Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Rabbi Eliezer Silver Trove Goes on Auction Block

Image by kedem auction house

A huge collection of letters, manuscripts, religious artifacts and photographs belonging to one of the leading rabbinical authorities of 20th-century America will be put up for public sale on Wednesday in Jerusalem.

Image by kastenbaum and co.

The entire archive of Rabbi Eliezer Silver (1881-1968), who served for decades as the head of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis in both the United States and Canada, is being put on the block by Kedem Auction House, which specializes in ancient Jewish books and manuscripts.

Silver also served as president of Agudat Israel of America, the umbrella organization for Haredim.

“For us, this sale is an extremely significant event,” said Avishai Galer, a partner in the auction house. All the items are from the collections of private individuals, he added.

Born in Lithuania to a rabbinic family, Silver is credited with saving thousands of Jewish Torah scholars in Europe during the Holocaust by arranging for them to leave to the United States on special student visas.

He helped organize the famous march of rabbis on Washington, D.C. in 1943, demanding U.S. intervention on behalf of European Jewry.

For more go to Haaretz

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version