No comments about The Story of Sir Moses Montefiore (Famous Jews).

No comments about Gus J. Solomon: Liberal Politics, Jews, And the Federal Courts.

No comments about Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A: One Hundred Years of Service.

No comments about This is how seventy looks: Stories of my life.

No comments about Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-generation Memoir.

No comments about The Next-To-Final Solution: A Belgian Detention Camp for Hitler Refugees.

3 comments about Survival: The Story of a Sixteen-Year-Old Jewish Boy (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).

1. Survival: The Story of a Sixteen-Year-Old Jewish Boy begins with Israel J. Rosengarten's deportation in 1942 to the Belgian concentration camp of Breendonk at the age of sixteen and follows his movements through a series of camps until 1945. Survival is a compelling, personal account that concludes with the Auschwitz death march, liberation by the Americans, and Israel's return to Belgium -- only to discover that he was the lone survivor of a family of seven. This intimate story of what it was like to be a teenage boy in the concentration camps of the holocaust, of surviving almost 1,000 days of internment through a series of incredible coincidences, miracles, and a fierce struggle to stay alive against impossible odds. Survival is a welcome addition to the growing body of holocaust literature.



2. A truly haunting book in its simplicity. This is not high emotion, but an incredibly comprehensive recollection of life in various concentration camps. Israel Rosengarten conveys the true horror of the concentration camps via his narrative of the details and minutiae of day to day life. It is the very ordinariness of many of the details which jolts us and the capriciousness with which one either lived or died. Mr. Rosengarten's detailed memories of the routine of the camps 50 years after the events is what sets this book apart. It is this which conveys the true horror of the Holocaust and makes it a must read. It is a pity that the Publisher allowed such obviously poor translation and editing to be done of such an important work.



3. This testimony to man's inhumanity to man is a welcome addition to Holocaust literature. Mr. Rosengarten's personal story is a tribute to the human spirit and the will to survive. Although the book was originally planned for his children, I appreciate the fact that he shared his experiences, his courage and love of family with the general public. Because this authentic and moving book made such a lasting impression on me, I wish to donate a copy to our library.

No comments about A Lonely Rose.

2 comments about Students Scholars and Saints.

1. The essays in this book are titled as follows: 'The Jewish Primary School', 'The Disciple of the Wise', 'The Rabbinical Student' 'The Religion of the Pharisee' 'Jewish Thought as Reflected in the Halakah' ' 'The Gaon.Rabbi Elijah Wilna'
   'Rabbi Israel Salanter' ' Zechariah Frankel' Isaac Hirsch Weiss'
   'Solomon Schecter ' ' David Hoffman'.
   The biographical essays are of special interest and value, but the whole of the work is rich in Jewish learning and insight.



2. The essays in this book were based on speeches given by the author between 1901 and 1922. Some of the essays were enlightening, others less so.
   
   Generally, I liked the speeches on Jewish education and institutions better than the speeches about individuals; the former speeches were especially useful for someone with limited cultural literacy, while the latter tended to assume too much background knowledge (with the possible exception of Ginzberg's excellent essay on Israel Salanter).
   
   A few points I thought were interesting:
   
   *Ginzberg's explanation of how Poland became so heavily Jewish. In medieval Poland, Jews were allowed to enter a wide variety of businesses, while in western Europe Jews were confined to a few trades. Unsurprisingly, Poland became more popular with Jews, western Europe less so.
   
   *An essay on Jewish childhood education points out that early childhood education begin with biblical Hebrew, so that students could learn to follow adult prayers as soon as possible. By contrast, I wasted my childhood Sunday School mornings on conversational Hebrew - useful if you are moving to Israel, but not so useful in shul.
   
   *An essay on the Talmud emphasizes that scholars were expected to master the secular sciences as well as Torah; he notes that St. Jerome, one of the 4th-century Christian Church Fathers, actually criticized Jews' interest in medicine. By contrast, today some Jews seem to think that the most "authentic" or "traditional" type of Jewish education is limited to Torah and a minimal level of secular literacy.
   
   *An essay on Salanter (a leader in the Musar movement, a 19th-century group focusing on moral regeneration) does a nice job of pointing out Salanter's wisdom and purity: noting, for example, that Salanter believed that equanimity of temper is a fine thing for oneself, but that "Trust in God . . . is an abominable sin if applied to shift from us our obligations towards our fellow man; one must not trust in God at the expense of those who seek our help." Salanter was also something of an ascetic; when he died, his room contained only his tallit and tefilin. Ginzberg also points out that Musar was actually controversial during Salanter's lifetime; some Jews worried that Musar was a potential separatist sect.
   
   *His essay on Zechariah Frankel makes a case for something resembling Conservative Judaism (though the phrase never creeps into his essays, since Conservative Judaism as a separate denomination did not exist at the time of his 1901 speech). He wrote: "the sanctity of the Sabbath reposes not upon the fact that it was proclaimed on Sinai, but on the fact that the Sabbath idea found for thousands of years its expression in Jewish souls . . . practical Judaism [ ] is not concerned with origins, but regards the institutions as they have come to be." Regardless of its origin, Judaism is how Jews express religiousness, and is thus our way "to grasp the highest ideas and to keep them clearly before them".
   
   Some negatives:
   
   *His last few essays, focusing on a few Western European religious intellectuals, were very hard to follow for anyone without an enormous level of background knowledge. One example: an essay on Solomon Schechter states: "The letter of Rabbi Hushiel dispelled with one stroke the legend of the four captives, with which Jewish history in the West was supposed to start." A footnote explaining Rabbi Hushiel and "the legend of the four captives" might have been a good idea.
   
   *Incredible defensiveness about East European Judaism, which Ginzberg goes out of his way to compare favorably with Sephardic Judaism- perhaps because at that time, East Europeans were sometimes viewed as a little backward.

No comments about Black-Jewish Relations: The View from the State Capitols : A Survey Based on Interviews With Black State Senators.