existed — a purely fictional figure — falls on the other side of the line. It is minus, not avodah zarah.

The distinction has implications well beyond sheitels, and poskim have debated its application to other religions. But it is the distinction itself that is the chiddush.

That is how Rav Dov Landau shlita saved the sheitels.

The author can be reached at [email protected]