Latest news with #NationalLibraryofIsrael
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
14th century Shem Tov Bible comes home to Jerusalem
The Shem Tov Bible, a stunning 14th-century manuscript created by the renowned kabbalist Rabbi Shem Tov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon, will be displayed in the National Library of Israel. The National Library of Israel proudly announced this month the arrival and public display ofthe Shem Tov Bible, a stunning 14th-century manuscript created by the renowned kabbalist Rabbi Shem Tov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon. This extraordinary codex—both a work of biblical scholarship and an artistic masterpiece—is now exhibited as part of the Library's permanent collection. Created in 1312 in Spain, the Shem Tov Bible reflects the rich spiritual and intellectual life of Sephardic Jewry during the medieval period. Combining deep kabbalistic insight, meticulous Masoretic tradition, and exquisite illumination, the manuscript offers a unique window into Jewish mysticism and textual transmission. Rabbi Shem Tov himself embarked on a journey to the Land of Israel shortly after completing the manuscript, settling there by 1315 and continuing his scholarly work until his death around 1330. Over the centuries, the Bible traveled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, where it gained a reputation for mystical powers, especially among women seeking a safe childbirth. In the modern era, the manuscript passed through notable private collections, including that of David Solomon Sassoon in the early 20th century, and later European collectors. In 2024, the Bible was auctioned at Sotheby's and purchased by Terri and Andrew Herenstein, who generously loaned it to the National Library for long-term public display. Sallai Meridor, Chairman of the National Library of Israel, emphasized the profound symbolism of the Bible's return to Jerusalem, especially coinciding with Shavuot, the festival commemorating the giving of the Torah. 'Having journeyed from Spain to Jerusalem, Baghdad, Tripoli, London, and Geneva, the Shem Tov Bible has come full circle and is now back home in the land where Rabbi Shem Tov lived and intended for it to be,' Meridor said. He also expressed deep gratitude to the Herenstein family for making this historic loan possible. Dr. Chaim Neria, curator of the Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica Collection at the Library, highlighted the Bible's scholarly importance. 'This manuscript represents the pinnacle of biblical and kabbalistic scholarship from the medieval period,' he said. He noted its detailed adherence to the Sefer Tagei, a traditional guide for sacred scribal practices, and its unique references to now-lost earlier texts such as the Hilleli Codex from 600 CE. Beyond its textual significance, the Shem Tov Bible is celebrated for its artistic beauty. Its richly decorated pages feature gothic arches, arcades, birds, beasts, and gilded frames surrounding the biblical verses, inspired by the artistic languages of both Islamic and Christian traditions of the time, yet adapted to Jewish ritual aesthetics. The Shem Tov Bible was unveiled to the public on May 8, 2025, as part of the National Library's 'A Treasury of Words' exhibition in the William Davidson Permanent Exhibition Gallery. The Herenstein family also announced plans to digitize the manuscript to enable worldwide access for scholars and enthusiasts alike. 'The Shem Tov Bible stands as a unique cultural artifact,' the family said. 'We are delighted that it will be preserved, studied, and admired by future generations.' For more information about the manuscript and to view images, visit theNational Library of Israel's website.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
German president visits Israel to mark 60 years of diplomatic ties
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in Jerusalem on Tuesday to mark 60 years of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, forged in the grim shadow of the Holocaust. Steinmeier was welcomed at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport with military honours by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who visited Germany on Monday to mark the diplomatic milestone. Diplomatic ties were formally established on May 12, 1965, following an agreement between Germany's then-chancellor Ludwig Erhard and Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol. The move came after a gradual rapprochement between two nations whose relationship had been deeply scarred by the atrocities carried out during the Holocaust, during which Nazi Germany murdered some 6 million Jews. In the following decades, Germany and Israel have built a close network of political, economic, military, scientific and cultural cooperation. But the anniversary was overshadowed by the ongoing Gaza war, with Steinmeier appealing to Herzog in Berlin to lift the blockade preventing humanitarian aid from reaching the civilian population in the coastal area and adhere to international law. "Israel's enemies do not abide by the rules, but we must," said Steinmeier in his speech at a state banquet in the German capital on Monday evening. At the same time, he noted Israel's right to self-defence. In Jerusalem, the two heads of states visited the National Library of Israel, with Steinmeier set to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later in the afternoon. Human rights group Amnesty International had previously called on the German president to refrain from meeting Netanyahu, who is being sought under an international arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court over accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza.
