a community-grown, libre Open Access archive of Jewish prayer and liturgical resources — for those crafting their own prayerbooks and sharing the content of their practice
This is an archive of exclusively modern resources preprared for use as special readings or recitations in commemoration of days in the Jewish calendar, as well as on civic days on civil calendars.
The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America, were first adopted in 1791. They were closely modeled on the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason in May 1776. This translation, by Judah David Eisenstein was published in 1891. . . .
This is De Rechten van den Menschen van den Burger (“The Rights of Man and of the Citizen” 1795) and its Hebrew translation, דברי הברית החקים והמשפטים אשר בין אדם לאדם (1798), upon the establishment of the Batavian Republic and the ensuing emancipation of Dutch Jewry in the Netherlands. The text of the Declaration, with nineteen articles, follows after the French Republic’s much expanded Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1793 written by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles. (The French Declaration, ratified by popular vote in July 1793, was a revision of the initial Declaration from 1789 written by the commission that included Hérault de Séchelles and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just during the period of the French Revolution.) Declarations such as these enshrined the liberal values of the Enlightenment which changed the situation and status of Jews under their aegis. 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 fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, initially proposed by Congress on 13 June 1866 and adopted on 9 July 1868 was the second of three Reconstruction Amendments addressing citizenship rights and equal protection under the law. It was enacted in response to issues related to emancipated slaves following the failure of the Slaveholders’ Rebellion (1861-1865). . . .