With the approval of the government of Czechoslovakia, 2,000 copies of a one volume edition of the Torah — the first five books of the Jewish Bible — in Czech and Hebrew have been printed in New York and shipped to Prague as a gift to the Czech Jewish community by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation.
Foundation president Rabbi Arthur Schneier announced this week that the 356-page hardcover book is the first of its kind to be published since the 1930s and fills an important need for Czech Jewish community. He added that the project was carried out with the cooperation of Czechoslovakia’s Council of Religious Affairs.
Schneier, spiritual leader of the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan, explained that the volume was produced photographically from individual copies of the five books that make up the Torah that he brought with him from Prague in 1983. “There were literally the last copies left in all of Czechoslovakia,” Schneier said.
The new Czech-Hebrew edition will be used at religious services in the Altneu Synagogue in Prague and other Jewish houses of worship in that country, he said.
The one-volume edition reproduces the covers of the last editions of the five books of the Torah published in Czechoslovakia in the two languages: Genesis, published in Prague in 1932; Exodus, 1935; Leviticus, 1938; Number 1939; and Deuteronomy, 1950. Because the latter had been published only in Hebrew, a translation into Czech was prepared in Prague for the new edition.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
