A timely acquisition I made this week is of a beautiful manuscript commentary on Pirkei Avot written by the rabbi of a long forgotten Jewish community in Auburn, Maine. Written in a fluid Eastern European Hebrew script, the writer, clearly a learned individual, describes his manuscript as the basis for his Pirkei Avot shiur in Auburn during the year 5688 (1928) in congregation Beth Avraham.
The author then goes on to describe in brief the history of this community. I wrote to ask him if he had any further clues concerning this manuscript, to which I received the following reply:
It is unsigned but from what I can make out, the rabbi there at the time was a Rabbi S. Levine.
I wonder if any members of this group know anything about this manuscript, the rabbi or of his interest in Pirkei Avot. Might he be connected in some way with a contemporary scholar with an interest in the same subject, Rabbi Chanoch Zundel (“Zindel”) Levine, whose Derashot Shelemot on Pirkei Avot was published in New York in 1936?
