This Yizkor prayer for the victims of October 7th 2023, was written by Rabbi Binyamin Holzman and first published on the website Geluyah on 7 November 2023. The English translation was made by an unknown translator and set side-by-side with the Hebrew source by the Shalom Hartman Institute. The work and its translation came to our attention through a reading and partial translation on the Promised Podcast‘s program for Shavuot 5785 (2025).

Source(s)

Yizkor for the victims of the Simhat Torah massacre (Binyamin Holzman 2024)

“baShanah haBa’ah” (Next Year) by Ehud Manor (1941-2005) was first published in 1970 as sung with music by Nurit Hirsch and performed by the duo Ilan & Ilanit (Hanna Dresner-Tzakh and Shlomo Zach). The song was written by Manor in memory of his younger brother, Yehuda Wiener (1949-1968), who was killed in a tank battle by Egyptian gunfire in the Sinai Desert during the War of Attrition. We are not certain whether the English translation appearing in David Breakstone and Cindy Jochnowitz’s The Israel Experience Book (1977), p.242, was by Manor or remains uncredited.

Source(s)

“Bashana haBa’ah” by Ehud Manor (The Israel Experience Book 1977), p.242

Many thanks to Fred MacDowell for sharing a copy of this service originally printed a University Press, Oxford. The transliteration ‘Ng’ is a Western Sepharadi custom for the romanization of the Hebrew letter ‘Ngayin’ (Ayin ע).

Source(s)

https://opensiddur.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Coronation-of-Queen-Elizabeth-II-Spanish-and-Portuguese-Synagoge-1953.pdf

For many, the experience of liberation from Mitsrayim, striving for Theophany, and receiving Torah, is a daily mental exercise, prompted by the thematic arrangement of morning prayer readings. Students of the Baal Shem Tov, from the Alter Rebbe to Rebbe Naḥman taught, that every person, in every era, in every year, and in every day is obligated to leave Mitsrayim. Following after the suggestive wordplay of Mitsrayim read as “mitsrim” (narrows) in Lamentations 1:3, simply moving between the mental states of sleep into wakefulness echoes this liberatory process, and with even greater intention, liberation can also be a movement from small-mindedness to a more expansive awareness, and hopefully one that takes into consideration the needs and concerns of all the beings whose lives we connect with or whose lives we might disrupt through our activities and habits of behavior. It’s instructive to me that such a project requires intention but that we are not alone at all in working on this project — and on the contrary, there are many people that are and have been engaged in this work.

In this spirit, I made an effort before Pesaḥ this year to transcribe the pointed Hebrew translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and set it opposite one of the source texts from which it was derived, along with two other translations: Ladino and Yiddish. It is something I can review on a regular basis after shaḥarit among other profound works such as the zikhronot and the Decalogue.

The Declaration is an attempt to realize a profound hope for a new order to emerge out of the horrors of World War Ⅰ & Ⅱ — a peaceful and prosperous world founded on human rights enshrined in international legal agreement. This document was preceded by other declarations and charters — President Roosevelt’s articulation of the Four Freedoms (1941), Meyer I. David’s Declaration of Interdependence (1944) and the Preamble to the United Nations Charter (1945). Our work in helping to realize a more peaceful and humane world begins with our honoring and demanding these humane values and international aspirations be made manifest in our day, in our time. –Aharon Varady

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, was adopted and proclaimed by United Nations General Assembly resolution 217 A III of 10 December 1948 (גוטגעהײסן און פּראָקלאַמירט װי רעזאָלוציע 217 ‮A‬ (3) פֿון דער אַלגעמײנער פֿאַרזאַמלונג פֿון די פֿאַראײניקטע פֿעלקער, 10 דעצעמבער, 1948).

The original vocalized Hebrew translation that we have transcribed was made by unknown translators and publsihed in 1959 from the nascent department of Information Management (מינהל ההסברה) of the State of Israel. Missing from that source are subsections 2 and 3 of Article 16 of the Declaration. For these, we have used an unvocalized Hebrew translation appearing elsewhere on the Internet credited to the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations Office in Geneva. (Many thanks to Asaf Bartov of Project Ben-Yehuda for vocalizing these portions of Article 16!)

