20 Selected Stories From the Exhibition

Hannah Senesh dedicated the book to her friend Miriam Yitzhak in January 1944, before leaving on her mission. She signed the cover with her code name, “Hagar”.

[Martin Buber archive]

The chapter on the writer’s erotic awakening in his youth was deleted from the Table of Contents, out of concern that it would be offensive to his Catholic readers

The item attests to the importance Yehoshua attributed to the opinion of close colleagues on his writing, even in the early stages

Published in 1951

This Haggadah was composed at the request of the Education Minister, for the use of soldiers attending Seder in army camps. Its contents stress human action and heroism and the capabilities of the IDF, omitting the motif of divine deliverance. Before Passover, the IDF printed 10,000 copies of this secular Haggadah and distributed them to army camps. However, at the last minute the Haggadah was suppressed due to pressure from the army rabbinate and the religious political parties. On instructions from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion it was decided to cancel the reading of the Haggadah in army bases, and to collect and destroy all copies. Only 20 copies survived, two of which are exhibited here.

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The Al-Aqsa mosque, and by extension Jerusalem, is a sacred site in Islam and a place of pilgrimage. While Jerusalem is never named explicitly in the Quran, many commentators accept that the verse describing the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey to the “furthest (al-ʾaqṣā) mosque” refers to the Temple Mount (Ḥaram al-Sharif) in Jerusalem. Later traditions, including this anonymous Indian poem, describe in detail the Prophet’s ascension to heaven from Jerusalem on the back of his miraculous steed, al-Burāq.

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Zweig apparently wrote the letter shortly before ending his life. He left it on the table in his home in Petropolis, Brazil. The title (statement) was written in Portuguese, while the body of the text is in German. Even in his final moments, he adhered to his linguistic style: he corrected the wording in two places.

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The exercise book contains a selection of her poems, among them: “In the Fires of War”; “To My Mother”; “A Walk to Caesarea”. Hannah Senesh dedicated the book to her friend Miriam Yitzhak in January 1944, before leaving on her mission. She signed the cover with her code name, “Hagar”.

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The manuscript is decorated with images of Temple vessels and hunting scenes drawn using micrography (designs formed from miniature lettering). Most of the liturgical poetry in the prayerbook follows the customs observed in communities originating in Barcelona and the Catalonia region. The prayerbook survived the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, traveled around Europe, and was smuggled out of Nazi Germany to the USA, from where it found its way to the National Library.

The maḥzor was brought to Worms, in the Rhine Valley, by refugees from the Würzburg community after it was destroyed in the pogroms of 1298. It was preserved in the Worms synagogue and saved in 1938 by the city archivist, who concealed it in the cathedral when the synagogue was destroyed on Kristallnacht. In 1957, following a legal adjudication in Germany, both volumes of the maḥzor were donated to the National Library.

This work by Moses Maimonides is the greatest individual achievement in the field of halakha and Rabbinic literature, including halakhic rulings covering every aspect of Jewish life. Due to its status as a foundational text, it was sometimes copied in the form of a monumental codex, similar to the Bibles of the period. The illustrations were added in the early 15th century, and closely follow the halakhic topics dealt with in the text.

The first printed edition of this work, written in Safed in 1563. After its publication, the work was distributed rapidly and was so successful that it became the most authoritative work determining the way of life of observant Jews up to the present day.

The composition is in the form of a scroll, which describes in words and illustrations, historical sites and holy graves in and outside the Land of Israel, and allowed Jewish households abroad to visualize the homeland. Since they were evidence of a Jewish community that watched over the holy places, and therefore deserved their brethren’s support, the scrolls also aided publicity and fund raising.