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Loading... The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction (edition 1996)by David Weiss Halivni
Work InformationThe Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction by David Weiss Halivni
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. NO OF PAGES: 197 SUB CAT I: Holocaust SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: I do not remember when I came to Sighet for the first time to live with Grandfather. But I do remember what I was learning. I was learning Chumash, the Pentateuch. With Rashi's commentary, and that means I was about four years old. I lived with Grandfather, Rabbi Shaye Weiss, for more than ten years, until we were separated by Josef Mengele, in Auschwitz, when we both stood before him and he sent Grandfather to the right, to death, and me to the left, to struggle and hard labor.NOTES: SUBTITLE: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction no reviews | add a review
The words of the Talmud were the universe for David Weiss Halivni during his childhood in Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains. Before he was five he began his studies; by the time he was ten he had outgrown the town's teachers and started to learn at home with his scholarly, impoverished grandfather. Even before his ordination at the age of fifteen, in 1943, he was famous for his erudition. But when the Nazis crushed the Jewish community of the Carpathians in 1944, he closed his Talmud. Halivni taught in the concentration camps and risked his life to save a scrap of paper from a sacred book. But adherence to the fundamentalist worldview that insists on reconciling every apparent contradiction in the text--troubling to him even as a child--had become impossible for him now. When he arrived in New York after the war, he began struggling toward the "window" of secular learning. From that synthesis emerged his original approach to critical study of the Talmudic text not only in its modern printed form but as it was in its original form, the Oral Torah from the mouths of countless sages. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.53History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War IILC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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