The Yiddish translation was made by Dr. Refoyl Finkl and Sholem Berger in 1998. (For an audio recording, visit here.) The Ladino translation is uncredited but dates to sometime between 1996 and 2009. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

This is an undated El Malé Raḥamim prayer for the victims of the Shoah translated into Dutch for a Yom Kippur ne’ilah service, likely sometime soon after the Holocaust had ended. To this I have added an English translation for those not fluent in Dutch or Hebrew. We are grateful to Shufra Judaica (Ellie Fisher and David Selis) for sharing a digital copy of this prayer. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

Dutch Shoah memorial prayer for Yom Kippur Neilah (courtesy of Shufra Judaica)

The Charter of the United Nations (UN) is the foundational treaty of the United Nations and its preamble sets out its intention. The preamble was drafted in committee with significant contributions by Jan Smuts, Virginia Gildersleeve, and U.S. Representative Sol Bloom. Via the article “Preamble to the United Nations Charter“:

Jan Smuts from South Africa originally wrote the opening lines of the Preamble as, “The High Contracting Parties, determined to prevent a recurrence of the fratricidal strife which twice in our generation has brought untold sorrow and loss upon mankind…” which would have been similar to the opening lines of the Covenant of the League of Nations. After considerable argument at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, held in San Francisco, Virginia Gildersleeve from the US was successful in changing and shortening the Preamble, however, with much of Smuts’ original text reattached at the end. The opening phrase “We the peoples of the United Nations…”, echoing the preamble of the United States Constitution, was suggested by US congressman and Conference delegate Sol Bloom.

Recognition by the United Nations as an institution was recognized in the Declaration of Independence by the State of Israel (1948) which promises to abide by the United Nations Charter. The Hebrew translation appearing here was made by an unknown translator or translators working for an early Israeli government printing office.

Source(s)

This is chapter 2 of Sefer Refuat haNefesh (1934) a tract by Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein summarizing his writings on Jewish Science for a Yiddish literate audience. (For a longer essay find his explanation of the efficacious use of Prayer in chapter 3 of Jewish Science and Health (1925).) The Yiddish was translated into English by an unknown translator for the Society of Jewish Science, and published as The Healing of the Soul (Sefer Refuath ha-Nefesh) in 1974. This is the first time the original Yiddish has been set side-by-side with its translation.

Source(s)

“Kuando el rey Nimrod” (קואנדו אל ריי נמרוד, “When Nimrod was king”) is a Sephardic folk song, sung in Ladino. The song has its roots in a piyyut called “La vocación de Abraham.” Several versions have been found dating from the 18th century, written by anonymous authors in the former Ottoman Empire. The song, with its original much longer lyrics and its makam rhythm, would become popular in the Sephardic communities of the Mediterranean basin. Around the year 1890, an anonymous author from Tangiers, Morocco wrote the version of the song copied here, shortening its lyrics and composing a new melody in the Phrygian dominant scale also referred to as Freygish, Fraigish, or Hijaz.

The earliest recorded version of the story of Avraham’s survival from a fire resulting from his iconoclasm is attested in the Sefer haYovelim 12:12-15.

We are looking for other variations of Kuando el rey Nimrod and “La vocación de Abraham.” If you can provide a reference to one or more, please do — and thank you.

The English translation here follows the translation provided in the article “Kuando el rey Nimrod” on Wikipedia. (There, the translation was initially offered in 2009 by the user ‘Gorgongnu’ and improved by subsequent editors such as Archaeogenetics ([kandell].) Honi Sanders and I published this translation along with the romanized Ladino in the birkon for his wedding, Siman l’Vanim (Dimus Parrhesia Press 2019). –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

