Lectures in Jewish History and Thought. No hard questions, please.
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.
I recorded this video just hours before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, motivated by Mr. Putin’s bizarre speech denying the historical legacy of the Ukrainian people. It’s a dense talk, with lots of maps in various languages, intended to demonstrate the millennial role of Ukraine in Jewish history.
Second brief lecture (10m) in the sequence of talks on the Holocaust, part of the Jewish History Lab series. Premieres today at 12 noon ET (New York Time). For a more sophisticated discussion, please note the free online course on the Holocaust (registration information below). This course now has over 100 students.
Brief video added to the Biblical Jewish History online course, available also to YouTube channel members at the Researcher and Colleague level. Introduction to some of the more challenging issues related to dating this book.
I recently enjoyed a conversation with the Judaism Demystified team, Ben Koren and Benzion Siouni. Wide-ranging discussion of methodological and philosophical approaches to the study of Jewish History.
I recorded this video after Vladimir Putin delivered his February 21 speech denying the historical validity of Ukraine, a clear pretext to the invasion that began a few hours ago. This brief video provides a survey of the long Jewish presence in the region, framed in the context of maps: political, ethnolinguistic, military and social. Please join me for a premiere and live chat at 1pm ET (New York time, 34 minutes).
Praying for the safety of the peoples of Ukraine.
Very pleased to welcome the 100th student to my new online class on the Holocaust, free and open to the community.
New video available to students registered for the Biblical Jewish History course, and YouTube channel members at the Researcher and Colleague level.
Join us today at 11:00 am ET (New York Time) for a discussion of the implications of Digital Learning for Torah and Torah-adjacent study. Rabbi Schwed is the visionary director of multiple initiatives for the Orthodox Union, including the revolutionary All Daf app, also All Mishnah and All Parsha.
Premieres today at 12 noon ET (New York Time) with live chat. Join us!
Discussion of the difficulty of working with forged artifacts and the study of Biblical History. This video is available to YouTube Channel members at the Researcher and Colleague level as well as to students registered in the online course in Biblical Jewish History.
Looking forward to this discussion with my colleague Rabbi Moshe Schwed, creator of the wildly successful All Daf app, on the implications of digital learning for Torah and Torah-adjacent study. Register for the Zoom by clicking here.
Biblical Jewish History students: please check your Course Page for new updates to the draft chapters of the volume in progress!
We got Zoombombed by Neo-Nazis in the middle of the conference, but I manage to deliver my presentation. Join us at 12 noon ET (New York time) for a premiere and live chat! 23 minutes, presentation is a little different than most of my lectures but still fun I think. I hope.
Also: Origins of the Jewish People; Neo-Nazis Zoombomb the Sri Lankan Conference of Jews and Buddhists; Soviet Jews During the Interwar Period, and What’s with the Queen of Heaven Business?
Final installment in the What is a Synagogue? series. Amazing things in the basement and sub-basement of this medieval synagogue!
Part One of a new lecture series, delivered at Congregation Beth Israel in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Series title: All Jewish History, but Skipping the Boring Parts.
Recording of a presentation to a scholarly conference organized by the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Unfortunately–and to the great surprise of the saffron-robed Buddhist monks that made up much of the audience–the conference was attacked, and ultimately shut down, by Neo-Nazi zoom bombers who disrupted our discussions by displaying pornography and shouting “Heil Hitler” over the speakers. I managed, after an interruption of two or three minutes, to complete my paper, but the Neo-Nazis returned and the Sri Lankan tech team were unable to control the intellectual vandalism.
We plan to reconvene the conference, but now our Buddhist colleagues have received a more powerful lesson in the realities of Jewish life than any of us could have described in text.
Premieres Tuesday at 12 noon ET (New York Time) with live chat. Moderated, btw.
Discussion of the “Queen of Heaven” inscriptions discovered at Kuntillet Ajrud and their implications for reading the book of Jeremiah, among other Biblical passages. Available to members of my YouTube channel at the Researcher and Colleague level and to students enrolled in the online Biblical Jewish history course.
Ukrainians and Jews forged an unusual partnership during the brief period that followed the collapse of the Russian Empire, creating a Ministry of Jewish Affairs in a short-lived independent Ukrainian state. The experiment was doomed, however, by the Russian invasion, civil war and wave of pogroms that submerged the region in violence.
Join us for a live chat at 12 noon ET (16 minutes, New York time), perhaps reflecting on what this history means for contemporary Jews and Ukrainians.
Sixth video in the “What is a Synagogue?” series, in connection with the upcoming 41st Annual Dinner of the Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst.
My colleague Professor Nathan Katz, a world expert on Judaism and eastern faiths, invited me to participate in this unusual conference hosted by the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. What I know about Buddhism would fit into the sound of one hand clapping, but my role here will be to describe some of the basics of Jewish religious practice to Buddhist scholars (is there a word for “Jewsplaining”? “Yidsplaining”?). Honored to participate with Professor Alan Brill and Rebbetzin Blu Greenberg, both of whom are very knowledgable and reputable scholars in their respective fields.
Zoom ID: 885 0128 2754, Passcode 005234
The Ketef Hinnom amulets are absolutely amazing–almost as amazing of the story of their discovery! This video deals with some philosophically challenging issues, not intended for broader distribution, so it’s available to members of my YouTube Channel (Researcher and Colleague levels) and students registered in my Biblical Jewish History online course. Click here for a longer explanation of why this video is not public.
Henry Abramson 