A fragment of a Yom Kippur prayer book written in the late 11th or early 12th century by a scribe named Hillel Ben-Eli sits in the National Library of Israel today, one of the oldest prayer books in the world. It's part of the Cairo Genizah, a collection of hundreds of thousands of Jewish documents and fragments discovered about 176 years ago in the attic of a synagogue in Fustat, the ancient city of Cairo. The texts include holy books, letters, and business and legal documents that span centuries of Jewish life.
Hillel Ben-Eli was 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, about 918 to 958 years ago. The prayer book from which this fragment comes is the oldest in the National Library of Israel's collections.
A Soldier's Memory
Another prayer book in the library's collection tells a different story. It's a two-volume Yiddish and Hebrew prayer book printed in New York in 1942 by Ziegelheim Press. Inside is 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 — 81 years ago. The inscription said he should rest in peace in the cemetery of Margraten, Plot Nn, row 9, grave number 222. It was signed by Zelg and Hania Wald, who asked that his soul be commemorated.
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, 77 years ago.
Researchers at the National Library of Israel were puzzled about the prayer book until they discovered 19 years ago, 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.
It's 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.
From Lisbon to Aleppo
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. Many faced forced baptism.
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, 69 years ago, 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.
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.
Preserving a Living Tradition
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!"
Why This Matters:
These manuscripts and prayer books aren't museum relics — they're threads connecting Jewish communities across centuries and continents. From an 11th-century scribe in Cairo to a Pittsburgh family mourning their son in Holland, these texts document how Jewish life adapted, persisted, and remembered through expulsion, migration, war, and genocide. The reunification of the Lisbon Mahzor and the preservation of David Meyer Wald's memorial prayer book show how cultural institutions can recover what displacement and violence scattered. They also reveal how prayer books functioned as both spiritual tools and historical records, carrying the names and grief of ordinary people through time. In a region where cultural heritage is often weaponized or erased, the work of preserving these texts — and making them accessible online — is a quiet act of resistance against forgetting.