Old books can be a treasure, not just for their words but also what can be found between their pages. And in the case of one yellowing page that fell from a very old Gemara, this entails a newfound discovery of a long-lost prayer chanted by the Jews of Krakow.
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The page in question contains a prayer recited by Krakow's Jews at the grave of Rabbi Moses Isserles, a renowned Ashkenazi posek (the term in Jewish law for a legal scholar who determines the position of Jewish religious laws) in the 16th Century, on the Lag B'Omer holiday – the day of his passing. On every anniversary of his death (yahrtzeit), the Jews of Krakow would visit his grave and recite a special prayer.
This prayer does not appear in the prayer book. Unlike the customary prayer and textbooks that were printed in numerous editions, passed between communities and preserved on shelves and in libraries across the globe, this prayer was printed on pages that were distributed locally. Only a limited number of these pages were ever printed, for the specific purpose of marking a very local event, solely at Isserles' cemetery, one day a year, and were immediately discarded following the event.
Berl Shor, 94, who was born in Krakow, is a descendant of Isserles and still remembers the custom of visiting his grave on Lag B'Omer. When Shor was 12 years old, the Second World War erupted. He and his sister managed to escape Krakow before the Germans conquered it, but their parents and many other relatives remained in the city. Before they were murdered, Shor's parents were able to give a Polish neighbor by the name of Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski at Jagiellonian University in Krakow their library of ancient Jewish texts.
Kowalski safeguarded the library and after the Holocaust returned it to the surviving relatives. Today, this library belongs to Shor.
The library contains hundreds of books, from the inception of the printing press onward. Along with books are lone pages and manifests that by nature normally aren't saved and become lost. One of these pages, it emerged, was of particular historical value.
A rare account of the event at Isserles' grave was documented by a young Jewish resident of the city, Ze'ev Aleksandrowicz, who later became a well-known photographer. For years, no one knew what the Jews in his photograph were reading, until the aforementioned Gemara was dusted off.
Shor and his son, attorney David Shor, sent photocopies of the prayer to the current head of Krakow's Jewish community, in the hope of reviving the old and unique custom, practiced by one of the largest Jewish communities in Poland before the Holocaust.
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