Articles: Yona Sabar | Grandpa Ephraim and Grandpa Menashe: Two Opposite Characters, Based on Personal and Communal Childhood Memories Dov Cohen | ‘The Holy Island of Chios’: New Findings Concerning the Purported Burial Place of R. YaꜤakov ben Asher (BaꜤal Ha-Turim) on the Island of Chios and Pilgrimages to His Gravesite Itamar Drori | Rabbi Israele Costa’s ‘Miḳweh Yisrael’ (1851): The Beginning of the Adapted Jewish Story for Youth Carmela Abdar | Reflections on Magical Texts on Jewelry and Amulets of Jewish Women and Children from Yemen and Habban Tom Fogel | JaꜤle – Yemenite Nostalgia in a Jerusalem Café Jacqueline Laznow | ‘I Recognized the Holidays According to the Food’: Tradition and Memory in the Jewish Community of Argentina Reviews: Eli Yassif | The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal, ed. Elliott Oring, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018 Dudu Rotman | Vered Tohar, The Book of Tales, Sermons and Legends. Anthology of Hebrew Stories from the Print Era: An Annotated Edition, Tel Aviv: Hakibbuz Hameuchad 2017, 201 pp.

In this issue we have articles, in Hebrew, by Professor Avi Ohry, on sanatoria in the Land of Israel, and by Reuven Gafni, on Russian-born Olga Feinberg who served the Arab and Jewish communities in Jericho during the British Mandate until forced to leave, with the destruction of her home, during the riots of 1936–1939. Dror Hubara looks at the example of providing quality medical care in a poor neighborhood in Israel, that of the old Yemenite settlement of Kfar Shiloaḥ close to the Mount of Olives, which came to an end in 1939. Moshe Pinchuk considers Hippocratic and Mesopotamian medicine in the texts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. In her intriguing article Adaya Hadar looks at how the human pulse and its rhythms were understood by the early Hassidic masters, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, in different spiritual and metaphysical ways. Zipora Shehory-Rubin and Shifra Shvarts contribute an important addition to our understanding of school doctors from the Ottoman period till the end of the British Mandate. This saw the beginnings of provision of health services to students, pioneered by physicians like Dr. Hillel Yaffe (1864–1936) and Dr. Mordechai Brachyahu (1882–1959), first hygienist physician in Israel. In the English section Samuel Kottek also looks at medicine in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, reviewing several texts on medicine and hygiene, while Edward Reichman features an unusual medical halachic case tried many times as a ritual murder and focusing, partly, on the religious practices of Jews regarding removing a fetus at the time of death, or soon after. Much has been written about Mordechai Gumpel (Gumpertz) Schnaber Leviso(h)n and his role in the early Haskalah movement but Kenneth Collins’ paper concentrates on the years he spent in London and the links he established there with Christian Hebraists and freemasons, as well as on his medical studies with the famed Hunter brothers and his London medical practice and writings. His short Historical Note examines the question whether the early enlightenment rabbi, Baruch Schick of Shklov, was in London in the early 1770s during the time of Levisohn’s period there. Ephraim Nissan looks at the life and death of the Polish-Jewish neurologist Maksymilian Rose (1883–1937), considering the causes of his sudden death in prewar Vilna, which still has significance some eighty years later. Prof. Avi Ohry offers an important account of the career of Berthe Neoussikine (Batia Nose-Chen), a largely forgotten figure from rehabilitation medicine and electro-physiology in France and Israel. Korot has been carrying articles from the regular workshops and conferences on Medicine and the Shoah organized by Boaz Cohen, Miriam Offer and Shmuel Reis and, following the international event held in Akko last year, we plan to publish several papers on this topic in our next issue.

The dictionary mainly covers the Hebrew component in languages that have not been documented or that have been documented less than that of the prestigious Judeo-languages, Yiddish and Latino. Thus, it encompasses the different dialects of Judeo-Arabic from North Africa, Yemen and Iraq, and to some extent from Syria, Judeo-Georgian and Judeo-Persian. Other languages are included sporadically. It also includes Haketiya (Moroccan Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Italian and others.

