United States or Bangladesh ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Those of Brest proposed that Government aid be invoked to compel Jews to dress in the German style, to use authorized text-books in the hadarim, and interdict the study of the Talmud except by those preparing themselves for the rabbinate.
It is also recorded that Samuel ben Avigdor, the last rabbi of Vilna, held the rabbinate of Königsberg, and there certainly must have been many more who, because of their inferior positions, cannot be so easily traced. Besides, Germany, as we have seen, was the common fatherland of the greater part of both Slavonic and Teutonic Jews.
Outside of a handful of assimilated "Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion," who were imbued with Polish chauvinism, the hasidic rank and file was permeated by extreme separatism, fostered by "the Kahal through its various agencies, the Congregational Boards, the rabbinate, the heders, and a host of special institutions."
Solomon Zalkind Minor, who lectured in German, acquired a reputation as a preacher in Russian since his election to the rabbinate of Minsk . He was called "the Jellinek of Russia" by the Maskilim. Aaron Elijah Pumpyansky began to preach in Russian at Ponevezh, in Kovno . Germanization at last gave way to Russification.
The head cook filled a couple of plates with soup, dipping a great pewter pot into the cauldron. The Rabbinate then uplifted its eyes heavenwards, and said the grace: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, King of the Universe, according to whose word all things exist."
It was a Saturday night, soon after the death of my elder brother Dovidl, within the period of the thirty days' mourning for him. Mother would not be consoled, for Dovidl had been her "very best." Three brothers had I. The first-born, Simhah, may he rest in peace, had been married long before; he was the junior Shohet in town, and a candidate for the Rabbinate.
Poor Rabbinate! The politics of the little community were extremely complex.
He denied that modern English Jews had any religion whatever; claiming that their faith consisted of forms that had to be kept up in public, but which they were too shrewd and cute to believe in or to practise in private, though every one might believe every one else did; that they looked upon due payment of their synagogue bills as discharging all their obligations to Heaven; that the preachers secretly despised the old formulas, and that the Rabbinate declared its intention of dying for Judaism only as a way of living by it; that the body politic was dead and rotten with hypocrisy, though the augurs said it was alive and well.
When the President had finished, the Rabbinate was invited to address the philanthropists, which it did at not less length, eloquently seconding the proposition that charity was a virtue. Then the door was slid back, and the first two paupers were admitted, the rest of the crowd being courageously kept at bay by the superintendent.
Many of their acquaintances and relatives were of an orthodox turn. A kosher dinner could be eaten even by the heterodox; whereas a tripha dinner choked off the orthodox. Thus it came about that even the Rabbinate might safely stoke its spiritual fires at Mrs. Henry Goldsmith's. Hence, too, the prevalent craving for a certain author's blood could not be gratified at Mrs.
Word Of The Day