Rokeach, Israel Dov. Autograph Manuscript, a ledger of funds raised to benefit Knesseth Israel of Jerusalem, Palestine - Kupat Rabbi Meir Ba’al Hanes. Text in Yiddish and Hebrew.
AUCTION 79 |
Thursday, November 15th,
2018 at 1:00 PM
The Valmadonna Trust Library: Further Selections from the Historic Collection. * Hebrew Printing in America. * Graphic & Ceremonial Art
Lot 209
(AMERICAN JUDAICA)
Rokeach, Israel Dov. Autograph Manuscript, a ledger of funds raised to benefit Knesseth Israel of Jerusalem, Palestine - Kupat Rabbi Meir Ba’al Hanes. Text in Yiddish and Hebrew.
Various American and Canadian cities: 1921
Est: $800 - $1,200
Documents Rokeach’s travels to numerous North American Jewish communities, from McKeesport, PA (he received 21 donations, totalling $34.71), to Grand Forks, ND, and Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN in between. Several of the pages are from cities in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec. Each man and woman is listed by name in the column for donors, the amounts given, and receipt number are all carefully recorded. Donations usually came in modest amounts: $.50, $2, or odd numbers such as $2.06 or $1.48. One imagines the donors giving whatever they might have had on hand. Occasionally, a local gabbai, or agent, is named, who collected the sums for Rokeach to pick up when he came to town.
Rokeach, as a rabbinic emissary collecting funds for the needy and Torah scholars of Eretz Israel, was part of a tradition in America that actually preceded the formation of the United States. See Stanley Mirvis, Shadarim in the Colonial Americas: Agents of Inter-Communal Connectivity and Rabbinic Authority, in: American Jewish History Vol. 102.2 (2018).
Records such as these are a testament to long-gone Jewish settlements in the United States and Canada.