📖 סדר תפלה לתענית (מנהג הספרדים) | Seder Tefillah l’Taanit (The Fast Days Service), a bilingual Hebrew-English prayerbook for days of mourning translated by A. Alexander (1776)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (digital imaging and document preparation) and Alexander Alexander

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28 July 2025 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

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18th century C.E., 56th century A.M., British Jewry, fast, Spanish-Portuguese

סדר תפלה לתענית The Fast Days Service (1776) is a bilingual Hebrew-English prayerbook for days of mourning translated by A. Alexander for use in the S&P (Spanish & Portuguese) community in London. It is the sixth volume in a set of bilingual S&P prayerbooks for English speaking Jews in the British Empire. The edition reproduced here was a posthumous reprint by his son L. Alexander who continued his father’s work as a printer.

This work is in the Public Domain due to its having been published more than 95 years ago.

Aharon N. Varady (digital imaging and document preparation)

Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project, is a copyright researcher and amateur book scanner. He prepares digital images and new digital editions of prayer books and related works in the Public Domain in order to make their constituent parts (prayers, translations, annotations, etc.) publicly accessible for collaborative transcription by project volunteers. (In some cases, he finds existing digital editions prepared by others that require correction and reformatting.) If you appreciate his efforts, please send him a kind note or contribute to his patreon account.

Alexander Alexander

Alexander Alexander (also, Alexander ben Judah Leib, Hebrew: אלכסנדר בר יהודה לײב; d. ca. 1807), from London, was a translator of many of the first Jewish prayerbooks in the English language, for both (S&P) Sefaradim and Ashkenazim. He initially used the press of a non-Jewish printer, J. & W. Richardson, before acquiring his own, the first Jewish press in London. Prior to translating the S&P liturgy Alexander produced an Ashkenazi prayer book translated into English in collaboration with B. Meyers. Both were printed in London in 1770 by W. Tooke. In the same year he also printed two Haggadot, one for Sefaradim and another for Ashkenazim printed by W. Gilbert. Alexander worked for the printer Moses Hertz Hague from 1770 to 1773, and his name is recorded as a typesetter for the second volume of מלך הדרת, a commentary on the Zohar by Rabbi Shalom Buzaglo.

Stable Link: https://opensiddur.org/?p=63044

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Seder Tefilah l’Taanit – The Fast Days Service (Alexander Alexander 1775) – title

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Support this work: The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-commercial, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis & libre Open Access archive of contemplative praxes, liturgical readings, and Jewish prayer literature (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed. Our goal is to provide a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook (siddur). Through this we hope to empower personal autonomy, preserve customs, and foster creativity in religious culture.

ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃ (תהלים צ:יז) · "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." (Psalms 90:17)