Issachar Solomon Teichthal. Eim Habanim Semeichah.

(HOLOCAUST).

Salamon Katzburg

Budapest

1943

FIRST EDITION. Some marginalia.

Rare first edition. Few copies survived the devastation of war. An historically vital and disquieting tract written by one of the rabbinic leaders of Slovakian Jewry, professing deep distress at the onslaught of Nazism through Europe and the absence of any trace of salvation. Despite Teichtal’s lifetime support of a strong rejectionist view of the Zionist return to the Land of Israel, he now believes this very rejection engendered God to permit the mass slaughter of European Jewry. The settlement of Eretz Israel is, according to the author, a necessary precondition for the onset of Messianic redemption and engages in a psychological analysis here of the ongoing rejection of this idea within the Orthodox world, in spite of the grave situation of the Jews of Europe. Eim Habanim Semeichah was written while the author was in hiding from deportation. He and his family were eventually caught and while being transported to Auschwitz, Rabbi Teichthal was lynched by Ukranian criminals occupying the same rail-car.