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This is an untitled prayer offered in the Evening Service for the Sabbath from the Union Prayer Book Newly Revised (CCAR 1924), pp. 68-69, as a reading between the Shema and the Amidah. As a prayer for protection it fits as a paraliturgical haskivenu, and in New York City, it makes sense in the context of the terrifying news of mass-murder, rape, and genocide being reported from Ukraine at the time. (Find Nokhem Shtif’s “פּאָגראָמען אין אוקראַיִנע : די צײַט פֿון דער פֿרײַװיליקער אַרמײ (The Pogroms in Ukraine: the Period of the Volunteer Army)” (1923) offered in Yiddish and in English translation at In Geveb.) The Ukrainian context of this prayer is further underscored in that the prayer is not found in the 1918 revised Union Prayer Book, but in the later 1924 edition. It may have been unique to Congregation Emanu-El in New York City, who compiled this version of the Union Prayer Book for radio listeners joining their service.
“A Prayer of Re-dedication” (also simply called “Rededication”) is the thirty-fifth prayer in the “Meditations” section of the Union Home Prayer Book (CCAR 1951), p. 199. It is one of only three new prayers found in this section (the others having been reprinted from CCAR’s 1923 collection of teḥinot). A close read of the prayer suggests to me that this prayer was written in the shadow of World War Ⅱ and the Holocaust, giving voice to concerns over Jewish continuity in the midst of post–World War II economic expansion and largess in the United States.
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