Page Six

THE JEWISH NEWS

Friday, July 6, 1945

•• •

Strange Passenger

By MEYER LEVIN

G

Eminent war correspondent;'
author of "Yehudah" and "The
Old Bunch."
•

Copyright, 1945, by Jewish Telegraphic Agency

A scholar and author reviews the his-
tory of the Siddur, oldest prayer book .
in the world and subject of frequent
theological controversies. • f. • • •

T

The Torah has ridden with me across the whole
of Germany from Leipzig to Hamburg, from
Hamburg to the Shards of Essen, from Essen to
Cologne. This Torah has passed over the rutted
byroads to the death camp of Bergen-Belsen, and
over the ashes of tfe burned typhus barracks,

HE cherem, or ban,
proclaimed by the Orthodox
rabbinate against the Recon-
sti'uctionist movement's Sid-
dur, (prayerbook) and its edit-
or, Dr. M. M. Kaplan, brings to

passed the mounds where 20,000 namelss, naked,
starved Jews lie heaped in burial.

idea inherent in our Torah is that mankind can
progress on earth only through social compact.

Sometimes there has been another passenger
with me, in the front seat—once a German
schoolteacher, once an American soldier, once a
Polish Jew wandering from camp to camp seek-
ink trace of his sister, who is most certainly long
dead, burned in Auschwitz.

The Jews made law their God, they made
man's word their God, recognizing the social
compact as highest authority. And through all the
changes of history, this one idea has bound us
together and given us, life; we believe in man's
word to man, as the basis of all human relation-
ship, as the basis of civilization.
Over the long stretches of German roads, in the
companionship of the Torah, this idea became ever
clearer to me. And now that the war was ended
here, I saw more plainly than ever the necessity
of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews. For
their idea was the antithesis of law. They be-
lieved in guile, in lies, in perversion, in force,
in torture, in any means to attain domination.
Synagogue in Ruined Hospital -
All this is known; all this has been many -times
said. But I never felt this truth with such beau-
tiful clarity as throughout this voyage.
In ruined . Cologne, there was part of a build-
ing still standing, of a group of • buildings that had
been formerly a Jewish hospital. There, I found
an earnest self-possessed little man, Israel Bram-.
son, the head of what was left of the Jewish
community. Therg were less than 100 Jews in
Cologne, and several of them were at work, clean-
ing out the few inhabitable rooms of the hospital.
One room was large enough to be used as their
Synagogue.
Brarnson carried the Torah from my jeep, and
placed it in a mended armoir. "I myself was never
very religious," he said. 'But we must have the
Torah." •
So I left the Torah, in her home in Cologne;
the few, few remnants of Israel there - will plant
the law again, in this laid, in this city to which
they brought their bride seven centuries ago;
they will live by their concept that the social
contract, the word, is holy among men, they will
try to live by this law, among a people who all
but destroyed it, among -a people who more than
any in humankind need to understand the one
whole truth of our Torah, to whom we are wed-
ded.

With these passengers, one or the other, my
Torah and I have passed through the gently rol-
ling countryside where guiltless-minded Ger-
mans worked peacefully under the warm sun; we
have passed fields where groups of German men
and women stopped along the rows of budding
plants, apparently unused 'to this labor, for until_
this summer they had had slaves.

I have carried my Torah through all this land;
most of the time I rode alone with her; when it
rained I covered her with a raincoat taken from
a German coldnel.

For entire days and nights, the Torah was my
only companion, and I remembered the legends
out of Jewish hiStory, of pious men who regarded
the Torah as a bride, and the legend of one Sab-
battai Zevi, who had been married under the
wedding canopy, with the Torah as his bride.
I am not religious; but I regard the religion of
my people as a part of our folk as a whole, in the
unity of all our past with our present, and there-
fore as a part of myself.

