Library acquisitions: ‘Vessels of time, touch and community’

This Yom Kippur, Chaim Neria intends to bring copies of two manuscripts, which the National Library of Israel recently acquired, to synagogue with him to study and to “deepen my knowledge” during services.

“Taking to shul different mahzors and holding them side by side with your mahzor helps to reflect on the nusach and see unique nusachim, renewing your experience,” Neria, curator of the library’s Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica collection, told JNS.

In recent days, the library announced its acquisition of a 14th-century mahzor for Yom Kippur from the Crimean peninsula and of two out of three parts of a 15th-century mahzor from Lisbon.

Neria confirmed that the 14th-century manuscript is one that Kedem Auction House in Jerusalem sold on May 6.

The curator also said that the 15th-century manuscript is one that Kedem withdrew from a sale “due to the historical value of the item,” and which the auction house says was “purchased by the National Library of Israel with the assistance of Kedem Auctions.” Kedem listed an estimate of $150,000 to $200,000.

Neria said that in a “screen-saturated age,” the library’s new acquisitions offer “a lesson in how culture endures.”

“These books aren’t only carriers of words  —  they are vessels of time, touch and community,” he said. “They reveal the Jewish year not as an app or a feed but as something literally held together by thread and parchment, calibrated by generations who turned those pages on festivals and fasts.”

The fact that the two mahzors have endured “is a lesson in resilience and responsibility,” according to Neria. “Both the Lisbon mahzor — a survivor of expulsion and upheaval — and the Crimean mahzor, from an area of vibrant, diverse Jewish life at a Black Sea crossroads, carry the marks of dispersion and return.”

But admiring the physical beauty and importance of centuries-old books on parchment doesn’t mean that one must be a Luddite who attacks machines.

“The computer screen is not an enemy,” Neria said. “We will digitize and share these volumes online to allow access to a global audience, but the aura of the original — its marginal notes, thumb-worn corners and traces of past readers’ voices — can only be fully grasped through the object itself.”

The 14th-century mahzor for Yom Kippur from the Crimean peninsula, which the Krauss Family Charitable Trust purchased for the library, includes piyutim, liturgical hymns that are chanted on holidays, including the High Holidays, that don’t appear in any other known texts, according to the National Library of Israel.

There is a need for scholars to study the manuscript, which includes prayers for Yom Kippur morning, afternoon and evening, more to ascertain its significance, according to Neria.

The curator said that the Kaffa rite is one from the port city of Kaffa on the Black Sea.

“It started as a Greek colony in the first century, and its earliest tradition stems from the Romaniote tradition practiced by Judeo-Greek Jews,” he said. “However, as a port city, it housed many different Jewish communities: Rabbanites, Karaites,

There were so many kinds of Jews in Kaffa that Rabbi Moses ben Jacob of Kiev, the city’s spiritual leader, opted to create a prayer book of the Kaffa rite in the late 15th or early 16th century, according to Neria. The mahzor that the library acquired predates that standardized mahzor “and is predominantly in the Romaniote tradition,” he said.

Only some 3,000 Crimean Jews survived the Holocaust, and although there are small communities of Krymchak Jews, Neria isn’t aware of the Kaffa rite being practiced today. “It was never put into print form and therefore fell out of use centuries ago,” he told JNS.

Neria called the mahzor “an irreplaceable piece of Jewish history that enriches our understanding of medieval Jewish prayer, poetry and community life” and said that the prayer for mourners in the manuscript could be adopted today “as we pray for the return of the hostages and for a time of peace.”

The Lisbon mahzor, which the Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica Foundation and Zukier Family bought for the library, was split into three parts at some point. The library says it is now “reunited” in Jerusalem.

The Aleppo community gifted one volume of the manuscript — with Shabbat prayers — and the Aleppo Codex to then-Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi in 1957, and it was placed in the Yad Ben-Zvi archives. “The whereabouts of the other two volumes was unknown until they recently came up for auction,” the library said. “These have now been acquired by the library that will digitally reunite the Lisbon mahzor and make it available online.”

The “reunited” manuscript contains prayers and poems for the High Holidays, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, as well as other holidays, in the Sephardic rite, according to the library. It was made during a period in which Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and some moved to Portugal. The latter expelled Jews, or forced them to convert, in 1496.

“It appears that even in their most difficult moments, the Portuguese Jewish community did not give up its books,” Neria said. “They took these cultural treasures along to their next destination.”