This is a prayer for those fallen in the battle of Kápolna, a decisive battle during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, written by István Roboz (1826-1916). Translated into numerous languages, the prayer was widely misattributed to enlightened president of Hungary, Lajos Kossuth. An English translation, originally appearing in The New York Tribune was republished in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate (August 1849), p. 60. There, Isaac Leeser echoed the misattribution writing, “The…prayer, offered by Kossuth, will be interesting to our readers. It was offered by him, kneeling amid the multitude, at the graves of the Magyar heroes who fell in the battle of the Kápolna, and was originally published in the Opposition, a journal of Pesth. We translate from the German.” Leeser also noted the unusual ecumenical nature of the prayer. Jewish hopes for the promise of emancipation by an enlightened and independent Hungary helps to explain the widespread Jewish participation in the revolution. According to Lajos Kossuth, approximately 20,000 of his army of 180,000 were Jewish—this at a time when the Jews, numbering 340,000, represented but 3.7 percent of the total Hungarian population of 9.2 million. This prayer, circulated in translation and attributed to Kossuth, helped to cement his popularity among Jews worldwide praying for liberty from despotic regimes inclined for various reasons towards Jew hatred. Concerning the misattribution, Wikipedia’s article on the battle of Kapolyna notes the following:

Ignác Helfy (1830-1897) – politician, Member of the Hungarian Parliament, and Kossuth’s commissioner in Hungary – gave Kossuth a copy of the oil print with the text of the prayer. Kossuth found it beautiful and atmospheric but denied that he had ever written or said a prayer in memory of the heroes of Kápolna. He could not have said a prayer, as the battle was won by the Austrian army, so the battlefield remained in their hands, they buried the dead, and if Kossuth would have been got there, the Austrians would have immediately captured him, as the head of the “rebellion”. We now know that the prayer was written by István Roboz (1828-1916), a former student, lawyer, and publicist from Pápa, secretary to Gáspár Noszlopy, the government commissioner of Somogy County in 1848-49, in the mansion of the landowner Pál Csapody in Ádánd, after reading the description of the battle in the journal Kossuth Hírlapja (Kossuth’s Journal) on 2 March (at least that is what he claimed). After the prayer was written, it was printed in various places in different versions, for example in Kaposvár, Szombathely, Esztergom, Buda, Pest, Szeged, Kolozsvár, and there are also several unprinted editions. On 1 June 1849 it was published in Komáromi Lapok. There are many textual, grammatical, stylistic, phonetic, and word order differences between the prayer versions printed in different places.

The sourcetext for the lines by Roboz were copied from an early edition printed in Kaposvár made available from this site. German translation I transcribed from Geschichte der ungarischen Revolution in den Jahren 1848 und 1849, mit Rückblicken auf die Bewegung in den österreichischen Erbländern, vol. 2 by Julian Feodor Joseph Chownitz (1849).

Source(s)

Prayer by [Lajos] Kossuth (The Occident, August 1849), p. 60 (misattributed.)

Attached is a transcript of a Western Sephardic verse-by-verse targum of the aftará for the Shabbat before 9 Aḇ, based on the text found in Isaac Leeser’s Siddur Siftei Tsadiqim, volume 6: Seder haTefilot laTaaniyot (1838), pp. 174-184. Each verse is included in Hebrew, as well as the original Spanish text, and a slightly modernized Spanish text underneath to clarify archaic forms or words that have fallen out of use. Also included are from-scratch English translations.

Note: “The CAUSE” is used to translate the Divine Name YHVH, based on the philosophical idea of God as the Prime Mover and on the interpretation of the Name as a causative form of the copula – “causes to be.”

Recording

Source(s)

We are indebted to Dr. Sabine Arndt for her article “A Pious Ode ‘To Joy’” which appeared in Studia Rosenthaliana, Vol. 38/39, Omnia in Eo (2005/2006), pp. 266-267. The manuscript image (8 mb download) from which my transcription was made derives from the manuscript Hs. Ros. PL B-57 held in the collection of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana at the Amsterdam University Library. All errors in the transcription are my own and corrections and translations of the Hebrew, where the adaptation differs from Schiller, are greatly appreciated! (Contact us.) NOTE: The anonymous translator of “An die Freude” into Hebrew appears to have rearranged, intentionally or accidentally, the stanzas in the manuscript. (Perhaps the version they were working from had the stanzas printed in a different order?) We have reordered the Hebrew to fit Schiller’s arrangement.

Although the translator is unknown, the sensibilities of this work align with that of the Felix Libertate society in Amsterdam and their “Neie Kille” (new congregation) which advocated for Emancipation of European Jewry among the other revolutionary reforms enshrined in documents like De Rechten van den Menschen van den Burger (דברי הברית החקים והמשפטים אשר בין אדם לאדם | The Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1795/1798) which was also translated to Hebrew.