Torah Found. by Chaplain

This Torah in my jeep was found by Chaplain
Rabbi Sidney Lefkowitz, of the Seventh U. S.
Corps, in the ruins of a Synagogue of Cologne.
He carried it with him, through the campaign of
Germany; his- unit came to rest at Leipzig, where
the American line met the Russians. While in
Leipzig, Lefkowitz learned that a few Jews
had returned to Cologne, and that they were
attempting to reconstitute a
congregation; so when I
passed, he asked me whether
I could carry their Torah back
to them.
What is this Torah, the chief
symbol of Judaism? To most
non-Jews, there is about the
image of a Jew with his
Torah something mystic and
tribal and magic. To the non-
Jew, the \Jew is always pic-
tured in the synagogue, wear-
ing a striped shawl, and
carrying this large mysterious
ancient-looking Scroll which
must seem to contain incanta-
tions and forbidden lore.
Actually, the Torah is noth-
ing but the five books of
Moses out of the Old Testa-
ment. It is not secret. It is not
magic. It is inscribed by hand
in Hebrew upon scrolls of
parchment. The Torah is pre-
served and' worshipped in this
antique wrapping because its
scripture form is a physical
symbol of the continuity of
law.

Made Law Their God
That is all that the Jews worship: law. They
made law their God. That is how I, as a Jew of
today, understand Judaism. I do not consider as
important the content of many of the laws in
the Torah, for they belong to other times, and
some of them spring from superstitions which we
no longer feel. But the great and still-unrealized

THE SIDDUR

By RABBI ABRAHAM J. BICK

ERMANY • (Delayed)—Through-
cut this country, I have carried a strange pas-
senger in the rear of my jeep. Across the back
seat sits a wooden box, and in this box, wrapped
in black cloth, lies a scroll of the Torah.

Guiltless-Minded Germans

iewry's Best Seller

ze&
RABBI A. J. BICK

light the first siddur controv-
ersy in American-Jewish his-
tory, which is by far not the
first controversy of this type
in Jewry's history. Numerous
siddurs, edited by eminent
Jewish religious authorities,
have aroused controversy in
their time.
The siddur is,. to use a col-
loquialism, the "best-selling
among Jews. Billions
book" among
of sidurim
been pur-
chased since the first siddur
was published some one thou-
sand years ago. 'The siddur
has sold better, and is more
popular, than even the Bible
and the Talmud. '
Compiled First Edition
Compiler. of the first siddur,
published in 1075, was Rav
Amram Gaon, one of the
greatest of the' Babylonian
Jewish scholars. He compiled
the siddur at the request of
Ray Yitzchak, son of Rav
Shimon, of Spain who paid
him 10 zehuvim (gold pieces)
for the labor.
Rabbi Amram's siddur was
the model for all subsequent
siddurim. It was compiled 150
years before the emergence of
the greatest Hebrew poet of the
Golden Epoch in Spain, Rabbi
Yehudah Halevi, 200 years be-
fore the emergence of Rashi,
most popular biblical and
talmudic commentator a n d
300 years before Maimonides.
Rabbi Amram did not auth-
or the siddur, he merely as-
sembled prayers that had
already been current among
Jews for some one thousand
years, and, some, perhaps for
two thousand years. There
was a procedure of prayer
even in the first .Temple, and,
according to the Talmud,
dates back even earlier: Ab-
raham introduced morning
prayers (Schachrith), his son
Isaac — dusk prayers, (min-
chah) and his son, Jacob, even-
ing prayers (maariv).
Chief Sources of Siddur
What did the early prayers
consist of? The psalms are
among the chief sources of the
siddur. The siddur we now
use opens with a poem by a
non-Jewish poet, Bilam, who
came to curse the Jews, and
blessed them. "Mah Tovu," he
said—"how good and beauti-
ful thy tents, Jacob, thy resi-
dences Israel."
The siddur is one of the
richest anthologies, including
the most beautiful passages
from the bible and the pro-
phets, passages from Talmud
and from rich garnery of He-
brew poetry over a period of
three thousand years, includ-
ing poems by Rabbi Yehudah
Halevi and Rabbi Solomon ibn
Gabirol. The siddur also in-
cludes citations from the Shul-
chan l'Aruch, the Jewish
gious Code.
The Talmud is the source

.

