This little booklet is a speech on Sabbath rest, in Yiddish. It was published in 1919 by the Liverpool branch of Mizrachi at a price of sixpence.
Rabbi Samuel Jacob Rabinowicz was born in Kelme, Lithuania, in 1857, and died in Liverpool, England, in 1921. He held rabbinical posts at Ivye, Aleksot, and Sopotskin and wrote responsa and novellae. He is particularly remembered as a Rabbinical Zionist leader. He was an early member of the Chovevei Zion, and was a delegate to the Second Zionist Congress, where he made a deep impression on Theodor Herzl. He was elected to the Zionist General Council, and later served as one of the first directors of the Jewish Colonial Trust. His own essays on the religious aspects of Zionism appeared in his book Ha-Dat ve-ha-Le’ummiyyut (1900). After the Fourth Zionist Congress Rabbi Rabinowitz accompanied Rabbi Isaac J. Reines on a mission to the Warsaw area, where their efforts to gain the support of leading Chassidic rabbis for the Zionist cause met with some success. Together with Rabbi Reines, he founded the Mizrachi world movement of religious Zionists in 1902.
In 1906 Rabbi Rabinowitz was appointed rabbi of Liverpool, England, where he did much to promote traditional observance and communal harmony, despite the early hostility of more Anglicized members of the local community. He maintained his Zionist activity in England, being elected President of the British Mizrachi organization at its first conference in 1918.
I have written previously about Rabbi Rabinowitz’s book LiTekufot Hayamim, published in 1917, and my copy of his posthumous book, Yeshresh Yaakov, published in 1925.
Jewish Miscellanies 