Who Was Rabbi Shlomo Alkabets? Jewish Biography as History by Dr. Henry Abramson

Famed author of the Lecha Dodi hymn sung on the eve of the Jewish sabbath, Rabbi Alkabets was one of the founding members of the 16th-century school of Kabbalists based in Safed (Tsfat), Israel.

Next week’s lecture: Gluckel of Hameln!

Love Yiddish culture? Check out the new poster for the 2015 Kultur Festival in Boca Raton! I’m really proud to be doing a book reading (The Kabbalah of Forgiveness) there on March 6. Main event, as always, will be Maestro Aaron Kula’s phenomenal Klezmer Company Orchestra concert on March 1!

January 22, 2015 1

Emanuel Ringelblum: Heroic Scholar of the Warsaw Ghetto

An examination of the life and work of Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-1944), the heroic Polish scholar who organized the underground Oneg Shabbat society in the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum recognized the extreme and unprecedented nature of the Nazi onslaught early in the war, and brought together a group of highly dedicated volunteers who recorded every aspect of Jewish life in the ghetto, including a functioning underground medical school, theaters, newspapers and the like. Betrayed to the Germans, he died a martyr’s death, but not before he buried the Oneg Shabbat archives in milk cans. They were unearthed after the war, and constitute a major source for the study of the Holocaust.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/eqy5tJWraRE]

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