Concurrent outstanding fellow students included Yitzchak Blazer, Simcha Zissel Ziv, Naftali Amsterdam, Yerucham Perlman and Jacob Joseph.

On Tuesday, 24 March (6th Nissan) 1874, Gordon took over the position of Chief Rabbi at Kelm, where he remained for nine years and founded a Yeshiva.

In 1875, rabbis Meir Atlas, Zvi Yaakov Oppenheim and Shlomo Zalman Abel had founded the Telz Yeshiva.

Gordon tried, unsuccessfully to hire Yitzchok Yaakov Rabinowitz ("Reb Itzele Ponovezher") to teach at the yeshiva.

[4] He warned those Jews who were not yet wary of what he perceived as the evils of Zionism to just look at what Herzl himself said and wrote about the Jewish people, and they would understand what the movement was really about.

[6] I It was winter, and Gordon's doctors warned him that England's weather was dangerous to his health, especially since he had suffered a heart attack a few years earlier.

[5] Dayan Shmuel Yitzchok Hillman of Glasgow and several leading European Rabbis (who were in London at the time) such as Moshe Mordechai Epstein of Slabodka, and Yaakov Dovid Wilovsky (the Ridvaz) of Slutzk delivered tearful eulogies in Yiddish.