Bernard Illowy

Illowy continued his studies at the rabbinical college in Padua, Italy, and then returned to Bohemia, where for a time he was engaged in teaching and tutoring secular subjects in Znaim, Moravia.

He was reportedly an accomplished linguist, and besides a thorough knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, spoke fluent German, English, French, and Italian.

Like Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in Germany, Illowy wanted to strengthen traditional Torah law observance in the United States.

Rabbi Illowy's mastery of halacha became renowned throughout the United States, and halachic questions were addressed to him by pious Jews in America, looking for religious guidance.

While speaking at a National Fast Day program in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 4, 1861, Illowy said, "Who can blame our brethren of the South for seceding from a society whose government can not, or will not, protect the property rights and privileges of a great portion of the Union against the encroachments of a majority misguided by some influential, ambitious aspirants and selfish politicians who, under the color of religion and the disguise of philanthropy, have thrown the country into a general state of confusion, and millions into want and poverty?

His son, Dr. Henry Illoway wrote that shortly after his father took the position in New Orleans, “In one congregation in which he entered upon his duties on the first day of the New Year there were but four or five members who kept a kosher house, and upon the festival of Sukkot there was not a Sukkah in the whole membership.

A year later there were over forty Sukkot in the congregation, and almost every house strictly kosher.” Similar claims are noted in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, giving credit to the synagogue's president S. Friedlander for his support of Illowy.

Despite his charismatic leadership and immense scholarship, after the end of the Civil War, a large influx of Jews from other parts of the Confederacy – where the Reform movement had taken hold – became the majority of the membership of Shangarai Chasset.

In describing the Shangarai Chasset membership's vote to initiate changes to his synagogue, bitterly, Illowy wrote in the German paper Der Israelit, that: "The enemies of goodness and religion destroyed all... my delicate garden devastated."

Congregations, requiring rabbinic guidance tended to be open to the liberal innovations of the Reform movement, and heard little opposition in the United States.