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Parchments Burning, Letters Soaring, and Books Lost and Found: S.Y. Agnon’s Library Fire 100 Years Later

Parchments Burning, Letters Soaring, and Books Lost and Found: S.Y. Agnon’s Library Fire 100 Years Later

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Parchments Burning, Letters Soaring, and Books Lost and Found: S.Y. Agnon’s Library Fire 100 Years Later Jeffrey Saks Rabbi Jeffrey Saks, Director of ATID and its WebYeshiva.org program, is Director of Research at Agnon House in Jerusalem and editor of the journal Tradition. Thanks to Prof. Mordecai Schwartz and Andrew Katz of the JTS Library for their assistance, and to Curt Leviant, whose questions prodded this research.  “All day I see the parchment burning, but its letters are soaring to…

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Review of Ha-Sefer ha-Kollel (Kitāb al-Ḥāwī) by Rabbi David ben Saʿadya al-Ger

Review of Ha-Sefer ha-Kollel (Kitāb al-Ḥāwī) by Rabbi David ben Saʿadya al-Ger

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Review of Ha-Sefer ha-Kollel (Kitāb al-Ḥāwī) by Rabbi David ben Saʿadya al-Ger Marc Herman Marc Herman is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and a core member of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. His research focuses on Jewish and Islamic intellectual history in the medieval Mediterranean. He is the coeditor of Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Brill, 2021) and his monograph, titled After Revelation: The Rabbinic…

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Will the Real Shas Kattan Please Stand Up

Will the Real Shas Kattan Please Stand Up

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Will the Real Shas Kattan Please Stand Up[1] Shmuel Lubin Shmuel Lubin is a doctoral candidate in biology and creator of “The Rishonim” podcast. There is an old tradition commonly referenced in the yeshiva community that Masekhet Ketubot is the “Shas Kattan” of Talmud Bavli, that is, it contains ideas that connect to just about every other area of Shas (short for “Shisha Sidrei,” all six orders of the Mishnah). The source and importance of this idea is the subject…

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Organizing the Mitzvot and the Sefer Ha-Chinukh

Organizing the Mitzvot and the Sefer Ha-Chinukh

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Organizing the Mitzvot and the Sefer Ha-Chinukh Yaakov Taubes Yaakov Taubes is the rabbi at Mount Sinai Jewish Center in Washington Heights, New York. He also serves as an assistant director at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University, and is a PhD candidate in Medieval Jewish History at the Bernard Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies. He can be reached at rabbi@mtsinaishul.com. This article follows from the excellent piece by Eli Genauer about the printing and reorganization…

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Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum

Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum

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Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum Aton M. Holzer Aton.holzer@gmail.com ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9852-3958 28 Binyamin, Beit Shemesh, Israel 9952200 The Mishnah in Ta’anit (4:6) puts forth a series of lists of five calamities that befell the Jews on each of two major fast days, the seventeenth of Tammuz and the ninth of Av, beginning in the days of Moses in the Wilderness and culminating after Bar Kochba: חמשה דברים ארעו את אבותינו בשבעה-עשר בתמוז (וב) וחמשה בתשעה באב….

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A Young Man Holding a Torah Scroll and a Young Woman Holding a Book: The Life and Afterlife of Two Illustrations

A Young Man Holding a Torah Scroll and a Young Woman Holding a Book: The Life and Afterlife of Two Illustrations

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A Young Man Holding a Torah Scroll and a Young Woman Holding a Book: The Life and Afterlife of Two Illustrations By Rachel Manekin Rachel Manekin is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. Her area of specialization is the social, political, and cultural history of Galician Jewry. She is the author of The Jews of Galicia and the Austrian Constitution: The Beginning of Modern Jewish Politics (Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2015, Hebrew), and most…

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The Haftarot in the1806 Lopez Calendar

The Haftarot in the1806 Lopez Calendar

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The Haftarot in the1806 Lopez Calendar Eli Duker Although[1] a Sephardi Machzor was published in 1766 in colonial New York by Isaac Pinto,[2] the first Jewish book printed in the newly formed United States that I am aware of was a calendar published by Moses Lopez of Newport, in 1806. Lopez born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1740 with the given name Duarte to a “New Christian” family, arrived with that family in Newport in 1767 on a ship sent by…

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Franciscans and More; “Repulsive” Practices; Saul Lieberman, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg

Franciscans and More; “Repulsive” Practices; Saul Lieberman, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg

