Model of the Beit Ha-Mikdash at Yeshivas Hakhme Lublin, 1931

Tishah B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, marks the destruction of the Beit Ha-Mikdash, the Temple in Jerusalem. Over the millennia, Jews have mourned the loss of the Temple in a myriad of ways.  One form of memory and memorial is concrete – or in this case fashioned of wood and gold – a model of the Beit Ha-Mikdash which took pride of place in the Yeshiva Hakhme Lublin in the 1930s. The model was built by Henokh Weintraub of Zagórów, Poland and was presumably destroyed during the Holocaust.

Henokh Weintraub, artist who built the Temple model

The photographs are from Albom Yeshivas Hakhme Lublin, a booklet published in 1931 in honor of the Yeshiva.  The booklet is housed in the rare book room of the Mendel Gottesman Library, a fitting home, since when Rabbi Meir Shapira, founder of Yeshivas Hakhme Lublin was in the United States in 1926 he presented a lecture, a shiur at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, on the subject of “the sanctity of the Mikdash.”  The New York Yiddish newspapers, the Tog and the Morgen Zhurnal, reported on the event. In addition to being the founder of Yeshivas Hakhme Lublin, Rabbi Shapiro is best known for inaugurating the study of the daf yomi,  the seven and a half year cycle of daily study of a page of Talmud.  For more information on the Yeshiva and the daily daf, see /library/2012/07/31/leaves-of-talmud/ The next siyum HaShas, the culmination of the 7½-year daf yomi cycle, will take place on January 1, 2020. Posted by Shulamith Z. Berger