Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas; The Story of the First Woman Rabbi

by Elisa Klapheck

Had it not been for the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and for Regina Jonas' foresight in leaving her documents with the Berlin Jewish community before being deported by the Nazis, her life and achievements might well have been lost in the mists of history.

Fräulein Rabbiner Regina Jonas became the first woman to be ordained as rabbi on Dec. 27, 1935. Seven years later, she and her 66-year-old mother Sara were sent to Theresienstadt. They arrived at Auschwitz on one of the last transports on Oct. 12, 1944, and were probably murdered on arrival.

It would not be until 1974 that another woman was ordained a rabbi: Sally Priesand in the Reform Movement, followed in 1976 by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso in the Reconstructionist movement, and in 1985 by the ordination of Amy Eilberg in the Conservative movement.

The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

Michael David Lukas' story, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, unfolds as if he were pulling fragments from an ancient geniza and piecing them together.

It's apt for a book about an ancient synagogue (Ibn Ezra) in Old Cairo. In the world Lukas has created, Jews and others have believed for more than a thousand years that a flawless Torah scroll created by a scribe named Ezra was hidden within the synagogue's geniza.

One fragment of this story is about Joseph al-Raqb, 26, born to an Egyptian Muslim father, Ahmed al-Raqb, and an Egyptian Jewish mother, Claudia Shemarya, who is trying to understand his origins and why his parents never married.

National Jewish Book Awards

I don't always agree with the judges of book awards, but I love having a list of books that a panel of people have ranked as worth reading. In that sense, the finalists are as interesting as the winners to me.

The National Jewish Book Awards are particularly important because books with Jewish themes or content don't always make best-seller lists.  These awards are an easy way to discover new books and authors.

Jewish Book Council announced its 2018 National Book Award winners this month. Here's the concise listing of the winners. (You can find a full list of winners and finalists here.)

The Genizah at the House of Shepher

by Tamar Yellin

In the attic of the Shepher house at Kiriat Shoshan in Jerusalem, aging paper turns to dust. The trash and treasures of three generations of the family tumble into chaos.

In this geniza, an accidental find is made. It is a book, a codex, a bound manuscript of the Torah that doesn’t precisely match the accepted version of the Torah today.

Is this a national treasure? Will it change the fate and fortunes of the Shepher family? Does it even belong to them?

Sacred Trash; The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

By Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole

Imagine Rabbi Solomon Schechter cast in a role like Harrison Ford’s in the movie “The Raiders of the Lost Ark” and you’ll get the flavor of this true life, swashbuckling history of the treasures of the Cairo Geniza.

The Cairo Geniza, located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (or Old Cairo), contained nearly 1,000 years of documents and manuscripts from one of the wealthiest and most centrally located medieval Jewish communities.

Among its 300,000 manuscript fragments are scraps handwritten by Maimonides and renowned poet and thinker Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, both of whom lived in ancient Cairo during this period.

Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

Ruth Gilligan's story about Jewish life in Ireland is as beautiful and haunting as a watercolor.

She tells three tales that intersect as gently as a good-bye kiss.

Ruth Greenberg's family saved for 10 years to go to America, shlepped their belongings across the border from Lithuania to Latvia to Riga, boarded a former cattle ship and set off for Lady Liberty and the city of skyscrapers: New York.

The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

Author Rachel Kadish bridges nearly four centuries to connect two strong women who have made heavy sacrifices to pursue a life of the mind.

Starchy Helen Watt is in the twilight of a career as a professor and researcher of Jewish history. Facing retirement and in failing health, she has seen much, been disappointed often and expects little from the world.

Her heart and her hopes lift when a former student calls her to evaluate a cache of ancient documents found in cubby hole beneath a staircase in a house he is renovating. When she sees the pages, written in Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish and dated from 1657 to 1665, she knows the find is significant.