In their article in Studia Rosenthaliana, Dr. Arndt introduces Hs. Ros. PL B-57 as follows:

In 1785 Friedrich Schiller wrote his ‘An die Freude / an ode ‘To Joy’, describing his ideal of an equal society united in joy and friendship. Numerous copies and adaptations attest to its popularity at the time. The slightly altered 1803 edition was set to music not only by Ludwig van Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony but also by other composers such as Franz Schubert and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

Hs. Ros. PL B-57 contains a Hebrew translation of the first edition of the ode (apparently rendered before the 1803 alteration), revealing that the spirit of the age even managed to reach the Jewish community in the Netherlands.

Whereas the imagery of Schiller’s original is drawn from Greek mythology, the author of the שִׁיר לְשִׂמְחָה relies on the Bible as a source. In fact, he not only utilises Biblical imagery, but successfully avoids any allusion to Hellenistic ideas whatsoever. Thus the Hebrew version of Tochter aus Elysium (Daughter of Elysium) reads בַּת גַּן עֶדֶן (Daughter of the Garden of Eden), Göttern kann man nicht vergelten / Schön ists, ihnen gleich zu sein (Gods one cannot repay / It is beautiful to be like them) reads הֲלַהְ׳ תִּגְמְלוּ חַסְדוֹ וְטוּבוֹ? נֵלְכָה בְאֹרְחֹתָיו (Can you repay God’s grace and goodness? Let us walk in His ways). Apparently the ideas of equality and unity were appealing, but being like gods was going too far; the author was, after all, a believing Jew.

The transcription of the 1785 version of Schiller’s Ode to Joy and his English translation are copied directly from wikisource.

Source(s)

Hs. Ros. PL B-57 (Ode to Joy)

This is “A Din Torah Mit Gott,” the Ḳaddish prayer of Rebbi Levi Yitsḥaq of Berditchev (1740-1810), in Yiddish with Hebrew, and English translations. Paul Robeson sang an adaptation of this prayer throughout his career and famously at his comeback concert at Carnegie Hall in 1958 after having been blacklisted in the early years of the Cold War (Cf. Jonathan Karp’s “Performing Black-Jewish Symbiosis: The “Hassidic Chant” of Paul Robeson“). The text of the Yiddish and Hebrew is adapted from the various nusḥaot provided at Zemereshet. The Hebrew mainly from Sefer haḤasidut (Warsaw: Di Welt 1922), p. 257-258. The Yiddish as transcribed by Yigal Landsman as his father, Hillel Landsman heard it from his father. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

In 1795, shortly after the Batavian revolution, the ‘Felix Libertate’ [Happiness through Freedom] society was founded in Amsterdam. The aim of the society was to realize the legal equality of Jews within the new Batavian Republic. Most members were educated High German Jews, but Portuguese Jews and even non-Jews were also members. The Jews among them had an affinity with the ‘haskalah’, a movement that wanted to apply the ideas of the Enlightenment to Judaism. All members of Felix Libertate were convinced supporters of the patriot movement, the political vanguard of the Batavian Revolution. Leading figures were the physician Hartog de Hartog Lémon and the merchant and lawyer Mozes Salomon Asser.

Shortly after this political milestone, a battle of directions broke out within the Jewish community between the progressive supporters of Felix Libertate and the conservative ‘parnassim’ (administrators) of the High German Jewish community in Amsterdam. The modernists demanded more influence within the synagogue, while the parnassim feared that their modernist ideas would undermine orthodoxy. Probably a factor was that the members of Felix Libertate were patriots, while more traditionally oriented Jews were usually pro-prince-minded. The battle for power in the synagogue ended in a small schism, because more than twenty newcomers founded their own congregation with a shul on Valkenburgerstraat.

