Lighting the Sabbath and Festival Candles

Very little is known about the life of Isaac ben Benjamin Tyrnau, who is named for a town thought to be in present-day Austria. Isaac spent part of his early life in Vienna and studied with Shalom of Neustadt and Abraham Klausner. He seems to have left the city before the anti-Jewish violence of 1420–1421, later possibly moving to Nuremberg and then Pressburg. Isaac compiled an influential collection of Jewish customs. Such collections, known as sifre minhagim, were common in this period and are thought to have been composed in reaction to the tribulations that faced Central European Jewry in the decades after the Black Death.

Shim’on Levi Gintsburg (also known as Simon Guenzberg) was the translator of Isaac Tyrnau’s Minhagim into Yiddish for the first printed edition of a book of customs, published in Venice in 1566. In 1592, he published a maḥzor (prayer book) in Tannhausen.