Rabbi Howard Morrison

Dear Congregational Family,

In the 1950's, one of the earliest brands of North American prayerbooks was the edition of Rabbi Philip Birnbaum. He arranged prayerbooks for Daily, Shabbat, and Holy day use. His editions were among the earliest North American English-Hebrew texts. Other familiar liturgical publications include the well known De Sola Pool, Silverman, and Phillips prayerbooks.

For North American families many decades ago, an English-Hebrew prayerbook was exceptional. Growing up in the Boston area, the Birnbaum edition was the exclusive English-Hebrew Siddur and Machzor carried by my childhood shul.

Sitting next to my father during the High Holy Days in the 1960's, I would turn to the last pages of the Birnbaum Machzor. A one page calendar listed the dates of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur through the year 2000. Later printings would revise the list up to 2011. As a child, I would remark to my dad that those years will never come - the thinking of a young child.

The Birnbaum Machzor was the High Holy Day prayerbook of my childhood. For two years as a rabbinical student, it was the Machzor I officiated with at a small shul in Webster, Mass. How comforted I was to see it again when I came to Beth Emeth in 2000. It was like a dear friend.

The calendar dates in the last page have expired. In recent years, new Machzorim with sharper print, modern translation, and lucid commentary have entered the scene. It was time to introduce a new Machzor last year. Nevertheless, the Birnbaum Machzor is like an old familiar friend.

Because of the pandemic, many of us will choose to pray at home this year, even though we hope the shul will be open to a finite number of people. Our synagogue's shelves contain many many Birnbaum Machzorim. I invite you to visit the shul and pick up as many as you want. You can use them privately, during my on line classes in September, and during actual services. They are yours to keep.

For me, the Birnbaum Machzor unites the generations of the Jewish people, the generations of my immediate family, and the generations of my rabbinic experience.

A Jewish prayerbook unites us all.

Rabbi Howard Morrison