The Cairo Genizah contains hundreds of thousands of complete Jewish documents and fragments, including holy books, letters and business and legal documents, and the texts were discovered in the attic of a synagogue in Fustat, the ancient city of Cairo, in the mid-1800s. That’s the opening fact, and it says plenty: paper survived where empires, armies and bureaucracies came and went, while the documents themselves were left to rot in an attic until someone bothered to look.
The Archive and the Afterlife of Paper
Among the treasures in the genizah is a fragment of a page from an ancient Yom Kippur prayer book written in the late 11th or early 12th century by a scribe named Hillel Ben-Eli, a cantor from Baghdad who immigrated to Egypt and worked as the official scribe of the Cairo rabbinical court. Certificates in his handwriting appeared between 1066 and 1108. The prayer book from which this fragment comes is the oldest in the National Library of Israel’s collections, and one of the oldest in the entire world. The dates are doing the heavy lifting here. The court, the scribe, the library, the centuries — all of them are institutions that preserve, classify and claim what survives.
The article also describes a two-volume Yiddish and Hebrew prayer book printed in New York in 1942 by Ziegelheim Press. It contained an inscription in Dutch with some Hebrew in memory of David Meyer Wald, of the American Army, who fell in the liberation of Holland on September 27, 1944, Yom Kippur 5705. The inscription said he should rest in peace in the cemetery of Margraten, Plot Nn, row 9, grave number 222, and was signed by Zelg and Hania Wald, who asked that his soul be commemorated. Even in grief, the language is catalogued, plotted, numbered and signed.
Researchers learned that David Meyer Wald was one of 8,288 soldiers buried in the American military cemetery near the village of Margraten in southern Holland. He was born in 1923 in Timkovichi, now in today’s Belarus. His family immigrated to the United States in 1938 and settled in Pittsburgh, PA. He served in the 325th Infantry Regiment, a unit belonging to the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and was killed in Holland in 1944. He was initially buried in Holland and re-interred in 1949 in Montreal. The military machine moved him, then the cemetery system moved him again. The paperwork kept pace.
Who Keeps the Books, Who Moves the Dead
Researchers at the National Library of Israel were puzzled about the prayer book until they discovered in 2007 that a Torah scroll was dedicated in memory of the same deceased American soldier by his parents. It was donated to the synagogue closest to his burial place in Holland. The Walds also donated two prayer books and perhaps other books to the National Library of Israel at the same time. The trail runs through family memory, synagogue space, military burial grounds and a national library. No single institution owns the whole story, but each one tries to hold a piece of it.
It is still unclear exactly how the books reached the National Library of Israel, or why the prayer book mistakenly contained another label from the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., often abbreviated as JCR, which worked after the Holocaust to save books stolen by the Nazis during the war from Jewish libraries and from private collections across Europe. The JCR label is a reminder that even rescue comes with paperwork, and that the archive world is full of institutions sorting the wreckage left by states and armies.
The article also says the Lisbon Mahzor was produced in the period just after Jews were expelled from Spain. King John II of Portugal recognized an opportunity if he allowed tens of thousands of Spanish Jews to settle in Portugal, because they possessed commercial skills and an important trade network. Soon after, Jews in Portugal faced new restrictions, Jewish children were seized and shipped to Portugal’s colonies, families had to pay large sums to renew their right to remain in Lisbon, and many faced forced baptism. The sequence is blunt. A ruler sees profit, then the restrictions arrive, then the coercion.
The Lisbon Mahzor eventually reached the Jewish community of Aleppo and was guarded alongside the famed Aleppo Codex. The three-volume prayer book contained all of the liturgy for the Jewish year: one volume for daily prayers, and two others with the festival services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In 1957, one volume of the Lisbon Mahzor was given to then-president of Israel Yitzhak Ben-Zvi by the Jewish community of Aleppo, where it remained in the archives of Yad Ben-Zvi. Another archive, another shelf, another claim of stewardship.
The whereabouts of the other two volumes remained a mystery until recently, when the missing volumes appeared in the catalogue of the Kedem Auction House. When the National Library of Israel learned of their availability, it appealed to acquire them directly without public auction. The purchase was made possible with support from the Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica Foundation and the Zukier family. All three volumes have now been reunited at the National Library of Israel and are accessible online. The books end up where institutions want them: catalogued, digitized, and made legible to the people who can navigate the system.
Dr. Chaim Neria, curator of the Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel, said the library’s collection of prayer books fits into the overall mission of the library. He said the library aims to build a very deep and broad collection and, ideally, to include every book printed about the Jewish people and eventually have the best documentation of the Jewish people since the invention of printing. He also said prayer books were widely produced because people needed them and used them.
Neria said, “This is why the National Library is here, to tell us about our roots and traditions – from 2,000 years after the piyutim from the Cairo Genizah were written (and read until today on Yom Kippur), to a soldier who died on Yom Kippur, with his parents’ words continuing to move us! This is a living tradition!” The line lands with the confidence of an institution that believes preservation itself is the point. The documents, though, tell a rougher story: migration, war, burial, confiscation, donation, recovery, auction, acquisition. The state and its cultural machinery don’t create that history. They sort it after the fact.