The paper was founded in 1985 by Rabbis Elazar Shach (1898–2001) and Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky (1899–1985). In 1988 Rabbi Shach went on to found the Degel HaTorah political party that later joined forces with Agudath Israel and is called United Torah Judaism. The paper was founded as part of a broad initiative to have a full range of social and communal organizations that specifically serve the Lithuanian Torah community, after it was felt that Agudat Israel, its institutions, and their paper Hamodia no longer represented their point of view.