Many Voices in the Prose of Shulamith Hareven by Yael Balaban is the first book-size monograph dedicated to Hareven’s oeuvre. It offers for the first time a deep understanding of Hareven’s fiction, including her early short stories, City of Many Days, and Thirst – the Desert Trilogy . Hareven’s unique voice has been missed by contemporary critics, as both her ideas and her poetics were ahead of her time: She wrote about sexual abuse long before the subject ever entered public discourse; wrote about the “second generation” of Holocaust survivors before the term was established; and created Mizrahi and Arab characters very different from the stereotypic characters in contemporary Hebrew literature. It is time to re-read Shulamith Hareven’s work and discover beautiful stories suffused with moral and social sensitivity and a profound commitment to language and literature .

The purpose of this volume, like its predecessor, is to uncover fragments of important Hebrew works hidden in the “European Genizah”. Thousands of pages of Hebrew manuscripts have been discovered in this “Genizah”, which is scattered in hundreds of libraries and archives throughout Europe and even beyond. In the late medieval and early modern eras, these pages were used to bind books and as folders of archival documents. The nine works published herein are from a variety of genres: Biblical exegesis, Talmud commentary, halakhic literature, and liturgical interpretation. They appear in this volume in chronological order, from earliest to latest. The most significant of the works is also the work whose discovery required more effort than all of the others; it appears in the first chapter of the book. This work was written in ninth or tenth-century Palestine. It reveals valuable information on the history of halakhah in Palestine of that era, and also teaches a great deal about how Palestinian Traditions made their way to the European continent.

16 October 1943 is one of the most intense, troubling and spectacular works ever written on a single event in the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. This text embodies a stylistic combination of almost real-time journalism, powerful poetic and emotional literature and a profound philosophical essay on the Nazi's behavioral patterns. Giacomo Debenedetti, a distinguished Jewish-Italian author, journalist, and literary critic and theorist describes in 16 October 1943 the terrors of the raid of the Ghetto of Rome. The story (for it is first and foremost a story) unfolds, with piercing, terrifying language, the deportation of one Jewish community within the Nazi extermination mechanism.

This book surveys the development of Jewish religious law and practice in relation to healthcare, with an emphasis on their influence on Israeli medical law. It contains discussions on the nature of Jewish law and and ethics, especially in comparison to Catholic moral theology and the Western political traditions . The book is divided into key themes: approaches to health, illness and the body; medical nursing and social services; doctor-patient relationships; the uses of the dead and living body; fertility, genomics and infertility; Jewish sexual ethics and the medicalization of religion; abortion; care for neonates; the timing of death and organ transplantation from the brain-dead, and end-of-life care . The book should be of interest to students and scholars of bioethics, Jewish religious law, history of Israeli law, and the interactions between social history of medicine and biomedical law . This is a much expanded and revised Hebrew version of the 2014 book Jewish Medical Ethics published by Cambridge University Press.

Sarah Schenirer is one of the unsung heroes of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism. The Bais Yaakov schools she founded in interwar Poland had an unparalleled impact on a traditional Jewish society threatened by assimilation and modernity, educating a generation of girls to take an active part in their community. The movement grew at an astonishing pace, expanding to include high schools, teacher seminaries, summer programmes, vocational schools, and youth movements, in Poland and beyond; it continues to flourish throughout the Jewish diaspora. Naomi Seidman explores the movement through the tensions that characterized it, capturing its complexity as a revolution in the name of tradition. She presents the context which led to its founding, examining the impact of socialism, feminism, Zionism, and Polish electoral politics on the process, and recounts its history, from its foundation in interwar Kraków to its near-destruction in the Holocaust, and its role in the reconstruction of Orthodoxy in subsequent decades. A vivid portrait of Schenirer shines through. The book includes selections from her writings published in English for the first time. Her pioneering, determined character remains the subject of debate in a culture that still regards innovation, female initiative, and women’s Torah study with suspicion.

