Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Rabinowitz, Reb Itzele Ponevezher, was born in 1854 in Shereshevo, Belarus, into a well-to-do merchant family. At fourteen he left home to study in Selets under Rabbi Yerucham Perlman, later rabbi of Minsk. A few years later he went with Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik to Brest-Litovsk: studying together, the two young men developed a new method of Talmud study based on logical analysis and conceptual understanding of the text, breaking with pilpul.

In 1889 he became a teacher at the Slobodka yeshiva, which he left in 1894 because of reservations about the Mussar path the institution followed, becoming rabbi of Gorzd. In 1896 he was appointed rabbi of Ponevezh, Lithuania, succeeding the Aderet, and in 1909 founded the Ponevezh yeshiva there.

Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik of Boston used to say that two great roshei yeshiva had opened new horizons in Talmudic thought in the nineteenth century: Rabbi Chaim of Brisk and Rabbi Itzele of Ponevezh. His method of conceptual analysis deeply influenced learning in the Lithuanian yeshivot. His teachings were published as Zecher Yitzchak.

He passed away in 1919.