Lectures in Jewish History and Thought. No hard questions, please.
This video is part of the Biblical Jewish History online course (click here for information and registration).
Lecture delivered as part of the Touro Talks series, April 6, 2022.
Premiering today at 11:00 am EDT (New York Time). Join us for a live chat (58m).
Really proud of my son Aryeh for his upcoming competition at the 2022 Maccabiah games in Shotokan Karate. Please consider support his mission by clicking here: https://secure2.convio.net/musa/site/TR;jsessionid=00000000.app208a?px=1099195&fr_id=1160&pg=personal&NONCE_TOKEN=E0AB7F850711AC3D5904F77E36715460
Well done Aryeh! Thank you all!
The first in a series of twelve lectures delivered at The Ashkenazium of Budapest. Join us at 11:00 am (New York time) for a premiere and live chat. The last four lectures will be delivered on Monday and Tuesday: sign up for free registration at http://www.bit.ly/ASHKENAZ2022.
Did you know that some of the first soldiers to land at Normandy in June 1944 were Jewish? I didn’t!
Join me for a discussion of the economic, social, political and religious background of the violent Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising of 1648-49. Trigger warning: some cherished, yet incorrect, stereotypes may be challenged. Video with live chat.
With gratitude to The Ashkenazium and its Dean, Dr. Michael Chighel, I am pleased to offer twelve lectures on the history of Jews in Ashkenaz to the global audience. Please visit http://www.bit.ly/ASHKENAZ2022 to register for free!
Can’t make the live classes? No problem. Sign up for the course I put together to prepare my Hungarian students for the lectures: A Thousand Years of Ashkenaz. As the Twelve new lectures are produced, I hope to post the lectures in the course for future students.
Enjoy in good health!
Absolutely free, courtesy The Ashkenazium of Budapest! Twelve live lectures on the history of the Jews of Ashkenaz. RSVP at www.bit.ly/ASHKENAZ2022 and join us for a discussion of this fascinating history! Lectures start Monday, March 21 (click on the image below or visit www.ashkenazium.eu for more information).
With gratitude to Dean Michael Chighel of The Ashkenazium of Budapest, my new series of lectures on the history of the Jews of Ashkenaz will be open to the global community of students of Jewish history via webinar. Please visit http://www.bit.ly/ASHKENAZ2022 for details and registration. Lectures are scheduled for Monday-Thursday, March 21-24 and Monday-Tuesday March 28-29, 13:00-16:30 CET (8:00 am-11:30 am ET). Visit the course website for advance preparation. Join us!
Premiering at 12:00 noon ET, with live chat (12 minutes). Join us!
Returning students: thanks so much for contributing comments to the draft chapters of the textbook! Please be sure to check out the additions to Chapter 3. New students welcome! Please click here for information and to register.
This video is a very brief treatment, in keeping with the format of the Jewish History Lab series. For a more sophisticated and extended discussion, please visit the online course (free registration).
A brief discussion of the election of Volodomyr Zelensky in the larger context of Ukrainian-Jewish history. Recorded on March 4, 2022 with hope for a speedy return to peace for Ukraine and its people.
My grandfather died, suddenly, on the rarest date of the year: March 3, 1957, which coincides with today, the 30th of Adar Rishon.
It’s a leap year date that only appears seven times in the nineteen-year cycle of the Hebrew calendar. Following our Lithuanian Jewish custom, we observe his death anniversary on the 1st of Adar in non-leap years, but if we were to hold by the strict standard of the exact date, his yahrzeit has only appeared 24 times in the last 65 years.
More strikingly, this is the very first time that the Hebrew date of 30 Adar I and the Gregorian date of March 3 have coincided since his passing. In a way, it’s as if he died just last year.
I never met my grandfather Henry, but his daughter—my mother—chose to bestow his name on me, and I feel a special responsibility to reflect on his life and legacy.
Henry was only fifty-two years old when he died. I’ve relived the scene many times in my imagination, especially on Yom Kippur when I contemplate the fragile brevity of our human lifespans.
My uncle Leon, then fourteen years old, was having difficulty with his homework. My grandmother Pauline sent him downstairs to speak with my grandfather in the finished basement of their Montreal duplex, a quiet place to which Henry often retreated for personal study. Leon remembers hearing Henry’s labored breathing just before he collapsed to the floor and died within moments, right in front of him. Coronary thrombosis was later listed on the death certificate.
I picture Uncle Leon as a young boy, just starting high school, suddenly burdened with the task of telling his mother that she is a widow, his eighteen-year-old sister that she is an orphan. I reach out with my mind and gingerly touch the mental picture, tentatively placing myself and my own wife and children in my namesake’s place, looking sideways at the result so as not to be overwhelmed.
Yehudah Leib and Shifra Ravvin, originally of Zagare, Lithuania, gave their newborn son the Hebrew name Hillel when he was born in Leonpol’e, Belarus in 1905. I don’t know why they moved from Zagare to tiny Leonpol’e: Zagare was a significant Lithuanian town, famous as the birthplace of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter a century earlier, father of the Mussar movement. Leonpol’e, on the other hand, barely registered on the map. Some 800k to the south-east, closer to Kyiv than Vilnius, it was known principally for the ramshackle wooden synagogue that stood on the outskirts of the shtetl.
Henry’s childhood was shaped by the turmoil of World War I and the Russian Civil War, and antisemitism truncated his studies at the University of Moscow. When he emigrated to Canada he booked passage with his Russian name Ilya, although he would later use the English name Henry, hoping to avoid prejudice in the new world.
It was on his journey from Rotterdam to Halifax in February 1930 that he met his wife Pauline, also a Lithuanian Jew (their names are sequential in the Canadian immigration record, suggesting that they got off the boat together). They were married in the Chevra Kadish congregation of Montreal, where they lived for the rest of their lives.
Henry was linguistically gifted, and he mastered Canadian English with an accent that was reportedly undetectable, eh? He completed his degree in Electrical Engineering and worked in the aeronautics industry. When he died he was studying toward a PhD candidate in History at the University of Montreal, specializing in the Slavic studies, a fact I only learned when I was accepted to graduate school for the same degree.
He was a man who valued a well-rounded education, working in science and technology yet appreciating literature, music and culture. My mother and my uncle Leon tell me he was a loving father, a hard worker who supported them with an encouraging warmth. His wife Pauline never remarried, but before her passing in 2010 she merited to see his children have children of their own—me and three cousins, one of whom also bears his name—and many great-grandchildren.
My cousin Michael is flying in from Washington, DC to commemorate our grandfather’s yahrzeit at a siyum, a traditional celebration on the completion of a Talmudic tractate. If you are in New York, please feel free to join us at the 8:00 am minyan at Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst.
May the memory of the righteous be a blessing.
Henry Abramson 