Minhag America - The Daily Prayers, for American Israelites, Revised in Conference. With: Select Prayers for Various Occasions In Life. Edited by Isaac Mayer Wise.

AUCTION 58 | Thursday, May 02nd, 2013 at 1:00
Fine Judaica: Printed Books, Manuscripts and Autograph Letters

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Lot 24
(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

Minhag America - The Daily Prayers, for American Israelites, Revised in Conference. With: Select Prayers for Various Occasions In Life. Edited by Isaac Mayer Wise.

Hebrew and English on facing pages pp. (2), 271, (1 blank); 48. Endpapers soiled. Original boards, worn, lacking backstrip. 8vo. Singerman 2337.

Cincinnati: Bloch & Company 1872

Est: $700 - $900
<<The first Reform Prayer-book printed in America.>> Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900) was born in Steingrub, Bohemia and immigrated to America in 1846. At first a rabbi in Albany, in 1854 he moved to Cincinnati. There he established the institutional structure of American Reform Judaism: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Hebrew Union College. Wise, who desired to publish an “American” prayer book from his earliest years in the country, believed that the acceptance by all American Jews of a single liturgical rite would represent a great step toward unity. This first Reform prayer-book retained a Hebrew text and the traditional framework of the liturgy, though certain “objectionable” passages were altered, shortened or excised. Erased were all references to Jewish particularism, a Return to Zion and the reinstitution of the Temple.