Sarah Schenirer is one of the unsung heroes of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism. The Bais Yaakov schools she founded in interwar Poland had an unparalleled impact on a traditional Jewish society threatened by assimilation and modernity, educating a generation of girls to take an active part in their community. The movement grew at an astonishing pace, expanding to include high schools, teacher seminaries, summer programmes, vocational schools, and youth movements, in Poland and beyond; it continues to flourish throughout the Jewish diaspora. Naomi Seidman explores the movement through the tensions that characterized it, capturing its complexity as a revolution in the name of tradition. She presents the context which led to its founding, examining the impact of socialism, feminism, Zionism, and Polish electoral politics on the process, and recounts its history, from its foundation in interwar Kraków to its near-destruction in the Holocaust, and its role in the reconstruction of Orthodoxy in subsequent decades. A vivid portrait of Schenirer shines through. The book includes selections from her writings published in English for the first time. Her pioneering, determined character remains the subject of debate in a culture that still regards innovation, female initiative, and women’s Torah study with suspicion.

Un véritable courant de vie parcourt ces pages que Perspectives consacre au cinéaste Marcel Ophuls. La vie, le vivant dominent. Il n’est pas étonnant qu’une des contributions de ce numéro s’intitule “Liberté, vitalité, spectacle” (Sophie Brunet). Dès lors, la division du volume s’est faite d’elle-même: 1-Un homme vivant; 2-Une oeuvre vivante. Au départ, le portrait d’un homme se dessine. Dans une “interview imaginaire.” On savoure son franc-parler, non que l’on adhère à toutes ses idées – en particulier en ce qui concerne Israël – mais on admire l’aisance et la liberté totale qui anime ses propos. Le comportement professionnel du cinéaste, son comportement tout court, trouvent leur place dans cette première partie. Parfois même, l’homme est saisi dans le feu de l’action. Les grands problèmes qui occupent le coeur et la pensée d’un homme de notre temps se retrouvent dans la seconde partie du volume. Là encore, au plus près de la vie . Le cinéaste interpelle les spectateurs lorsqu’il traite de la Shoah, de l’Occuption, ou de la Résistance, de la place que ces sujets tiennent dans la mémoire d’un Français ou d’un Allemand. On s’interroge avec le cinéaste : se doit-il d’être objectif? Mais “dès le début de sa carrière, remarque Pierre Beylot, un style documentaire original fondé sur la parole de témoignage et le montage des sources dont il assume de plus en plus ostensiblement le caractère subjectif” marque son oeuvre. C’est dire aussi que souvent le regard s’attarde sur le traitement esthétique des sujets abordés. Ecoutons François Niney:“Cette remise en question de nos manières de voir et de nos dilemmes, à la fois politiques et personnels, par le jeu et le poids des mots, différencie radicalement le documentaire selon Marcel, du panel d’opinions tel que l’expose en permanence l’étal médiatique”. L’important est que son public réfléchisse. Il s’agit, selon Valérie Carré, de “mettre en mouvement la réflexion du spectateur”. Qu’attendre de l’avenir? Encore une oeuvre surprenante? Vincent Lowy, à l’écoute, note: “Boulimique de projets virtuels, l’infatigable MO junior annonce déjà les quatre titres d’ […] improbables best-sellers…” [futurs romans policiers }. Il convient enfin de souligner le rôle déterminant qu’a joué Stéphane Kerber dans l’élaboration de ce numéro de Perspectives. Nos vifs remerciements vont à lui. Laissons-lui maintenant la parole.

The charm of Agnon’s work lies in an inebriating combination of the funny and the serious, in his famous irony that knocks down every unquestionable certainty and even its very self. Agnon’s humor eludes rhetoric borderlines, does not tolerate confines of a genre and disobeys simple interpretative solutions. In his new book, Roman Katsman suggests a new literary-anthropological method to break down Agnon’s complicated ‘laughter code’—a method based upon the cultural and semiotic interpretation of symbols. His reading of a wide selection of Agnon’s works, including his four major novels, reveals an entire world of his laughter symbols—a world of violence and sacredness, tragic bewilderment and eruption of new possibilities. In this world, arks fly, princes disappear, serpents eat their own tails, angels and demons dance, illusion turns into reality, and other foolish and cruel miracles occur. The research looks for a solution to the riddle: should Agnon's stories be considered serious or ironic, religious or secular, scornful or emphatic, archaic or modernist; or perhaps the reader is intended to swell with pathos or burst into laughter—and how come Agnon always has the last laugh?