The old and the new community – the ‘Alte’ and the ‘Neie Kille’ – bombarded each other with pamphlets entitled Diskursen (discourses). Between July 1797 and March 1798, the Neie Kille published twenty-four Discourses, the Alte defended itself with eleven. All in all, the controversy produced six hundred densely printed pages, written in Amsterdam Yiddish and printed in Hebrew letters. The pattern of these remarkable Jewish pamphlets corresponded to that of the Dutch pamphlets of the same time: the writers put forward their point in dialogues that took place in barges, stagecoaches or coffee houses. The controversy had subsided by 1798, but the schism continued for another ten years. In 1808, King Lodewijk Napoleon – meanwhile the Batavian Republic had been succeeded by the Kingdom of Holland – decided that the Neie Kille had to reunite with the Alte. And thus it happened. The reconciliation posed no difficulties, for the ‘equal state’ had meanwhile become a fait accompli. Felix Libertate’s Jewish patriots had history on their side.

Ultimately, these values were largely enshrined under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by member states of the nascent United Nations in 1945.The editor imagines this work recited every day after Shaḥarit, on civic days for civil calendars celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations, or for Dutch Jewry and their descendants: in celebration of Dutch independence and the emancipation of its Jewry. –Aharon Varady

This is a transcription of the Dutch from De Rechten van den Menschen van den Burger (“The Rights of Man and of the Citizen” 1795) and of its Hebrew translation, דברי הברית החקים והמשפטים אשר בין אדם לאדם (1798), and set side-by-side with an English translation. We do not know the names of those responsible for the Dutch adaptation or the Hebrew translation of the Declaration. We are indebted to Nir Krakauer for his correction, comments, and notation. The kerning of letters in Lambert Antoine Claessens’s lithograph of De Rechten made it difficult sometimes to distinguish the spacing between words. If you compare the wording with the source image and find the need for a correction, or simply find something else that needs correcting, please leave a comment or contact us. The English translation of the Dutch here is mine, which is to say I have made liberal use of DeepL and Google Translate, the output of which I have proofread for clarity. I have taken the liberty of translating “Menschen” using the familiar Yiddish understanding of מנטשן in its gender-inclusive sense of “people/persons.” –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

De Rechten van den Menschen van den Burger (Batavian Republic, 31 January 1795, Den Hague) by Lambert Antoine Claessens, 15 April 1795

Divrei haBrit…Asher bein Adam l’Adam (Batavian Jewry, 1798)

Attached is a transcript of a Spanish verse-by-verse targum of the aftará for the Shabbat before 9 Aḇ, based on one found in a publication from Amsterdam in 1766 (the ḥumash Ezrat ha-Sofer: Devarim, 1766). Each verse is included in Hebrew, as well as the original Spanish text, and a slightly modernized Spanish text underneath to clarify archaic forms or words that have fallen out of use.

Source(s)

debarim_aftara_with_spanish_verse_by_verse_targum_amsterdam_5527_Page_1

debarim_aftara_with_spanish_verse_by_verse_targum_amsterdam_5527_Page_2

debarim_aftara_with_spanish_verse_by_verse_targum_amsterdam_5527_Page_3

debarim_aftara_with_spanish_verse_by_verse_targum_amsterdam_5527_Page_4

debarim_aftara_with_spanish_verse_by_verse_targum_amsterdam_5527_Page_5

debarim_aftara_with_spanish_verse_by_verse_targum_amsterdam_5527_Page_6

Author unknown, Ayn Adir kAdonai (“There is none like YHVH”) was originally composed as a piyyut for Shavu’ot. Macy Nulman writes in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Prayer that the poem was transmitted orally and was put into writing in the 1700s. Variants of the text exist in different compilations. This is a variation of Mipi El in Hebrew with a Judeo-Arabic translation found in the Seder al-Tawḥid for Rosh Ḥodesh Nissan, compiled by Mosheh Asher ibn Shmuel in 1887 in Alexandria. The English translation provided is adapted from the one offered by Akiva Sanders with changes made to the lines which differ from the variation that he translated. Vocalization of the Judeo-Arabic by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

• the use of “zouz” in place of the standard Arabic “ithnan” to refer to the number 2
• the verbal morphology, with a present-tense indicative kaa- prefix
• the interchangeability of shin and sin, both pronounced as /s/, and of zayin and gimel, both pronounced as /z/ — a unique aspect of pre-Hilalian Maghrebi dialects like Judeo-Moroccan Arabic

As is often the case in translation, some of the numbers are different. Specifically:

• instead of being the days of the week, seven is the days of the ḥuppah (i.e. the days of celebration after a wedding)
• instead of being the dibrot, ten is a minyan
• instead of being the attributes of mercy, thirteen is the age of the bar mitsvah
• The opening line, by my estimation, means “I know, that I may know them; that I may know of .” kaa-ndri = “I know,” while ndri-hom = “I know (subjunctive) them”.

