DRBR 13: In which an Important Appeal is responded to

[hatam_soferet]

Images copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see larger version.

DR6-L16 contains two items: a flyer and a wedding invitation.

IMPORTANT EMERGENCY APPEAL FOR HACHNOSAS KALOH

Dear Brothers and Sisters:
I beg you with great respect. I am a refugee in this country. I have fled from the Iron Curtain (Budapest), where I had my own Beth Hamedrash. Now, I have to marry off my dear daughter very soon. I beg you to help me as much as possible. You should also take part in this Great Mitzvah Hachnosas Kaloh.

In merit of that Mitzvah you should have long life, happiness and luck in every way.

With blessing and best wishes, I am

Very sincerely yours,

RABBI JOSEF WEISS

Hachnasat kallah is about making sure a bride has what to set up house with and funds to have a wedding. If you move in frum circles you get hit up regularly for money for poor brides like this.

“Marry off my daughter” rubs me up the wrong way, honestly. “I need lots of money so that someone will take my daughter off my hands because they wouldn’t take her free with a pound of tea,” is what I hear. Okay, this has been the way of the world for centuries, or millennia, but it’s still annoying.

It also seems sort of chutzpahdik to say “giving me money is a big mitzvah, you should do it,” but I guess you get good at that if you run a yeshiva.

Anyway, he apparently did pretty well out of it; the daughter got married in due course, and note the fancy invitation with embossing and monogram, and the wedding venue was Gold Manor, apparently a Simcha Palace.

For funsies, I looked up Gold Manor, where the wedding was held. It’s now the site of Black Veterans for Social Justice, but I’m not good enough at American architecture (or Google archaeology) to know whether the building on Google Street View is the one that was there in 1953. But I did find an anecdote about Gold Manor in 1954, from Philip Fishman’s book A Sukkah Is Burning:

…the Tzehlemer Rav was then asked to be the mesader kiddushin (the rabbi responsible for the wedding sacraments). After the wedding ceremony the rav was nowhere to be found. He had left the wedding hall with the ketuba–the traditional wedding document required by Jewish law to be given to the bridge–still in his possession. Apparently, he had not yet been paid for his services. Either my father or my older brother eventually found him outside the wedding hall, wrote him a check, and obtained the ketuba’s release.

I like that.

I couldn’t find anything at all about Yosef Weiss, or E. Miriam his daughter, or Chanandl his son-in-law. Pity. It’s a rather sad reflection on how things went generally; all these scholars who managed to avoid getting killed in the war or trapped by communism, who came to America, where Torah learning was very very different; less of it, for starters, and already-established yeshivot, for another. The lucky ones found money and followers and joined the learning scene, and the unlucky ones sank into obscurity.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Comments

[ajollypyruvate]

If you haven't already read it, I think you might be interested in The Jews of Kaifeng China. (There's an article here)

It's a small book but excellent.