This prayer of Rabbi A.S. Bettelheim was offered before the Virginia House of Delegates on 26 May 1870. The prayer was published in a “Richmond, Virginia paper” and re-printed with commentary in the article “Religion and Politics in the House of Delegates” in The Israelite, vol. 16 no. 49 (10 June 1870), page 10. The prayer was met with controversy and elicited the following censure by House of Delegates member Col. John R. Popham on 27 May 1870:

Resolved, That in the judgment of this House its prayers should be so conducted, and in such phrase delivered, as to offend no political party; and that in the judgment of this House no minister of any religious denomination is authorized to pray for either the Republican or Democratic party of the State or nation.

Due to the lack of a quorum in the House, the resolution could not be passed. Rabbi Bettelheim nevertheless felt it important to respond:

To my astonishment, I have heard that a member of the House of Delegates, offered this morning, a resolution of censure, directed against a prayer delivered the preceding day before that body, alleging that it was of a partisan character. I protest against such a construction of my language. My design was to pray for all the people of our unhappy State, in whose welfare as an adopted son, I am sincerely interested, and without any regard to political parties. I am sure no gentleman of any party would desire the great Commonwealth to be ruled by heartless strangers or native enemies; or that Virginia should not be ruled by Virginians, (native or adopted,) through virtue, justice, and righteousness.

Little sympathy for Rabbi Bettelheim was expressed in the pages of The Israelite. In the opinion of the editor (Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise), Rabbi Bettelheim’s prayer was inappropriate, siding with Col. Popham. “[We] think Mr. Popham is decidedly right, and Mr. Bettelheim had no business to represent Judaism as a political party. It is not Mr. Bettelheim, it is the Jewish minister who officiated, and he has no business to be a party organ.” Although Rabbi Bettelheim had offered six prayers in the legislative session of the House of Delegates in 1870, from our review of the House Journal it appears that he offered no prayers thereafter. Col. Popham (1840-1900), a native Virginian representing Bath and Highland County (1869-1871), served in the U.S. Secret Service during the Civil War, was an Internal Revenue collector in 1867, and also served in the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

Religion and Politics in the [Viriginia] House of Deligates (The Israelite, 10 June 1870), p. 10

“Prayer of the Guest Chaplain before the Virginia House of Delegates: Rabbi A.S. Bettelheim on 26 May 1870” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Aharon N. Varady (editing/transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Albert Siegfried Bettelheim

Rabbi Dr. Albert (Aaron) Siegfried Bettelheim (1830-1890), born in Galgoc, Hungary, was a scholar, writer, educator, and rabbi in Europe and the United States. He began his education at the yeshivah of Presburg, and afterward studied in the Talmudical schools at Leipnik, Moravia, and Prague; enjoying the tutelage of S. L. Rapoport, from whom, at the age of eighteen, he received his semikhah. Rabbi Bettelheim officiated for a short time as rabbi and religious teacher at Münchengrätz, and then returned to Prague to enter the university, whence he graduated with the degree of Ph.D. In 1850, and for several years thereafter, Bettelheim was the Austrian correspondent of a number of London journals, and acted as private tutor ("Hofmeister") to Count Forgács, then governor of Bohemia, and afterward Hungarian court-chancellor. In the early fifties Bettelheim came to Temesvár, Hungary, where he was director of the Jewish schools and editor of a political weekly called Elöre (Forward). In 1856 he became the "official translator of Oriental languages and censor of Hebrew books" at Czernowitz, where, in 1858, he married Henrietta Weintraub, the first female Jewish public-school teacher in Hungary. In 1860 he became rabbi at Komorn, Hungary, where he was appointed superintendent of all the schools—the first Jew to gain such a distinction. Thence he went to Kaschau [Slowakei], where he officiated as rabbi until 1862. While at Kaschau he edited a Jewish weekly, Der Jude, to combat the views of the Jewish Congress, then holding animated conventions at Budapest. There, too, he edited a political weekly, whose progressive ideas were discountenanced by his congregation and held to be prejudicial to Judaism. The fanaticism of his people became so pronounced that, being threatened with excommunication by one of the colleagues of his former domicile in Komorn, he decided to emigrate to America with his family. In 1867 Bettelheim was elected rabbi of the Crown street congregation (now Beth Israel) of Philadelphia, and became a professor at the Maimonides College. In 1869 he became rabbi of congregation Beth Ahabah, of Richmond, Virginia, where he established and edited a German weekly, Der Patriot (afterward changed into a daily, with the title The State Gazette). While in Richmond he entered the Medical College, and was graduated with the degree of M.D. He intended to write a work on Jewish medicine, and has left behind a number of monographs and other documentary material not yet published. In 1875 he was elected rabbi of the Ohabai Shalom congregation of San Francisco, California, where he became chairman of the Society for the Study of Hebrew, composed entirely of Christian clergymen, and director of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. He held other public offices, and delivered the baccalaureate sermon at various high schools and colleges. He occupied the pulpits of the Unitarian and Baptist churches in San Francisco, and afterward in Baltimore, where, in 1887, he became rabbi of the First Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, an office he held till his death. In Baltimore he became identified with a number of public institutions and charitable organizations, and instructed some non-Jews in the elements of the Hebrew language. While on the homeward voyage from a visit to Europe, he died on board ship, and was buried Aug. 21, 1900. Two Catholic priests, whose acquaintance Bettelheim had made on the voyage, read the Jewish burial service and recited the "Kaddish" as the body was lowered into the sea. He was the art critic of a prominent San Francisco journal; coeditor of the Jewish Times of San Francisco, from 1880 to 1886; a regular contributor to the Argonaut of that city; a frequent contributor to the Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia, and the Menorah Monthly in New York. He was the author of Jewish stories, two of which—"Yentil the Milk-Carrier" and "The Baal-Milhamah-Rabbi"—were translated into German, Hungarian, and Hebrew. He was at work for over twenty years on a Revised English Bible, about three-fourths of which he had completed in manuscript at the time of his death. Many of his suggestions and scholarly notes are incorporated in the last two volumes of Kohut's Aruch Completum.

Works of related interest:

 

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. Senate: Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise on 20 May 1870

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives: Rabbi Abram Simon on 29 May 1929

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives: Rabbi Richard Boruch Rabinowitz on 3 May 2017

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives: Rabbi Dov Hillel Klein on 5 May 2010

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives: Rabbi Commander Maurice S. Kaprow on 5 May 2004

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives: Rabbi Laurence A. Kotok on 2 May 1979

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives: Rabbi Albert Plotkin on 17 May 1978

prev next