Rabbi Tzvi Yechezkel Michelson was born on 9 Shevat 5623 (1863) in Biłgoraj, Lublin province, the son of Avraham Chaim Michelson. Orphaned as a child, he wandered from town to town and studied under his main teacher, Rabbi Yaakov David Weintraub, and under Rabbi Zev Nachum Bornstein. A prodigy, he apparently wrote responsa by the age of twelve.

In 1884, at 21, he turned down the rabbinate of Zamość and became rabbi of Krasnobród. Persecuted and put on trial by the Russian authorities after being informed on, he moved to Plonsk near Warsaw, which he served as rabbi from 1893 to 1922; from then on he was known as "the Plonsker Rav". In 1922 he settled in Warsaw, where he was av beit din and a member of the city's rabbinical council, and very active in communal affairs.

A prolific author, he wrote works of halacha and aggadah, biographies of rabbis and bibliographical studies, including the responsa collection Tirosh veYitzhar. Under Nazi occupation he continued working in the archives of the Warsaw Jewish community.

He was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, during the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, at almost eighty years of age.