THE SCRIBE

—Photo by Rosner, Jerusalem

"This Book of the Law shall not de-
part out of thy mouth; but thou shalt
meditate therein day and night."
—Joshua 1:8.

of the siddur. The daily pray-
ers include passages sung by
the Leviyim in the Temple.
One of the finest prayers,
Shmoneh Esra (eighteen) was
created and approved by the
Anshei Kneseth Hagdolah,
the ancient Jewish Parliment.
Second Prayer Book
The second prayer book to
appear was compiled by Rab-
bi Saadyah Gaon, one of
Jewry's major 'theologians and
philosophers, born in Egypt,
eighteen years after the death
of Rabbi Amram. His was a
"Modern" siddur, including
Arabic passages and prayers
he himself had composed.
Although Rabbi Amram's
siddur was amended in later
generations, nothing was de-
ducted, but additions were
made. Eventually two stand-
ard siddurim emerged, with
Rabbi Amram's as the basis.
One was the Sephardic sid-
dur, the prayerbook of the
Oriental communities, and of
the Jews of Spain and Portu-
gal. The other siddur, Ashken-
azic version, was used in
Germany, France and Poland.
The Chassidic movement in
Eastern Europe adopted the
Sephardic prayerbook.
Toward the end of the med-
ieval epoch, and at the begin-
ning of the Renaissance, new
prayerbooks appeared. Rabbi
Isaac Lurie, father of the Kab-
balah, compiled a siddur joint-
ly with Rabbi Chayim Vital,
his pupil. Another Kabbalist,
Rabbi Isayah Halevi Hurwitz,
also compiled a siddur.
Most Popular Siddur
The eighteenth century saw
the emergence of several new
prayerbooks. Rabbi Jacob
Emdin, of Hamburg, trenchant
opponent of the Sabbatai Zvi
movement, the . Gaon of Vilna
and Rabbi Schneur Zalman of
Liadi, father of the Lubavich
dynasty, each compiled a sid-
dur. Rabbi Jacob Emdin's is
the most popular of these.
Rabbi Emdin's siddur in-
cluded an admonition to the
money-lenders of Hamburg.
He described their professions
as "shameful." The money-
lenders raged and requested
that he omit the admonition.
A commission of rabbis de-
clared that they had found
nothing in Rabbi Emdin's
prayer book that might be
construed as contradictory to
Jewish religious doctrine. The
moneylenders, unreconciled,
boycotted Rabbi Emdin's
prayerbook.
Rabbi Schneur Zairian's sid-
dur met a similar fate. He om-
mited certain prayers, and this
aroused the wrath of Rabbi
Baruch of Mershbizsh, grand-
son of the founder of Chassi-
dism, Rabbi Yisroel Baal Shem
Toy.
The ROorm Prayerbooks
There was quite a contro-
versy over the first Reform
prayerbooks which were pub-
lished in Germany and Hun-
gary in the first half of 'the
nineteenth century. These
prayerbooks, authorized by
the Reform leaders Jacobson
and Friedlander, ommitted
the prayers mentioning Zion
and Jerusalem.
There are various Reform
prayerbooks, including those
compiled by David Friedland-
er of Berlin, Araham Geiger,
Isaac Meyer. Wise, founder of
the Remorm movement in
America, and Rabbi Benjamin
Szold, father of the late Hen-
rietta Szold. Translations 'of
the Siddur fist appeared after
the French Revolution. The
Karaite sect has, its own
prayerbook, and so have the
Falashas (Black Jews).

(Copyright 1945. by Independent

Jewish Press Service)