The counting-song, “Eḥad Mi Yode’ah” appears for the first time in the Prague Haggadah (1526) in Hebrew and Yiddish, and was transcribed and translated into English by Aharon Varady. This Judeo-Moroccan adaptation is found on pages 159-160 in the maḥzor ספר מועדי ה׳ השלם (originally printed 1856). Many thanks to Milton Torres-Cerón for bringing this variation of Eḥad Mi Yode’ah to our attention via the Passages of Rite discussion group on Facebook.

Source(s)

kaandri ndrihom – mahzor Moadé Hashem, p. 159 (photo credit: Milton Torres-Cerón)

kaandri ndrihom – mahzor Moadé Hashem, p. 160 (photo credit: Milton Torres-Cerón)

kaandri ndrihom – mahzor Moadé Hashem, p. 161 (photo credit: Milton Torres-Cerón)

The Hebrew script traditionally used for Judeo-Italian features several unique aspects, most noticeably the use of shva to mark the vowel /e/.

Taken from the הגדה של פסח – מיט אַ סאָציאַליסטישען נוסח (from the פאָדגורזש printing in 1919, revised 1900 from an edition first published in 1888). The authorship of the Aramaic source is uncertain. It first appears in the 1888 “second edition” of the Haggadah (the 1888 brochure), written under the pseudonym “Der Nayer Velt-Magid” (the New World-Preacher). Benjamin Feigenbaum was probably involved, but it can’t be said for sure. Leon Zolotkoff was less likely to be involved with that edition since by 1888 he was already in the United States.

The authorship of the Yiddish translation is unknown. It is original to the 1919 Haggadah (though based on the earlier Aramaic text).

The English translation was made by Shlomo Jack Enkin Lewis, with thanks to Daniel Kaplan, 2024.

Source(s)

• the use of “zouz” in place of the standard Arabic “ithnan” to refer to the number 2

• the interchangeability of shin and sin, both pronounced as /s/, and of zayin and gimel, both pronounced as /z/ — a unique aspect of pre-Hilalian Maghrebi dialects like Judeo-Moroccan Arabic

• the dialectal diminutive form of -wa, along with the uniquely northern Moroccan diminutive mouyma for “a bit of water”

Perhaps due to influence from Andalusian Spanish, this text shows signs of īmala, wherein /aa/ is fronted to /ie/ when near a yod. Īmala is not particularly found in Muslim Moroccan Arabic. In this transcription, īmala is marked as <ä>, since its development is parallel to that of Germanic umlaut.

As is often the case in translation, some of the nouns are different. Specifically, everything from the kid up to the water is written in the diminutive. So in the Darija text, instead of water putting out fire burning a staff hitting a dog biting a cat eating a goat, you have a bit of water putting out a flamelet burning a stick hitting a puppy biting a kitten eating a kiddie.

The earliest known appearance of “Ḥad Gadya,” by an unknown author, can be found, handwritten, in the Prague Haggadah (1526). The uncorrected source Aramaic has been vocalized according to the Prague Haggadah (1590). This Judeo-Moroccan adaptation is found on pages 154-156 in the maḥzor ספר מועדי ה׳ השלם (originally printed 1856). Many thanks to Milton Torres-Cerón for bringing this variation of Ḥad Gadya to our attention via the Passages of Rite discussion group on Facebook. Besides the transcription of the Aramaic with its vocalization, I have also added an English translation adapted from Eve Levavi Feinstein’s Passover Haggadah translation following the explanation of Isaac in his description concerning diminutives. –Aharon N. Varady

Source(s)

Waaḥₔd ₔZdiwa – mahzor Moadé Hashem, p. 154

Waaḥₔd ₔZdiwa – mahzor Moadé Hashem, p. 155

Waaḥₔd ₔZdiwa – mahzor Moadé Hashem, p. 156

Judeo-Provençal was, of course, largely oral rather than spoken, but when written down it often followed the Hebrew pronunciation norms of the Comtat, and boy oh boy are those something! Sound shifts relevant to this text include:
שׁ = /s/ or intervocalic /z/
ס = /f/
ז = /v/
word-final בֿ = /w/
word-final דֿ = /z/
consonantal י = /tʃ~ʃ/
word-final or unvoiced-letter adjacent ר = /χ/
Thus, חַד becomes “Rhaz.”

