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.

(AMERICAN JUDAICA)

Various American and Canadian cities

1921

Collection of documents bearing the printed letterhead of the Committee Knesseth Israel of Jerusalem, the organization founded in 1866 under the auspices of Rabbis Meir Auerbach and Shmuel Salant. The pages were a record kept by this Shadar, or emissary from Eretz Israel sent to collect money in the Diaspora for distribution to the needy Jews of the Holy Land.

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.