30/1/00

In quest of Rabbi Edel

    When Rabbi Yehuda Leib Edel died in 1827, he left two giant legacies: a magnificent family, and a vast work of rabbinical scholarship. Only recently have the two discovered each other.
    One of Edel's offspring, Binyamin Richler, happens to be the director of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Since 1966, he has devoted his working life to cataloguing manuscripts from libraries worldwide.
     "My uncles used to taunt me in jest: 'You find manuscripts by thousands of authors; when will you find the writings of your own forebear?' "
     Binyamin accepted the challenge two decades ago, "but my quest produced no results for years."
    Providentially, Binyamin davens in a daily afternoon minyan at work. Here, coincidence -- and the first breakthrough.
    "One day in 1985 I was looking for the name of Rabbi Edel in an obscure card-catalogue -- and I found it, along with the vague inscription: 'Sefer Torah.' When I asked for further details, I was told to look at the special Sefer Torah we read at the minyan on fast days. There was an inscription on the mantle that I had never taken the trouble to read. It said: 'By Rabbi Edel.' "
    The first tangible evidence had been -- literally -- at his very fingertips.
    "I was stunned. I made copies of a few columns of the scroll and sent them to David and Stuart."
    At that same time, in Canada, his uncle David Richler, and David's son Stuart, were in the process of composing the family tree. With such a blessedly large family, it was a monumental task that had taken years. They managed to trace the roots back to the mid-1700s, to Rabbi Edel.
    Now, the three Richlers had narrowed their search to the same distant point.
    With the fall of communism, Binyamin hurried to Russia to microfilm thousands of Hebrew manuscripts. In the Russian State Library in Moscow, he came upon novellae by a Rabbi Moses Chefetz, in which he criticized some writings of none other than Rabbi Edel. The Chefetz papers included the original responses by Edel and his grandson.
    "For the first time," says Binyamin, "I discovered the actual writing of my illustrious ancestor."
    His exploration took him to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he found a motherlode of 17,000 books and fragments. It contained several works by Edel, some of them unpublished.
    He traced a distant cousin, six generations removed, who was then preparing a new edition of Edel's collection of sermons, Afikei Yehuda. The cousin, Rabbi Yehoshua Kaufman, the head of a Jerusalem yeshiva, was excited to see what Binyamin had found -- and in turn, showed him an early edition of the book with Edel's original glosses and corrections in his own hand.
    By now, Binyamin had an astonishing series of triumphs to answer the jest of his uncles.
    But there was more: he found a commentary on the Haggada and a work on Hebrew synonyms (Redifei Maya) that had been considered lost.
    The Edel Haggada was published three years ago, the new edition of Afikei Yehuda came out last year, and there are plans to publish Redifei Maya.
    Word got around Judaic-academic circles, and Binyamin was put in touch with another unknown distant relative, in Baltimore, who possessed some of Edel's original works. A couple of weeks ago, Binyamin received photocopies of the work -- amounting to 1,000 pages.
    "I still haven't had time to examine it all," says Binyamin, gratefully overwhelmed, "but it seems there are two types of writings: sermons or homilies, and novellae on the Talmud. There are also a few personal letters by Rabbi Edel.
    "Many other books written by him were never published and presumed lost."

RABBI EDEL, the most remote known ancestor in the Richler lineage, was born in Zamosc, Galicia, in 1757 or 1759.
    "He was famous for his learned sermons and erudition. Even the great  Vilna Gaon was so impressed with his writings that he invited him to Vilna to discuss whatever it is that rabbis discuss," Binyamin says.
    "Six books by Rabbi Edel were published during his lifetime or following his death. The most popular was Afikei Yehuda, which was reprinted several times. His novellae on Sedet Toharot was considered indispensable for anyone studying this order of the Talmud; Rabbi Haim Soloveitchik of Brisk kept a copy on his table at all times.
    "Rabbi Edel was considered an intellectual, because he delved into grammar and philology. In fact, his first book, Safah le-Ne'emanim, a treatise on grammar, was what caught the attention of the Vilna Gaon." 
    He had five children, all of whom became rabbis.
    Stuart Richler, a prominent Montreal genealogist, went one generation further, establishing that Edel's father was named Moshe. "Apparently, Rabbi Edel recorded his ancestry in a book we have not yet discovered," Stuart says. "According to a gloss in the Haggada, he descended from a 13th century sage called Rabbi Zerachia Halevi, but this has not been substantiated."
    By chance, Stuart's research recently turned up a tangential discovery: a direct link from his wife's family to the Vilna Gaon, and beyond, to  the Abarbanel of the 15th century.
    Taking up the project that his father started a quarter-century ago, Stuart made good use