Minhag America - The Daily Prayers, for American Israelites as Revised in Conference. With: Select Payers for Various Occasions In Life. Edited by Isaac Mayer Wise

(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

Bloch & Company

Cincinnati

1872

Hebrew and English on facing pages

Singerman 2337

The first Reform Prayer-book printed in America. Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900) was born in Steingrub, Bohemia and immigrated to America in 1846. At first a rabbi in Albany, in 1854 he moved to Cincinnati. There he established the institutional structure of American Reform Judaism: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Hebrew Union College. Wise, who desired to publish an “American” prayer book from his earliest years in the country, believed that the acceptance by all American Jews of a single liturgical rite would represent a great step toward unity. This first Reform prayer-book retained a Hebrew text and the traditional framework of the liturgy, though certain “objectionable” passages were altered, shortened or excised. Erased were all references to the Return to Zion, the reinstitution of the Temple Cult and Jewish particularism was sacrificed for regnant universalism.