Simcha Blass Simcha Blass Simcha Blass (November 27, 1897 – July 18, 1982; ) was a Polish-Israeli engineer and inventor who developed the drip irrigation system with his son Yeshayahu. Simcha Blass was born in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire, to an Orthodox Jewish family. He was active in the Jewish self-defense units organized in Warsaw to defend Jews during the end of World War I. His engineering studies in Warsaw were interrupted by the Polish-Soviet War and completed after that war. During the war, he was recruited to the Polish Army, there he invented for the
Simcha Zissel Ziv Bloch the chief rabbi of Bausk and Plunge. Other students of Simcha Zissel entered professions including medicine, law, and engineering. One of his students, Israel Isidor Elyashev, became a well-known literary critic. Many of Simcha Zissel's discourses and letters to his students were published in a two-volume work, "Hokhmah U-Musar", edited by Rabbi Yeruchom Levovitz and Rabbi Simcha Zissel Halevi Levovitz. Additional letters, as well as transcriptions of his words by his disciples, appear in a series of volumes under the title "Kitvei Ha-Sabba Mi-Kelm". An English translation of the opening letters of "Hokhmah U-Musar" by Rabbi Ira Stone appears