Posted 14 years ago
roder225
(2 items)
"HELP" I have a couple of documents that I found folded up in a leather pouch in the back of an old filing cabinet. One looks to be some kind of certification document that looks like it's written in hebrew (I think) however I don't know really what language this is and I'm reaching out to the collector community for some advice. In the same pouch there was an older sheet of paper that has a handwritten sheet of musical notes which looks a lot older than the notorized document, and both of the documents are extremely delicate and it looks as if at some point someone put tape on them to hold them together which I know is not a good thing but I know that removing the tape would damage these documents. What I'm looking for is a translation and/or clues as to what this is?
Hi Roder225,
First of all, you were right about your assumption of the body of the text being written in Hebrew, it is the Hebrew handwriting. However, the header of the letter is written in Russian language. Most likely line 1 states a locality, I could assume this to be the town of Chisinau, which by today is the capital city of the state of Moldavia. Anyhow, so far I have not gotten confirmation on that.
I have not yet tried to transcribe/translate line 2 but line 3 is the title "Rabbi" which is a Jewish Religious title, line 4 states the name of the Rabbi in Cyrillic letters, note that the name is transcribed from Hebrew to Cyrillic, but as it looks like it refers to Rabbi Leib Yehuda Tsirelson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehuda_Leib_Tsirelson
Now to the body... having the luck to know some Hebrew spoken good friends I was able to get the idea of what the letter is about...
A person (possibly the rabbi himself) is asking the local community for help as a lady with children needs to travel to the town of Cincinnati (OH) but the lady has no financial means for covering the costs of the journey. Her husband moved to the aforementioned location 3 years before that date.
The letter dates back to either 1912 or 1922.
I hope this helps you a tiny bit.