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One day I came back from my synagogue and sat down in my room to take breakfast—a bowl of milk and some bread, instead of the compote juice and butter cake that had been my customary…
For the two reasons specified below, I have given myself the surname “Wasserzug”; the first reason is that when I was five or six years of age, I was playing with some young children, I believe, in a…
In a dream, in a night vision, while [I was] asleep upon [my] bed during my imprisonment, a voice called in my ears. The voice was the voice of Jacob, like the voice of my father, may his memory be…
Now comes the turn, with awe and reverence, awe and reverence without end, of my father, the pious, God-fearing, learned one, may his strength be for the Torah [see Esther 2:15], the supernal light…
My parents had been married for five years when I was born, the second child after my sister, and, as far back as I can remember, I never heard them quarreling. It is possible that they…
When our teacher Rabbi Solomon, who was a rabbi here in Aleppo, passed away without any male children, the rabbis [of the city] consulted among themselves, and with the elders of the people and the…
As for myself, I was constantly going back in my studies as well as in manners and conduct. After a while, my father decided to send me to Prague, which was a day’s journey. My older brother was also…
On the twelfth of the month of Elul in the year five thousand four hundred and eighty-nine, Menaḥem the scribe and teacher of young children in the community of Dessau, became the father of Moses,…
The new Rabbi pleased everybody, because he was beyond all doubt a righteous man. I was then a boy of twelve. My father received two letters from Rabbi Yukel on the subject of a good match for me in…
Behold, I am aged and my eyes are dim and my hands heavy and shaky, and at a time when my strength, enabling me to remain standing upon my watch, is ebbing away—with the yoke of the…