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.
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 Wodziski
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 Korostenskien)
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 Grades Quarrels with Musar
Yehudah DovBer Zirkind
11 Religious Jewish Life and Secular Jewish Life in Lithuaniaa Complex
Reality
Shaul Stampher
Bibliography
Index
Marcin Wodziski is a professor of Jewish history and literature at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocaw. 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 Lempertien, 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.
