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Byline: Alina Dain Sharon JNS.ORG

Haggadah from 1500s

Haggadah from 1500s

Pages from the 1500s Passover Haggadah that was recently sold to the National Library of Israel. (photo from Sotheby’s)

On the right, a man sits and prays holding a liturgical book. On the left, a rabbi is seen explaining the story of the Exodus to a child. These images were printed on the pages of a Passover Haggadah in the city of Prague in 1556.

This nearly 500-year-old Haggadah, one of only two remaining copies, is part of the Valmadonna Trust Library collection that was recently sold to the National Library of Israel, with the help of philanthropy from the Haim and Hana Salomon Fund.

photo - The line to view the Valmadonna collection outside Sotheby’s in New York, before the collection was sold to Israel’s national library
The line to view the Valmadonna collection outside Sotheby’s in New York, before the collection was sold to Israel’s national library. (photo from Sotheby’s)

“The Haggadah is the most widely published book in Jewish history,” said Sharon Mintz, senior consultant for Judaica at Sotheby’s auction house, which arranged the sale to the Israeli library. She told JNS.org that more than 3,000 editions of the Haggadah have been printed during the last several centuries – more than the Bible.

The Valmadonna collection’s 1556 Haggadah is a rare, luxury edition with Yiddish interpolations that “constitute the earliest examples of such texts,” said Marc Michael Epstein, professor of religion and visual culture and the Mattie M. Paschall (1899) and Norman Davis Chair at Vassar College in New York.

Just a few decades after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440, printing spread to the Jewish world, beginning in Rome and then moving throughout Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. Scholars tend to refer to the era of early printing, before 1501, as the Incunabula period.

Jews were “tremendously excited” to be able to print multiple books, Mintz explained. “They viewed it as a gift of God,” she said.

The earliest printed Haggadah was printed in Spain in 1482. Another early Haggadah dates back to roughly 1486, and was published by the Soncino family, named for the Italian town where the family ran its printing operation. These early Haggadot were not illustrated. The earliest known illustrated Haggadah was printed in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) around 1515, but only a few pages of this Haggadah remain.

Jewish printing spread to other parts of Europe in the 1500s, which also led to a growth in competition among printers.

“The cradle of Hebrew printing is, of course, Venice. But the printing of Jewish books north of the Alps began in Prague in 1512 in the circle of Gershom ben Solomon Kohen and his brother Gronem,” said Epstein, who is the author of Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts and The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination.

“Due to the humanistic patronage of the Holy Roman Emperor and a general climate of relative tolerance and free trade, Prague in the 16th century was a place of vibrant Jewish communal and cultural life, and thus – along with Venice – a crucial centre of the newly developed art and craft of Hebrew printing,” he said. “Jewish printing spread from Prague throughout Western as well as Eastern Europe, the next great centres being in the Polish communities such as Lublin.”

 

 

Read more at jns.org.

Format ImagePosted on March 31, 2017March 31, 2017Author Alina Dain Sharon JNS.ORGCategories Celebrating the HolidaysTags Haggadah, Israel, Passover, Sotheby's, Valmadonna
Haifa’s Rambam practises medicine without borders

Haifa’s Rambam practises medicine without borders

The parking lot at the Rambam Health Care Campus is a dual-purpose facility capable of converting into a fortified 2,000-bed underground hospital in times of conflict. (photo from Rambam Health Care Campus)

Not unexpectedly, southern Israel suffered more than other areas of the Jewish state during this summer’s conflict with Hamas. Yet up in northern Israel, 30 doctors from the Haifa-based Rambam Health Care Campus (RHCC) were drafted into the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

“Israel is a small country, so everything affects you whether you are in the conflict or not,” Prof. Rafael (Rafi) Beyar, a renowned cardiologist and the director general of RHCC, told this reporter.

Now, in the aftermath of the 50-day summer war, RHCC is proving that medicine has “no borders,” in Beyar’s words. The week of this interview, doctors at the hospital conducted a successful kidney transplant on a 14-year-old boy from Gaza.

photo - The robotic catheterization system allows the doctor to open heart blockages and implant stents in patients remotely
The robotic catheterization system allows the doctor to open heart blockages and implant stents in patients remotely. (photo from Rambam Health Care Campus)

The largest hospital in northern Israel, RHCC serves more than two million residents and functions as the primary medical facility for the Northern Command of the IDF. In addition to treating Gazan patients and training Palestinian physicians, the hospital is receiving wounded Syrian refugees.

Many of RHCC’s Gazan patients are children facing cancer and kidney diseases.

“These kids don’t have any other solutions,” Beyar said.

While suffering from kidney failure, the Gaza boy treated this week also had a blood condition that obstructed some of his blood vessels. Doctors first needed to check for useable blood vessels, and only then could they transplant his sister’s kidney into his body. When it became clear that the boy’s functioning blood vessels could not sustain the new kidney, doctors implanted a synthetic connector that saved his life.

On the Syrian front, RHCC has received nearly 100 wounded refugees over the past few months. IDF soldiers provide the necessary immediate treatment for injured refugees at the Israel-Syria border in the Golan Heights, and then bring them to the hospital. Most of the Syrian patients have sustained injuries from shock, bombs and other blasts. When they are treated and recover, most return to Syria, but some don’t want to go back, said Beyar.

Like the patients from Syria, most of the Gazan patients are thankful for the treatment they receive from RHCC. Although Beyar doesn’t know what happens to the patients once they return to Gaza, he said, “Someone who is treated and whose life is saved knows how to appreciate that.” Beyar added that he believes Israeli medical treatment of Gazans “has a long-term impact” on how Palestinian civilians view Israel.

Read more at jns.org.

Format ImagePosted on September 19, 2014September 18, 2014Author Alina Dain Sharon JNS.ORGCategories WorldTags Gaza, Palestinians, Rafael Beyar, Rafi Beyar, Rambam Health Care Campus, RHCC, Syria
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