Before the Koren-Sachs Siddur (2006), and before Rabbi Jonathan Sach’s Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the British Commonwealth (1992), there was the Authorised Daily Prayer Book first published in 1890 and used by Jews throughout the British Empire, while there was a British Empire. It was originally published under the authorization of Great Britain’s first Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler with a Hebrew liturgy based on Rabbi Seligman Baer’s Seder Avodat Yisroel (1868). The translation by Rabbi Simeon Singer (1846-1906) was the most extensive English translation of the Siddur ever published, and for this reason most editions are simply referred colloquially as The Singer Siddur. The Standard Prayer Book, published by Bloch in 1915, was an American reprint of The Authorized Daily Prayer Book.
Before his death last April, John Hare, z”l, of the Internet Sacred Text Archive, asked us what he could do for us in return for our help on the 1917 JPS. He had just acquired a copy of the Standard Prayer Book and wondered whether we needed that. He completed the work in January 2010, one of the last projects he completed. The full text of Rabbi Singer’s English translation in the Singer Siddur is available at the Internet Sacred Text Archive. A PDF of the Singer Siddur without Hare’s transcription is available from Archive.org.
Given our work transcribing Seder Avodat Yisroel, having Singer’s translation offers an opportunity to link both Public Domain texts together in our open source public database. Recently, we moved closer to this goal by fully encoding Singer’s translation in our open standard XML format and uploading it into our database. Many thanks to Ze’ev Clementson and Efraim Feinstein for working on this.
Our image cache of Singer’s translation in The Standard Prayer Book is here.
Rabbi Simeon Singer’s translation from the Singer Siddur: HTML | TXT
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