Song for Simkhes Toyre

A teacher and women’s prayer leader (firzogerin), Rebecca Tiktiner wrote the posthumously published Meneket Rivkah (Rebecca’s Nursemaid), a Yiddish-language morality book that displays its author’s knowledge of rabbinic exegetical techniques and texts. These she selected, translated into Yiddish, explained, and organized into seven “gates,” describing a woman’s proper conduct and relations with her husband, parents, parents-in-law, children, children-in-law, and household staff. The family name implies origins in the Polish town of Tykocin, where Rebecca lived for a period, although she died in Prague and taught women in additional, unspecified locales.