This prayer of the guest chaplain was offered in the third month of the second session of the 89th US Congress in the House of Representatives, and published in the Congressional Record, vol. 112, part 5 (1966), page 6273.

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Congressional Record, vol. 112, part 5 (21 March 1966), p. 6273

This work is in the Public Domain due to the lack of a copyright renewal by the copyright holder listed in the copyright notice (a condition required for works published in the United States between January 1st 1924 and January 1st 1964).

This work was scanned by Aharon Varady for the Open Siddur Project from a volume held in the collection of the HUC Klau Library, Cincinnati, Ohio. (Thank you!) This work is cross-posted to the Internet Archive, as a repository for our transcription efforts.

Scanning this work (making digital images of each page) is the first step in a more comprehensive project of transcribing each prayer and associating it with its translation. You are invited to participate in this collaborative transcription effort!

Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “Prayer for American Enterprise” was delivered at the opening of the Kresge’s department store in East Orange, New Jersey on October 16, 1956. The prayer was published in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (1959).

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“Children’s prayer for the recovery of our president” was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959) and dated to October 1, 1955. President Eisenhower suffered a severe heart attack on September 24, 1955. Eisenhower initially planned on serving only one term, but he remained flexible in case leading Republicans wanted him to run again. While recovering from the heart attack late in September, he met with his closest advisors to evaluate the GOP’s potential candidates. The group concluded that a second term was well advised, and he announced that he would run again in February 1956.

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“Memorial Day” was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959) and dated to May 30, 1954.

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“Tree Planting” was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959) and dated to April 27, 1952 just a few days after Arbor Day (April 24) in the United States.

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Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “[Prayer on the] Retirement of a Civic Servant” can be found in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (Bloch 1959). Their he writes that the prayer was delivered November 8, 1952, “on the retirement of Mayor [Charles Henry] Martens [(1883-1955)] of East Orange after 32 years as the city’s chief executive.”

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“Nurses’ Commencement” at Beth Israel Hospital was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959) and dated to September 19, 1951. We are not entirely certain whether this prayer was written for a Nurse’s Commencement ceremony at Beth Israel Hospital in lower Manhattan, next to Stuyvesant Town, which included a School of Nursing, or for a ceremony at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey. In 1949, Rabbi Soltes, left his position as assistant rabbi at Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan to serve as rabbi at Temple Sharey Tefilo in East Orange, New Jersey (which is close to Newark).

Beth Israel Hospital was incorporated on May 28, 1890 by a group of 40 Orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, each of whom paid 25 cents to set up a hospital dedicated to serving immigrant Jews living in the tenement slums of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At the time, most of New York’s hospitals would not treat patients who had been in the city less than a year. It initially opened a dispensary at 206 Broadway in 1891, and moved to Jefferson and Cherry Streets in 1895. On March 12, 1929, it moved to First Avenue and 16th Street, facing Stuyvesant Square, and the old building was converted into an old age home, the Home of Old Israel. It purchased its neighbor Manhattan General Hospital in 1964 and was renamed Beth Israel Medical Center on March 10, 1965.

Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, previously Newark Beth Israel Hospital, is the largest hospital in Newark, New Jersey. It was run under auspices of the Newark Jewish Community and its suburban successors from its inception in 1900-1901 until its purchase by Barnabas Health in 1996.

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Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “[Prayer for a] Teachers’ Commencement” can be found in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (Bloch 1959). Their he indicates that this prayer was offered on June 14, 1951, at the New Jersey State Teachers College in Newark (currently Kean University).

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“Brotherhood Week” was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959) and dated to February 1951. Over on his blog, Barrio Boychick, Shmuel Gonzales provides the background behind Brotherhood Week:

In 1934 an organization known as the National Conference of Christians and Jews – which was an inter-faith and inter-cultural organization founded in 1927 to “bring diverse people together to address interfaith divisions” – they came up with the idea for Brotherhood Week.

The NCCJ was an organization founded back in 1927 in response the racial nationalism that was rising up in the country, and specifically to respond to the anti-Catholic religious bigotry which at that time had injected itself into the national politics when Catholic politician Al Smith was running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

In 1927, The New York Times reported on the founding of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, represented by community leaders from different faiths including US Supreme Court Chief Justices of the United States Charles Evans Hughes, a Catholic; and Associate Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, a Jew; as well as the “mother of social work” Jane Addams. Their members were committed to bringing diverse people together to address interfaith divisions, race relations, and social and economic barriers between people of different faiths, cultures, and ethnicities.

And for decades they organization would continue to partner Jews and Christians in both public policy and inter-community bridge building.

The rise of Brotherhood Week would be because of the work of three of their spokesmen known as “The Tolerance Trio” – Father John Elliot Ross, Protestant minister Dr. Everett Ross Clinchy, and Rabbi Morris Samuel Lazaron. In 1933 they traveled across the country to rally people together and calling on people everywhere to embrace intergroup understanding. They traveled over 9,000 miles on their mission of brotherhood, and visited with 129 audiences across the nation.

