Description

Droshes veg’n Shivas Tziyon un Kiyum HaUma – Yiddish Discourses on the Return to Zion and Jewish Destiny

by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik

edited by Dr. David Fishman

List Price $39.95 / NOW $34

This volume of Yiddish discourses by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, transcribed from his own handwritten manuscripts, was edited and contains an introduction (also translated in English) by Dr. David Fishman.

The volume, consisting of nine discourses delivered at conferences of the Mizrachi Organization of America beginning in 1939 and concluding in 1958, is a unique synthesis of homiletics, religious thought, and commentary on current events. Of particular interest are the addresses from the fateful years between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. ­While the discourses deal with the mission, politics, and state of the Mizrachi movement, both in America and in the Land of Israel, they go far beyond the confines of political speeches to address profound questions of Jewish destiny. This volume also includes a reprint of the original Yiddish version of Rav Soloveitchik’s “Five Addresses”, which have become canonical texts of religious Zionism.

Yiddish was for many years the primary medium in which Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik gave his shiurim and discourses.  As Julius Berman writes in his preface, “when we open up this volume […] those who know Yiddish will come as close as is humanly possible to capture the experience of sitting in his presence and listening to his brilliant expositions of halakha and aggadah, drush and machshava.

This volume is a fascinating window onto a period of catastrophe and rebuilding, from the perspective of one of the great Jewish thinkers of the time. Non-Yiddish speakers will welcome the news that OU Press is currently also preparing an English translation of this important work.