Wednesday, 22 September 2021

A couple of books: can you help?

I have a large collection of commentaries on Pirkei Avot, most of which I have picked up from second-hand bookshops, shemot (old and unwanted books on Jewish topics which, featuring God's name in Hebrew, await a respectable burial), or from the piles of abandoned books that periodically spring up in odd corners of Jerusalem (for an explanation of this phenomenon see my recent Facebook post on "The Reading Tree" at https://www.facebook.com/GrandpaJeremy).

One abandoned book I picked up last week is Benei Yehudah, a handsome and apparently unopened commentary on Avot which draws on content from several members of the same family. The contributors in question have the surnames Litsch, Rosenbaum and Segal and appear to have originated in Pressburg (now Bratislava). Some introductory words are penned by a Rabbi Matityahu Weinberg. The book itself was privately published in Jerusalem in 2007 and has no International Standard Book Number (ISBN).

A second commentary on Avot, given to me by a friend this week, is written by a Rabbi Eliezer Levi. Published in Tel Aviv in 1956 under the unpretentious and descriptive title Pirkei Avot, it is a slim volume that also contains the popular mishnaic commentary by Rabbi Ovadyah MiBartenura. The author had previously written a book on prayer, Yesodot HaTefillah.

If any reader has any information about either of these commentaries or their authors, I'd be really grateful if they could share it with me. I find it very useful to know a bit about the background to commentaries on Avot since the author often had a specific reason -- religious, political or personal -- for sharing his thoughts on Avot or for using its content as a vehicle for transmitting his own ideas.