Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries: (82 Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

This volume attempts to address the complicated issue of distinctive characteristics of Jewish religious life in Lithuania. Its authors and editors deal with the range of religious expressions, with the religious life of different sectors of the Jewish community of Lithuania and with the dynamics of change in religious life in Lithuania over time. In this volume, Lithuania is more a historical and social concept than a geographical territory with clearly delineated borders and political identity. The authors deliberate how “Lithuanian” are the religious phenomena they discuss and what the historical agents understood as Lithuania in their given period, area, and historical circumstances.

Table of Contents:
Note on Transcription and Place Names List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Lithuanian Jews and Their Religious Life: Introduction 1 “A True Servant of the Divine”: the Devotional World of Rabbi Alexander Zisskind of Grodno  Ariel Evan Mayse 2 The Gaon and the Hasid: The Image of the Vilna Gaon in Hasidic Memory  Uriel Gellman 3 The Earliest Maskilic Treatise on Hasidism: a View from Vilna  Marcin Wodziński 4 The Doctrine of Tsimtsum in Hasidic and Mitnagdic Schools of Lithuania and Its Contemporary Social Implications  Daniel Reiser 5 Rabbi Israel Salanter and Cholera: Anatomy of the Legend  Alexander Lvov (transl. by Julia Korostenskienė) 6 Toward a Modern Conception of Orthodox Womanhood: the Case of Lithuanian Bet Jakob  Tzipora Weinberg 7 The Status of the Rabbinical Association in Lithuania  Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky 8 Lithuanian Musar Thought: Afflictions of Love (Yesurim shel ahavah)  Gershon Greenberg 9 Together and Apart: Social Aspects of Lithuanian Synagogues  Vladimir Levin 10 Chaim Grade’s Quarrels with Musar  Yehudah DovBer Zirkind 11 Religious Jewish Life and Secular Jewish Life in Lithuania—a Complex Reality  Shaul Stampher Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Marcin Wodziński is a professor of Jewish history and literature at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław. His research focuses on the social and religious history of East European Jews in modern times, especially the Haskalah and Hasidism.

Shaul Stampfer, PhD, Hebrew University. He has written on various themes, including the rise of Lithuanian yeshiva, the historicity of the story of the Khazar conversion to Judaism, the demography of Eastern European Jewry, and more.

Lara Lempertienė, PhD, Vilnius University, is Head of the Judaica Research Center at the National Library of Lithuania. She has edited and co-edited several scholarly monographs and collections and published articles on the cultural history of European Jewry.