The spirit of all this caught wind of the administration of President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt.

The next year in 1934, the president made an official declaration for “National Brotherhood Week.” Which was to be celebrated towards the end of the month of February; in the 1930s it seems to have been the third week of the month, and by the 1940s it seems to have been celebrated in the fourth week of the month (February 19-28th).

In declaration of this observance President Roosevelt was declared its first Honorary Chairman of National Brotherhood Week. And the NCCJ would continue to sponsor it for over four decades.

However, since the Ronald Regan administration, there has not been any declaration for Brotherhood Week. We have not been able to look to our leaders to set even one week aside to focus on promoting brotherhood in our country, not for the past three decades. And we are all the worse off for it.

Indeed much racial and religious intolerance has injected into politics in recent years. As nationalism and bigotry again raised their ugly heads. We need such a week of focusing on brotherhood and sisterhood in our communities.

I also believe that we desperately need to revive partnerships after the model of the National Conference of Christians and Jews once again.

The NCCJ did not entirely disappear. Though not long after Brotherhood Week came to an end they became re-branded as the National Conference for Community and Justice, in the early 1990s. Keeping the acronym but updating their branding and reconstituted their mission to doing community work “dedicated to fighting bias, bigotry and racism in America.”

For more on Brotherhood Week, find this story at PRI (Public Radio International).

Source(s)

Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “[Prayer] in Illness” is an undated prayer published in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (Bloch 1959). The earliest prayer in that collection dates to 1950 and we are confident this prayer can be dated between that year and the date of publication.

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Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “[Prayer for] Little League]” is a prayer published in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (Bloch 1959). The earliest prayer in that collection dates to 1950 and we are confident this prayer can be dated between that year and the date of publication.

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Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “[Prayer for] Rebirth” is an undated prayer published in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (Bloch 1959). The earliest prayer in that collection dates to 1950 and we are confident this prayer can be dated between that year and the date of publication.

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Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “[Prayer] in Spring” is an undated prayer published in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (Bloch 1959). The earliest prayer in that collection dates to 1950 and we are confident this prayer can be dated between 1949 and 1954.

I have tagged this prayer as problematic, as it leaves ambiguous the subject and object of prejudice and bigotry (“those whose goodness is buried beneath mountains of suspicion, covered by waves of bitterness”). Which “fellowmen” is Soltes referring to when he posits that they have an “ever-present ore of goodness..jewels of lovingkindness…hidden deep in [their] hearts”? I have a sense that Soltes is cryptically referring to the civil rights conflict, but his vagueness makes it difficult to identify his fellowmen as civil rights activists, white racists, or both. Is Soltes sympathizing with fellow whites whose lovingkindness is hidden deep in their hearts, or is he referring to the anger of blacks struggling under American racism? Perhaps Soltes intended his prayer to remain ambiguous for his audience of suburban Jews, a generation of American Jewry enjoying new-found acceptance into white America. Given these ambiguities and Soltes position in New Jersey, it seems likely to me that this prayer was composed as a reflection of the Trenton Six case. (From wikipedia:)

The Trenton Six is the group name for six African-American defendants tried for murder of an elderly white shopkeeper in January 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey. The six young men were convicted in August 1948 by an all-white jury of the murder and sentenced to death.

Their case was taken up as a major civil rights case, because of injustices after their arrests and questions about the trial. The Civil Rights Congress and the NAACP had legal teams that represented three men each in appeals to the State Supreme Court. It found fault with the court’s instruction to the jury, and remanded the case to a lower court for retrial, which took place in 1951. That resulted in a mistrial, requiring a third trial. Four of the defendants were acquitted. Ralph Cooper pleaded guilty, implicating the other five in the crime. Collis English was convicted of murder, but the jury recommended mercy – life in prison rather than execution.

The civil rights groups appealed again to the State Supreme Court, which found fault with the court, and remanded the case to the lower court for retrial of the two defendants who were sentenced to life. One was convicted in 1952 and the other pleaded guilty; both were sentenced to life. Collis English died in late December that year in prison. Ralph Cooper was paroled in 1954 and disappeared from the records.

Source(s)

Rabbi Abraham Soltes’s “[Prayer before] the Chamber of Commerce & Civics [of the Oranges and Maplewood, New Jersey]” was first offered on November 30, 1950. The prayer was published in his collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: A Sheaf Of Prayers (1959).

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“Dedication of Medical Research Clinic” was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959). The prayer is undated and lacks any further details. If you know which Medical Research Clinic was the subject of this prayer, please share this information in the comments below.

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“Birthday of the United Nations” was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959). No date was given for its composition but sometime between 1948 and 1958 is certain. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly declared 24 October, the anniversary of the Charter of the United Nations, as which “shall be devoted to making known to the people of the world the aims and achievements of the United Nations and to gaining their support for” its work.^[1] United Nations General Assembly Session 2 Resolution 168. United Nations Day A/RES/168(II) 31 October 1947. 

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