The Mendel Gottesman Library was privileged to host the SAR Historical Society on December 4. Mr. Ben Zion Ferziger, the club’s adviser, and Professor Ronnie Perelis coordinated the visit with Shulamith Berger, Curator of Special Collections. Professor Perelis opened the class by asking the fourteen students to introduce themselves and their historical interests. The students responded enthusiastically and described a variety of topics, ranging from Second Temple History to the Renaissance and then to Russia and beyond.

Shulamith Berger showed the club a diverse selection of books, manuscripts, and archival materials from the library’s collections. The group enjoyed seeing Geniza fragments; an incunabulum – an edition of the Tur published in Mantua, Italy in 1485; the first edition of the Shulhan Arukh, (Venice, 1564) published in the lifetime of Rav Yosef Karo; the Pinkas Hevrah Tehillim, a beautifully illustrated handwritten ledger of a group of Jewish soldiers in Czar Alexander’s Russian Army in the 1860s; and buttons and bracelets featuring names of refuseniks, distributed by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry to young Jewish Americans. These symbolic yet concrete items helped personalize the plight of Soviet Jews who were prohibited from leaving the Soviet Union under Communist rule.

The students were very engaged with the materials and there was a lively back and forth discussion between the students and the presenters.

The SAR Historical Society members spontaneously organized a mincha minyan. After the minyan, the group left the library to continue their tour and view Zysman Hall, Yeshiva University’s domed and turreted architectural marvel, completed in 1928. It was a fitting finale to the club’s visit to Yeshiva University.

 Shulamith Z. Berger

Photo credits: Tina Weiss