This is a translation of Ḥad Gadya into Judeo-Provençal, largely based on a recording made by Eliane Amado Levi-Valensi (ca. 1972).

The earliest known appearance of “Ḥad Gadya,” by an unknown author, can be found, handwritten, in the Prague Haggadah (1526). The Aramaic has been vocalized according to the Prague Haggadah (1590). Besides the transcription of the Aramaic with its vocalization, I have also added an English translation adapted from Eve Levavi Feinstein’s Passover Haggadah translation. –Aharon N. Varady

This is “Chanukah” a free or interpretive rhyming English translation of Maoz Tsur, a 13th century piyyut attributed to Mordecai ben Yitsḥak haLevi (based on his acrostic signature). Employing the same rhyme scheme as the “Star Spangled Banner,” the anonymous translator implicitly suggests its proud usage as a patriotic hymn for American Jewry of the United States on Ḥanukkah. At the time, Zionism as a political force was still in its relative infancy and American rabbis were explicitly referring to the United States as a new Canaan. In conjunction with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the United States had just hosted the World’s Parliament of Religions — and representatives of Judaism were treated on par with that of every other representative. Jews worldwide were looking to the United States as a golden medinah amidst the shocking and persistent anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. At a time when the late 18th century Enlightenment promise of Emancipation and Religious Freedom remained unfulfilled in most places, for a generation yearning to realize Jewish safety amidst some measure of national pride, this use of Maoz Tsur compares with the adoption of Eugène Pottier’s “The Internationale” (1871), Naphtali Herz Imber’s “Hatiḳvah” (1878), and Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik’s “The People’s Blessing” (a/k/a Teḥezaqnah, 1894) as anthems to carry forward a vision of the end of Exile. –Aharon Varady

Source

Chanukah (The Hebrew Standard, 8 December 1893), p. 1 col. 1

A short piyyut by Avraham Ibn Ezra, whose first name is signed in an acrostic. The translation here, from an unknown and anonymous contributor to zemirotdatabase.org, follows after the translation that Honi Sanders and I published in the birkon for his wedding, Siman l’Vanim (Dimus Parrhesia Press 2019) with some minor changes. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

This is a transcription of “Amarer b-Vekhi,” a seliḥah for the 17th of Tammuz by Menaḥem ben Makhir. The German translation by an unknown translator can be found in סידור שפה ברורה Tägliches Gebetbuch der Israeliten für das ganze Jahr (B.L. Monasch, Krotoschin: 1845), pp. 405-407.

Source(s)

Siddur Sefah Berurah – Tägliches Gebetbuch der Israeliten für das ganze Jahr (1845), p. 405

Siddur Sefah Berurah – Tägliches Gebetbuch der Israeliten für das ganze Jahr (1845), p. 406

Siddur Sefah Berurah – Tägliches Gebetbuch der Israeliten für das ganze Jahr (1845), p. 407

The Seder Tefilat Kol Peh was printed in 1891 in Vienna, and features a full Ladino translation of the entire siddur. This Ladino translation of Adon Olam is found on the left side of pagespread №145. Along with a full transcription of the Ladino text, Isaac Gantwerk Mayer has also prepared a full romanization of the Ladino. I have set the Hebrew text of Adon Olam side-by-side with the Ladino.

Adon Olam is a piyyut that became popular in the 15th century and is often attributed to Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021–1058) and less often to Sherira Gaon (900-1001), or his son, Hai ben Sherira Gaon (939-1038). The variation of the piyyut appearing here is the sixteen-line version familiar to Eastern Sepharadi congregations.

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