Minhag America - Tephiloth B’nei Yeshurun. Gebet-Buch fur den Oeffentlichen Gottesdienst und die Privat-Andacht [daily, Sabbath and holiday prayers]. According to the Custom of America. Prepared by Isaac M. Wise

(AMERICAN JUDAICA)

Bloch & Co

Cincinnati

1864

Second improved German edition. First edition with Hebrew and Geman face-`a-face

Singerman 1846 (locating only one copy)

Isaac Mayer Wise was born in Steingrub, Bohemia, in 1819 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. See J.G. Heller, Isaac M. Wise; His Life, Work and Thought (1965) pp. 302-5