Review of Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar in The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures

by Igal German

This book is a new extensive and updated biography of Prof. Nehama Leibowitz (1905–1997), well-respected and much loved teacher and Bible scholar. This enormous project was undertaken by Yael Unterman, an Israeli scholar currently lecturing and writing in the area of contemporary Jewish Studies. A brief biography of Leibowitz’s academic career is as follows: In 1925–1930, Leibowitz pursued higher education in the Universities of Berlin, Heidelberg and Marburg, studying English, Germanics and biblical studies. At the same time, she continued her Jewish studies at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums , or Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, a rabbinical seminary established in Berlin in 1872 and destroyed by the Nazi government in 1942. In 1931, she completed her doctoral thesis, “Techniques of Judeo-German Bible Translations in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century, as Exemplified by Translations of the Book of Psalms” at the University of Marburg. The thesis explored the Yiddish translations of the Hebrew Bible, based on manuscripts in the Parma and Berlin libraries. Her scholarly interests ran the gamut from Jewish classical commentaries, Hebrew philology, and pedagogy to Germanics and literature. Well-versed in Jewish sources, Leibowitz became a distinguished Bible teacher, enthusiastically educating generations of students and teachers.

Unterman notes in her opening that “The book is based on

Interview with Ida Akerman, author of And You Shall Tell Your Children

by Doreen Wachmann

I have rarely met a happier person than 83-year-old Dr Ida Akerman who hardly stopped laughing during the course of our two-hour interview in her Jerusalem home.

Yet psychoanalyst Dr Akerman, who looks 20 years younger, is a Holocaust survivor who was haunted for most of her life by painful flashbacks which prevented her from easily re-integrating into the Jewish community and living a normal life.

The reason for our interview was the recent publication of the English edition of her book Et Tu Renconteras a tes Enfants, which took 20 years to write and which was published in French in 1995 and translated into Hebrew in 2002.

And You Shall Tell Your Children – A Chronicle of Survival details Dr Akerman’s long and hard – not only geographical but also emotional – journey from her parents’ native Poland to Berlin, where she was born, and then on to Belgium and then France.

It was from France that her parents Yehochua and Brucha Tieder were deported to Auschwitz.

By a miraculous stroke of fate, 14-year-old Ida was absent on the day of the round-up from the small Provencal village in which she and her parents were incarcerated.

After a ghastly premonitory nightmare, Ida’s mother had sent her to get information about the rumoured round-up from a Jewish market trader who lived in Avignon.

The trader had frequented the village of Le Sablet. where her family had been temporarily sheltered thanks to the intervention of a Rabbi Henri Schilli, who had been able to extricate them from a French concentration camp.

As she was too young to require a travel pass, Ida had been sent by her parents who could not travel to try to find out information in order to plan how they could possibly hide in a village riddled with Nazi collaborators.

But Mr Sokolowski of Avignon had no such information and he persuaded Ida to stay overnight till he could obtain some.

With no luck the following day in August, 1942, Ida returned to find her home sealed and empty after the Auschwitz deportation.

Still laughing, Ida told me: “I was alone in the world in my little summer dress with shoes of tissue – and not a cent.

“Suddenly, I had no parents and no home with collaborators all around. I was crying, rooted to the spot in front of the door. No one asked if I wanted the toilet or a glass of water.”

So how, nearly 70 years later, can Dr Akerman now laugh about the horrific trauma she had undergone as a teenager?

A World After This

by Susan Freiband

This story of an Orthodox Hungarian-Polish woman, from a wealthy Jewish family who miraculously survived the Holocaust makes for fascinating reading. It covers the period from 1938 when Lola was 15 years old to 1946 when her first child was born. During most of this time she and her husband experienced the evil and horrors of the Nazi killing machine and lost most of their families. They fled from hiding place to hiding place several times, barely escaping capture. After her husband was arrested, Lola worked tirelessly to free him from prison. Her strong faith sustained her through many trials. They were able to emigrate to the United States in 1947. Today Lola’s growing family includes her three children, twelve grandchildren and thirty-six great grandchildren. She is a successful artist, and some of her work is included in the book, along with family photographs and charts, and a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms. The book is an important contribution to Holocaust memoirs and is recommended for Holocaust collections in synagogue, high school, academic and public libraries.

Original review can be found here in the AJL newsletter.

Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought

Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought

by Rabbi Aaron I. Reichel

Title: Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought
Volume One: 1932–1975 (Hebrew Edition)
Author: Libby Kahane
Publisher: Institute for Publication
of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane

Anyone reading this well-researched and objective biography (just translated into Hebrew) has to be struck by how the focus of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s life was on promoting Jewish identity, pride, values, knowledge, and even music, and how minimal a role that actual violence played even in the “militant” Jewish Defense League. Even the limited violence was for deterrence and limited primarily to property damages.

Kahane’s ever creative and constructive life was devoted not merely to defending defenseless Jews more effectively than any police department and harassing indefensible Soviet officials more provocatively than all the well-organized rallies of the establishment with their eloquent speeches, resulting, together, in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews.

