tagged: United States home front during World War Ⅰ • the Open Siddur Project ✍ פְּרוֺיֶקְט הַסִּדּוּר הַפָּתוּחַ

For Those At Home, a prayer for the home front during war by Rev. Howard A. Bridgman adapted by Rabbi Morris Lazaron (1918)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (editing/transcription), Morris Samuel Lazaron and Howard Allen Bridgman

“[Prayer] for those at home,” a variation of a prayer by Rev. Howard A. Bridgman (1860-1929), is found adapted (without Christian god-language) by Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron in his World War Ⅰ era prayerbook, Side Arms: Readings, Prayers and Meditations for Soldiers and Sailors (1918), on page 25. The original version of the prayer was first published in The Service Song Book (Young Men’s Christian Associations 1917), pp. 86 in the abridged edition. . . .

מײן אַמעריקא (אונזער נײע הימנע) | My America (Our New Hymn) by Morris Rosenfeld (1917)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (editing/transcription) and Morris Rosenfeld

“My America (Our New Hymn)” was written by Morris Rosenfeld and published by the Jewish Morning Journal sometime mid-April 1917. On April 2nd, the United States had entered the World War against Germany and its allies. In the xenophobic atmosphere of the United States during World War Ⅰ, Representative Isaac Siegel (1880-1947), R-NY, offered the hymn as evidence of the patriotism of America’s “foreign-born” Jewish immigrants. The poem in its English translation was added to the Congressional Record on 18 April 1917 in an extension of remarks. Xenophobia in the United States though did not ebb. Nearly a year later, on April 4, 1918, a German immigrant, Robert Prager, was lynched in Collinsville, Illinois. . . .