The almost infinite possibilities at the disposal of printers today may make us forget the hard barriers printers and editors of siddurim in previous times had to deal with. These last, when forced into a corner, sometimes had to demonstrate real creativity when stressing new or at least renewed elements in the siddur they created. The rebirth of the yerach ben yomo, a rare ta’am mikra in the Torah and a symbol used for other purposes as well, in the Ishei Yisrael siddur, is a nice, unique example of this.
The Ishei Yisrael siddur was first published in Jerusalem, probably in 1908. It was produced and edited by a team of two: Rabbi Eliyahu Landa, a man known as the “grandson of the Gra” who worked for decades to commemorate and spread the Torah of his great ancestor, and Rabbi Yitzhak Meltzan, who joined him in producing one of the most prominent milestones in the effort to put together a full “nusach HaGra” for prayer.
This was one of a number of siddurim which appeared in those years courtest of the shared print shop of Shehenboim and Weiss in Jerusalem, and which ultimately enjoyed a few additional editions. The most recent of these was in 2008 – exactly one hundred years since its first edition.
Content-wise, the siddur was unique both for its “precise” nusach of the Gra which the editors sought to establish (and which later scholars and Rabbis rejected), and in the commentaries of the two editors which accompanied the nusach itself. The first was the Avnei Eliyahu, arranged by Rabbi Landa and based on the writings of the Gra and his son.
The second was the Siyach Yitzhak written by his partner, which focused on the “clarification of doubled synonyms, along the path of mussar and expanding on the principles of faith. But Meltzan sought to distill the nusach of the siddur in another way, bringing about a unique and fairly surprising design solution.
At the center of the siddur’s cover page, the two editors stressed that it also includes “a new addition: the marking and symbolizing of a shvah na [a shva which is pronounced as a vowel instead of as a consonant] (according to the view of the ancients and the Gra zecher tzadik livracha that [a shva] after a light movement [i.e., a vowel] is a shva nach) with the picture of a kind of yerach ben yomo, on the letter with the shva above.”
Nowadays, stressing the shva na is an accepted and fairly common element in many siddurim. But when Ishei Yisrael appeared, it wasn’t common at all. Indeed, printers lacked the technical ability to bold the regular shva or otherwise emphasize it in the way it is done today. The two editors therefore began searching for an already existing printers’ symbol, but one barely used for anything else, which they could then dedicate, for the first time, for the shva na.
Once they decided to do so, the choice of the yerach ben yomo – which looks like a half-moon with a line sticking down – was fairly natural: as one of the ta’amei mikra, the symbol was already in the printers’ inventory, and thanks to the fact that it appears a total of 16 times in the whole Tanach, which means it would not confuse readers or cause other problems. Thus, in a technical design effort worthy of admiration, thousands of shva nas were marked across hundreds of pages throughout the siddur, from beginning to end.
The Ishei Yisrael siddur is deserving of a more organized and deeper survey, devoted to its liturgical and interpretive contents, and not just a graphic solution – no matter how unique – employed by its editors. Nevertheless, I think it’s good from time to time to take note of these small issues as well, which demonstrate the sensitivity, learning, and talent of printers and editors of siddurim.
Dr. Reuven Gafni is a senior lecturer at the Land of Israel Department at Kinneret College. He specializes in the field of synagogues and religion in the Land of Israel in the modern era, and the relationship between Jewish religion, culture, and national identity in the Land of Israel.
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