Weekly Reader: Tisha B’Av
Published on August 11, 2024.
Tisha B’Av, the ninth of the month of Av, is the day Jews mourn the destruction of the first and second Jerusalem Temples. It’s more than that, though. Traditionally, Tisha B’Av has served as a day of mourning for all tragedies that have occurred throughout Jewish history. This year it falls on August 13, one day after the Night of the Murdered Poets, when in 1952 thirteen Soviet Jews were murdered in the basement of the Lyubanka prison in Moscow. Among these victims of Stalinist persecution were five Yiddish writers: Perets Markish, Dovid Hofshteyn, Itzik Feffer, Leyb Kvitko, and Dovid Bergelson. So it’s fitting that this year we use Tisha B’av to commemorate their memories, along with those victims of violence and persecution throughout history.
—Ezra Glinter, Senior Staff Writer and Editor
Light in Darkness
Among Jewish observances, Tisha B’Av is not the most widespread. While many Jewish holidays revolve around food and family, Tisha B’Av is a fast day and therefore does neither. Nevertheless, many Jews have memories of observing Tisha B’Av with their families and communities. In this oral history interview, Jalda Rebling—a cantor and Yiddish performer—remembers experiencing a spiritual awakening while observing Tisha B’Av in upstate New York.
Historical Drama
Tisha B’Av is traditionally believed to be the date of the destruction of both the first and second Temples. While we don’t have much information about the first event outside of the Bible, the second is attested to in various sources, including the Talmud and the works of Josephus. The second Temple’s destruction also served as a rich source for Yiddish historical novels, including Between Rome and Jerusalem, “a historical novel from the time of the destruction of the Second Temple” by the prolific Saul Saphire.
Read Between Rome and Jerusalem in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
Pogrom Literature
The liturgy for Tisha B’Av is notable for its large collection of kinos—liturgical poems written to commemorate various tragedies, many of them from the Middle Ages. In Yiddish there is also an entire genre of literature written to memorialize pogroms and other catastrophes. Of all the written accounts of pogroms in the Yiddish Book Center’s collection, we know of only one authored by a woman: Rokhl Faygnberg’s A pinkes fun a toyter shtot (khurbn dubove) (Chronicle of a Dead City: The Destruction of Dubove). Though the author was a survivor of pogroms, A pinkes fun a toyter shtot is not a personal account of her experiences. Instead, Faygnberg creates a record of a devastating 1919 pogrom in Dubove and, through this work, exemplifies how a book can preserve the memory not only of its previous owner and its author but of an entire community.
In Memoriam
Perhaps the best known kind of Jewish memorial literature, certainly in modern times, are the memorial books, or yizker bikher, written to commemorate specific Jewish communities after the Holocaust. The earliest of them were written while the war was still raging. In 1943, the Lodzher yizker-bukh, the Lodz Memorial Book, appeared in New York City, the first of hundreds of community memorial volumes to be published by landsmanshaftn, mutual aid societies formed by immigrants in America, Israel, and elsewhere.
Learn more about yizker bikher
Browse the Yiddish Book Center’s David and Sylvia Steiner Yizkor Book Collection
Night of the Murdered Poets
Most years, Tisha B’Av falls well before August 12. This year, however, because it was a leap year with two months of Adar, it nearly coincides with the Night of the Murdered Poets. And while that tragedy deserves its own day of commemoration, Tisha B’Av has always served as a day to remember all Jewish tragedies, including this one. On our website we have numerous resources to learn more about this terrible event, as well as about the lives and work of the writers and artists who were killed.
View a teaching resource guide for the Night of the Murdered Poets
View last year’s Weekly Reader about the Night of the Murdered Poets