Yom Kippur through the centuries: The prayer books that preserve centuries of Jewish history
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, NLI’s curator Dr. Chaim Neria explains how the NLI came to house thousands of prayer books, noting that “it fits into the overall mission of the library.”
The National Library of Israel houses an impressive collection of prayer books and holiday-related items that offer invaluable insights into the Jewish High Holy Days. Dr. Chaim Neria, the NLI's curator of the Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica Collection, shared a diverse array of Yom Kippur-related artifacts from their vast archive, which includes millions of physical and digital items such as books, journals, manuscripts, personal archives, and Jewish music.
The library's mission to amass a comprehensive collection of books about the Jewish people mirrors its commitment to preserving Jewish history, with aspirations to eventually hold the best documentation of Jewish life since the invention of printing. The popularity of prayer books, as a necessity for the devout, likely contributed to their widespread production and subsequent inclusion in the NLI's collection.
One particularly intriguing Yom Kippur prayer book, printed in New York in 1942 by the Ziegelheim Press, contained an inscription mourning the loss of a Jewish soldier who fell on Yom Kippur, 1944 while liberating Holland. The soldier, David Meyer Wald, was born in Belarus, immigrated to the United States in 1938, and served in the 325th Infantry Regiment of the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division.
The prayer book's history remained shrouded in mystery until researchers discovered a Torah scroll dedicated in his memory by his parents, which was later donated to a synagogue near his burial site in Holland. The prayer books were ultimately donated to the NLI in memory of this American Jewish soldier.
Delving deeper into Jewish history, Neria introduced the Cairo Genizah, a repository of hundreds of thousands of Jewish documents and fragments discovered in the attic of a Cairo synagogue in the mid-1800s. Among the treasures in the genizah is a fragment from an ancient Yom Kippur prayer book, written in the late 11th or early 12th century by scribe Hillel Ben-Eli, a cantor from Baghdad who immigrated to Egypt.
This prayer book, the oldest in the NLI's collection and one of the oldest in the world, features a piyut by Rabbi Eliezer Kalir, a renowned Jewish poet. The genizah's significance lies in its centrality as a hub of Jewish activity, commerce, and religious life, with Cairo serving as a refuge for merchants, rabbis, and scholars seeking knowledge and connection.
Written by urgent.news from Jerusalem Post's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
