Jewish Publication Society to Hold 75th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia

The Jewish Publication Society of America announced today it would hold its 75th annual membership meeting on Sunday, April 28, in the Warwick hotel here. The announcement was made by Sol Satinsky, president. The program will feature an address by Dr. Arthur Hertzberg, rabbi and author, on the late Dr. Cyrus Adler in observance of the centennial of Dr. Adler’s birth and in recognition of the valuable leadership which he gave during his lifetime to the JPS and other cultural and religious institutions.

(The National Federation of Jewish Men’s Club, the national association of men’s groups of Conservative Jewish Congregations, announced today that it would honor the Jewish Publication Society at its forthcoming annual convention for the JPS sponsorship of the first translation of the Old Testament to be translated directly into modern English from the traditional Hebrew text. A citation will be presented to the JPS at a special session of the convention which will open on April 28 in Kiamesha Lake.)

Established in Philadelphia in 1888 for the sole purpose of publishing and disseminating good books of Jewish interest in order to help preserve and strengthen the Jewish heritage, the JPS has published more than 400 books for laymen and scholars, with distribution in excess of 5, 000, 000 copies. These books may be found all over the world wherever English is read, and many of the early titles remain in print and are in constant use. Outstanding among these titles are the History of the Jews by Dr. Graetz (1891), Legends of the Jews by Dr. Ginzberg (1909), The American Jewish Year Books, an annual series which began in 1898, and The Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic Text, which was published in 1917 and represented the first translation of the Bible into the English language under Jewish communal auspices.

One of the most ambitious and significant projects undertaken by the JPS was launched in 1955 when it appointed a group of outstanding scholars to serve as a Bible Translation Committee for the purpose of preparing a new translation in modern English which would take into cognizance the linguistic and archaeological advances made in recent years. The first result of the Committee’s work was available several months ago when the JPS published The Torah: The Five Books of Moses as the first of three volumes. It plans to publish The Prophets and The Writings during the coming decade, so that the present and future generations of American Jews may have a completely new translation which will transmit the meaning and intent of the original Hebrew in clear and modern English.