(MEDICINE).
Hebrew Prayer for Averting a Cholera Epidemic.Manuscript written in a square and ...

(MEDICINE).
Hebrew Prayer for Averting a Cholera Epidemic.


Manuscript written in a square and cursive hand by a scribe named Yitzchak Ze’ev. A supplicatory service arranged by Rabbi Abraham Sutro to be recited on Mondays and Thursdays during the German cholera epidemic of 1831. A prayer of approximately 250 words composed by Rabbi Sutro is bracketed before and after by a selection of Selichot drawn largely from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and a list of eleven Psalms to be chanted afterward.
One page, lower left corner (blank) torn away. Unexamined out of frame. folio.
Schwelm (Germany): December 1831


This prayer was written during the second of five deadly cholera pandemics which ravaged Europe (and elsewhere) in the 19th century. The worst ravages in Germany were in 1831. One poignant couplet here beseeches God: “Be compassionate on your babes and infants, note the sounds of the schoolchildren, of sins - innocent!” The small town of Schwelm, located in North Rhine-Westphalia, had a miniscule Jewish community. See Gerd. Helbeck, Juden in Schwelm (2007). Rabbi Abraham Sutro (1784-1869) who composed this prayer, was trained in the yeshivoth of Fürth and Prague. In 1815 he was appointed Landesrabbiner of Münster and environs. A polemicist against Reform, he was also somewhat of a modernizer, who advocated for Emancipation, using in his writings the phrase “Torah im Derech Eretz” to apply to his conception of Judaism, as early as 1836. Sutro was the primary Torah teacher of Rev. Isaac Leeser and was thus, indirectly, an influence upon the direction of Orthodox Judaism in America for much of the 19th century. See http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2011/08/method-of-dehumanizing-siberian.html).