Rabbi Yitzchok Zilber was born in Kazan, Russia, several months before the Bolshevik Russian Revolution in 1917. His father, Rabbi Ben Tzion Chaim Zilber (originally Tsiyuni), a respected rabbinic scholar and rabbi of the city of Kazan, refused to send his son to an anti-religious Soviet school and taught him privately at home, teaching him Jewish law and tradition as well as secular knowledge.