Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on June 28, 2017

New YOrk times/file 2005

Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz helped run ArtScroll for 41 years.

NEW YORK Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, who took a small wedding-invitation print shop and turned it into ArtScroll Mesorah, the leading publisher of prayer books and volumes of Torah and Talmud in the expanding Orthodox Jewish world, books notable for their easily readable typography, instructions and translations, died Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 73.

His son Rabbi Gedaliah Zlotowitz said the cause was a liver ailment.

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Though Jews often refer to themselves as people of the book, the canonical books they studied and prayed from into the 1970s were often dense with undifferentiated Hebrew and Aramaic typeface and translated in inflated or turgid English. They were suitable for cognoscenti but not for novices or rusty yeshiva alumni.

ArtScroll, founded by Rabbi Zlotowitz in the mid-1970s, worked to make the books accessible to both, starting with the megillah (scroll) of Esther and crowning the companys output in 2005 with a 73-volume set of the Babylonian Talmud.

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Every day, in basement study halls, office buildings, and commuter railroad cars, hundreds of thousands of Jews study the same two sides of a page of Talmud until, after 7 1/2 years, they complete the entire work together. Many have joined this Daf Yomi (page a day) bandwagon because of the congenial typography, translations, and commentary of the ArtScroll edition, known as the Schottenstein Talmud.

ArtScroll made it possible for anyone to study Talmud on his or her own, said Samuel C. Heilman, who specializes in Jewish studies as a professor of sociology at the City University of New York.

The elegant ArtScroll siddur, or prayer book, used for daily Sabbath and holiday prayers is so popular that more than 1 million copies have been printed. It is used even by some synagogues in the more liberal Conservative Jewish movement.

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ArtScrolls sales have been helped by the striking growth of the Orthodox movement; 10 percent of American Jews identify themselves as Orthodox, according to a Pew Research Center study in 2015, but 27 percent of children under 18 are Orthodox, foreshadowing a mushrooming share of the Jewish population in years to come.

Rather than assume that every Jew knows the sometimes arcane procedures and rationales for prayer, the siddur lays them out in clear contemporary English and features explanatory footnotes, in the way that an annotated edition of Joyces Ulysses might ease that novels reading.

For example, the siddur tells those unfamiliar with the central Amidah prayer to take three steps backward, then three steps forward at the start, and urges a worshipper to pray loudly enough to hear himself but not so loudly that its recitation is audible to others.

J. Philip Rosen, a lawyer whose donation financed the siddurs 1992 edition, said Rabbi Zlotowitz, concerned about making books very user-friendly, agreed to make the type large enough for those with diminishing eyesight, like Rosens father.

I dont think theres an organization other than Chabad or Birthright Israel that has helped bring people closer to Judaism, Rosen said of ArtScroll.

Rabbi Zlotowitz, ArtScrolls president, ran the business with his partners of 41 years, Rabbi Nosson Scherman, who has served as general editor, and Rabbi Sheah Brander, its graphics expert. Both are continuing with the company.

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Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, 73; helped make Torah and Talmud accessible - The Boston Globe

Category: Talmud
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