New York Times
24-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
A Discovery of Lost Pages Brings to Light a ‘Last Great Yiddish Novel'
Altie Karper had been waiting for the call for years. An editor at a Knopf imprint, she had long wanted to publish an English translation of the last novel by Chaim Grade, one of the leading Yiddish authors of the 20th century. Grade was less well known than the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was held in greater esteem in some literary quarters. He'd written the novel in question through the 1960s and 1970s, and published it in installments in New York's Yiddish newspapers. But he died in 1982 without publishing a final Yiddish version. The following year, his mercurial widow, Inna Hecker Grade, signed a contract with Knopf to publish an English-language translation. To do that, Knopf needed the original pages in Yiddish, with Grade's changes and corrections. But Inna, who held his papers, put up roadblocks. She offered to translate, but then went silent, rebuffing entreaties from two editors over the years and refusing to consent to another translator. Karper took over the project in 2007, with no success. And then, in 2010, Inna died without any children or a will, leaving behind a morass of 20,000 books, manuscripts, files and correspondence in their cluttered Bronx apartment. The Bronx public administrator turned the papers over to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. The galleys, if they existed, were somewhere in there. Finally, in 2014, Karper received a call from Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute. It was the call. 'We found it!' he said. In the small world of Yiddish literature, the discovery of the pages had the startling impact of a lost Hemingway manuscript suddenly turning up. 'I nearly passed out,' said Karper, who retired in December as the editorial director of Schocken Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday. 'This was the Holy Grail.' In March, the 649-page novel, 'Sons and Daughters,' painstakingly translated by Rose Waldman over a period of eight interrupted years, and edited for another two, will be published by Knopf. Karper hailed the book as a masterpiece. In the book's introduction, the literary critic Adam Kirsch said 'Sons and Daughters' was 'probably the last great Yiddish novel.' Giving it more of a contemporary spin, Brent said the novel, set in the turbulent period between the two world wars, distills 'conflicts that still bedevil the Jewish people today.' The novel tells the story of Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, the Orthodox rabbi of the imagined Lithuanian shtetl of Morehdalye, whose three sons and two daughters are drifting away from the Jewish traditions he venerates. His children are variously drawn to the unfettered temptations of a more secular life — entrepreneurial success, sexual fulfillment, Zionist pioneering in Palestine and cultural freedom in the United States. While the rabbi's heartbreak may sound familiar to lovers of the humorous Sholem Aleichem stories that were turned into the popular musical 'Fiddler on the Roof,' the tone of 'Sons and Daughters' is less folksy, and the stakes seem higher. 'Sholem Aleichem writes about that world like Mark Twain,' Karper said. 'Chaim Grade writes about it like Dostoyevsky. And hanging over the novel is the knowledge that in 10 years, these people will all be gone.' Todd Portnowitz, who took over the book's editing from Karper, reached for another Russian colossus to describe the Grade novel, calling it 'Tolstoyan in scope,' because it depicts so many layers — religious, economic, romantic and cultural — of that bygone world. The novel portrays the hubris-tinged rivalries among rabbis, the enmity between different types of Orthodoxy, the momentous concerns around life cycle events like engagement and marriage and the backdrop of food markets, clothing shops and ramshackle wooden synagogues. The writing is often straightforward and unadorned but there are evocative touches on every page and many comic moments. Portnowitz was particularly taken with 'the childlike innocence of Grade's natural descriptions — of the Narew river, the snow, the dark, the trees. I'd add that I think part of that innocence is that he's seeing these landscapes, from his home in the Bronx, through the gauze of memory, through the eyes of his younger self, with a kind of nostalgic glow.' Grade (pronounced GRAHD-uh) describes one rabbi this way: 'A tall, slim man, dour and cold, he smelled of the dust of crumbling texts in a vacant synagogue.' A seedy men's clothing shop in Bialystok, he writes, sold 'off-the-rack clothing in cheap fabrics, sewn by third-rate tailors,' its salesmen instructed that, if a jacket doesn't fit a customer, 'you grab him a jacket two sizes smaller, yanking and pulling in such an artful way that the armpits don't feel too tight and the sleeves don't look too short.' Throughout, the reader senses the wry affection Grade felt for his lost world, its rogues as well as its personages. Waldman, the translator, recalled that Grade once said that, although he was not a religious man, he felt he had been saved from the Holocaust to write about this world. Almost as atypical as the novel is the saga of its author and how his novel came to be published more than 40 years after his death. Born in 1910, Grade grew up in Vilna, Lithuania (Vilnius in Lithuanian), then a hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. He attended yeshivas that were known for their emphasis on rigorous ethical conduct — a counterpoint to the Hasidic schools, with their emphasis on spirited engagement with the Torah. As a teenager, he began writing poetry and was a founder of Yung Vilne, a circle of avant-garde poets and artists. When the Germans attacked Soviet-occupied Lithuania, he fled eastward. His wife and mother lingered behind, assuming, as many did then, that the German invaders would not harm women. They did not survive. In Russia, Grade married Inna, and they emigrated to the United States in 1948. Settling into an apartment near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Grade turned out a half-dozen novels that vividly depicted life in Eastern Europe, including 'The Agunah,' 'The Yeshiva' and 'Rabbis and Wives,' as well as a collection of three novellas and a posthumously published memoir, 'My Mother's Sabbath Days.' Elie Wiesel praised him as 'one of the great — if not the greatest — of living Yiddish novelists.' After his death in 1982, publishers and scholars who wanted to track down Grade's manuscripts and correspondence were almost always turned away by Inna. (In a letter, Grade once told her, 'consciously or unconsciously your goal in life is to torture and scare me.') Grade's reputation began to fade. Despite the fact that 'Sons and Daughters' was never published as a book in Yiddish, interest in a translation remained. When Karper took over the project in 2007, she asked Brent to keep an eye out for the Yiddish galleys. The galleys, stuffed into a plain manila envelope, were finally found in 2014 by Miriam Trinh, an Israeli scholar of Yiddish literature who was surveying the Grade archive at YIVO's request. Waldman, who grew up speaking Yiddish in her Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn's Williamsburg and had translated works by S. Ansky and I.L. Peretz, was chosen to do the translation. But the saga was not over yet. In 2016, Karper received a call from Waldman. 'I have good news and bad news,' the translator said. 'The good news is I finished the translation. The bad news is that novel doesn't end. It just stops.' Luckily, a graduate student at Tel Aviv University had collected correspondence from Grade that indicated the galleys were the first volume of a two-volume work. So Waldman was able to piece together that second volume from the rough weekly installments in the two Yiddish newspapers. Grade stopped writing the installments in 1976 and, for reasons that remained unclear, never resumed. But then in 2023, after YIVO had digitized the entire trove of Grade's apartment, Waldman stumbled across two pages that seemed to be an effort by Grade to map out the novel's ending. She included those pages in a translator's note at the book's end. 'So here it is,' Waldman says in the note. 'Not an actual ending but a glimpse of what we might have gotten had Grade completed 'Sons and Daughters.' It will have to suffice.'