Jewish Book World Reviews Dove on a Barbed Wire

Dove on a Barbed Wire

In 1969, Deborah Steiner-Van Rooyen was instructed by her grandfather to find his brother’s son, Yonah Steiner. All she knew was the name of the Israeli kibbutz he had lived on nearly two decades ago. Miraculously, not only does she find her grandfather’s nephew, but she persuades him to t ell her about his experience during the Holocaust, something he had not spoken about to his own children for years. Yonah’s recounting of his life from age thirteen, when he was first captured by the Nazis in Poland on his way home from school and forced into brutal slave labor for seven years, is heart-wrenching.

Anne Frank’s biography published as graphic novel

Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography

A graphic novel version of Anne Frank’s biography was released in the Netherlands.

The 160-page book, launched Friday, uses text and illustrations to tell Frank’s story and make connections between her life and historical events during the period. According to Anne Frank House Museum spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker, the museum wants to use the book to make Frank’s story more available to teenagers from age 14.

“Not everyone has read Anne Frank’s diary,” she said in a statement to CNN. “The mission of the museum is to make the life story of Anne Frank accessible to as large an audience as possible, especially the younger generations.”

The biography is written by Sid Jacobson and illustrated by Ernest Colon, both American. They also co-created the bestselling graphic novel The 9/11 Commission Report. Publisher Hill & Wang plan to release the book in the U.S. later this month and Britain in the fall, with translations in German, Italian and French also planned.

Wiesel book on Rashi should have been more thorough

Rashi

by Fred Reiss, Ed.D.

Rashi by Elie Wiesel. Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson, Nextbook ISBN 978-0-8052-4254-6, ©2009, $22.00, p. 90 plus chronology, glossary, and bibliography.

WINCHESTER, California — One would be hard pressed to find a greater Jewish authority than Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak, known to the world as Rashi. Many religious questions have been quickly resolved by the opening words, “And Rashi says….” As a prolific eleventh century French rabbi, intellectual, and Hebrew grammarian, Rashi produced a commentary on nearly every book of the Talmud and a comprehensive interpretation of the Five Books of Moses. In addition, as a recognized Judaic scholar, Rashi wrote nearly three hundred responsa on wide-ranging topics for the benefit of many Western European Jewish communities.

Rashi was born in Troyes, located in France’s Champagne region, in 1040. During his youth, he demonstrated an affinity for Jewish learning. His family sent him to Worms and Mainz in Germany where he studied under Rabbi Gershom, a scholar and Jewish authority in his own right. At age twenty-five, Rashi returned to Troyes. Five years later, he established a yeshiva there.

A Doctor Without Borders

This Is A Soul: The Mission of Rick Hodes

by Dan Friedman

Rick Hodes cures sick African kids. With a reassuring manner and a brightly colored hat (bearing the Amharic words “peace” and “health”) the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s medical programs in Ethiopia treats the crippled and cancerous, the diseased and debilitated, the invisibly infirm and the grotesquely malformed children of Addis Ababa.

His work is addressed by both Susan Cohn Rockefeller’s short documentary “Making the Crooked Straight” (airing on April 14, on HBO2) — for which, surely, the word “heartwarming” was coined — and Marilyn Berger’s new biography, “This Is a Soul: The Mission of Rick Hodes” (William Morrow). Both give us a brief glimpse of Hodes’s “quiet heroism” (as best-selling medical author Abraham Verghese labels it on the book jacket).

Jewish Media Reviews Sages of the Talmud

Sages of the Talmud

by Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins

Sages of the Talmud is a collection of biographical information about the authors of the Talmud. It contains about four hundred entries and hundreds of anecdotes about the sages, all as recorded in the Talmud itself. An indispensable book for the student of the Talmud, it is not only an excellent practical reference guide, but also a text of general interest that may be read for enjoyment. This reference work cites the source of each quotation in the Talmud. The fascinating anecdotes and stories give readers an idea of the kind of social environment in which the sage lived. The work also includes an appendix with the corresponding general history of the time so that the reader can understand the contemporary political climate.

A Poet in a Poetic Age

Yehuda Halevi

by Jerome P. Copulsky

Poet, philosopher, physician and pilgrim, Rabbi Yehuda ben Shmuel Halevi has long been regarded as one of the geniuses of his age. Born sometime around the year 1070 in Christian Spain, most likely in Tudela, Halevi is best known as a composer of religious poems (piyyutim) which had became part of the Sephardi liturgy, as well as a series of Songs of Zion (one of which was incorporated into the Ashkenazi liturgy for Tisha Be’av).

He also engaged in the philosophical arguments of his time, authoring The Book of Proof and Demonstration in Defense of the Despised Faith, commonly known as the Kuzari. Originally written in Judeo-Arabic, the Kuzari was translated into Hebrew by Yehuda ibn Tibbon in 1167, and, along with Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, emerged as one of the key works of medieval Jewish religious thought.

In 1140, Halevi set out on a fateful pilgrimage to the Land of Israel. The legend of his death, first published almost 150 years later by Gedalia ibn Yahya in his Shalshelet Hakabbala, avows that Halevi reached the gates of Jerusalem where, with his famous ode “Zion, Do You Wonder” on his parched lips, he was trampled to death by an Arab horseman.