‘Hashem Elo-him Tzeva-oth.’ Prayer in honor of the coronation of Czar Alexander III of Russia. Also records names of his wife Czarina Maria Feodorovna and heir, Prince Nicholas II, the last Czar of Russia.

Alexander III (1845-94) succeeded his father, Alexander II, as Czar of the Russian Empire after the latter was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. Believing that his father’s liberalization efforts only antagonized Russia’s political crisis, Alexander III assumed a heavy-handed, reactionary approach to his reign. Seeking to placate his religious-nationalist supporters, Alexander blamed his father’s assassination on the Jews and enacted the infamous May Laws, severely restricting Jews’ freedom of movement and trade as well as inciting a series of devastating pogroms. The stated intent of these deeply restrictive laws was for ‘One third [of the Jews] to die, one third to emigrate and one third to assimilate.’ Thus, the present prayer, describing Alexander’s coronation as, ‘A day of jubilation for our land and its inhabitants’, beseeching God to, ‘Lengthen the days of (Alexander’s) reign’ and hoping that, ‘We might learn to love and fear our master the Czar all the days of our lives’, may well have been written for an external audience, intending to allay fears of Jewish loyalty. In any event, the prayer highlights the miserable predicament of a hapless Russian Jewry.