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Franciscans and More; “Repulsive” Practices; Saul Lieberman, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg Marc B. Shapiro 1. Following up on what I wrote here and here about the term צעירים (Franciscans) and other expressions used with reference to Catholic religious orders, Brian Schwartz called my attention to a couple of relevant sources. In Milhemet Hovah (Constantinople, 1710), p. 14a, R. David Kimhi mentions a theological argument he had with one of the חכמי הצעירים. In Ginzei Nistarot (1868), vol. 2, p. 10, R. Jacob of Venice in his…

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Book Week 2024

Book Week 2024

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Book Week 2024 By Eliezer Brodt Book week recently began in Eretz Yisrael. Continuing with my now Seventeenth year tradition B”h, every year in Israel, around Shavuos time, there is a period of about ten days called Shavuah Hasefer – Book Week. Many of the companies offer sales for the whole month. Shavuah HaSefer is a sale which takes place all across the country in stores, malls and special places rented out just for the sales. There are places where…

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From Kitzingen to London, From Berlin to Boston Charting the Pathways of an Intriguing Siddur Translation

From Kitzingen to London, From Berlin to Boston Charting the Pathways of an Intriguing Siddur Translation

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From Kitzingen to London, From Berlin to Boston Charting the Pathways of an Intriguing Siddur Translation Yaakov Jaffe The vast library of Koren English-language Siddurim generally follow the same translation of the prayers, authored by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, including “The Koren Siddur” (Sacks, 2009),” The Koren Soloveitchik Siddur (2011), “The Magerman Edition” (Goldmintz, 2014), “Zimrat Ha-Aretz Birkon” (2015), ”Birkon Mesorat Harav” (Hellman, 2016), “Rav Kook Siddur” (2017), and others.  Of note is their translation of Psalm 37:25, the…

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Life After Death: The Afterlife of Tombstone Inscriptions in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Vilna

Life After Death: The Afterlife of Tombstone Inscriptions in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Vilna

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Life After Death: The Afterlife of Tombstone Inscriptions in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Vilna By Shnayer Leiman The ultimate purpose of any Jewish cemetery is to provide a resting place, with dignity, for the Jewish dead. Jewish law and custom have played a major role in regulating almost every aspect of burial from the moment of death through the funeral itself, the period of mourning that follows the funeral, and – ultimately – the erection of a tombstone over the grave.[1] Once the tombstone is…

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Hidden Treasures in Jewish Medical History at the British Library: A Post Cyber-Attack Homage

Hidden Treasures in Jewish Medical History at the British Library: A Post Cyber-Attack Homage

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Hidden Treasures in Jewish Medical History at the British Library: A Post Cyber-Attack Homage Rabbi Edward Reichman, MD On October 28, 2023, the British Library (BL) fell victim to one of the worst cyber-attacks in British History.[1] Though its precious holdings thankfully remained physically unperturbed, access by scholars across the globe to the online catalog of its massive and formidable collection, some 170 million items, was disrupted. This incident shook the world’s bibliophiles to the core, and its impact on…

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Surrounding Independence Day

Surrounding Independence Day

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Surrounding Independence Day by Aaron Ahrend Dr. Aaron Ahrend, a senior lecturer in the Department of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University, has published many studies on Talmudic commentary and Jewish liturgy. The ancients established a sign by which one could determine on which days certain holidays occur. The sign is based on the pairing of the letters Aleph and Tav (א”ת) and the days of the Passover holiday.[1] Thus is the sign: Aleph-Tav (א”ת) = the day of the week on…

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Abraham Rosenberg, R. Chaim Heller, R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach on Conversion, Abortion, Mercy Killings, and new pictures and videos of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg

Abraham Rosenberg, R. Chaim Heller, R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach on Conversion, Abortion, Mercy Killings, and new pictures and videos of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg

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Abraham Rosenberg, R. Chaim Heller, R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach on Conversion, Abortion, Mercy Killings, and new pictures and videos of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg Marc B. Shapiro 1. In my post here I discussed the enigmatic plagiarizer Abraham Rosenberg. As we saw, in 1923 and 1924 Rosenberg published articles on the Jerusalem Talmud in the Orthodox journal Jeschurun, and he later published Al Devar Tikunei Nushaot bi-Yerushalmi. In this last work, Rosenberg refers to R. Chaim Heller as his friend. I and so many…

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The Ghetto Library and Daily Life Under the Nazis

The Ghetto Library and Daily Life Under the Nazis

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The Ghetto Library and Daily Life Under the Nazis In giving the public this opportunity to learn more about the spiritual resistance of the Vilna Ghetto, we seek to immortalize the moral heroism of the victims of the Holocaust. And bring to light the phenomenon of the vitality and endurance of the Jewish people – throughout their long existence, laden with suffering and restrictions, it has forced them not to give up but to seek the means of self-expression and…

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