Tkhines for the High Holidays and Sukkot, scribe: Jacob Segal, Paks: 1828
The traditional Jewish liturgy was composed in ancient times in Hebrew and Aramaic, and before the modern period, all mainstream Jewish communal prayer was recited in those languages. However, medieval sources indicate that already by the late thirteenth century, if not earlier, individual Ashkenazic Jews, particularly women, who did not understand the original Hebrew/Aramaic were offering their supplications – both those required by Jewish law and those of a voluntary nature – in the Yiddish vernacular.
With time, the latter category of Yiddish-language personal devotions came to form a liturgical genre unto itself known as tkhines. Modeled on the Hebrew-language tehinnot (supplications) authored by medieval mystics, as well as on the statutory prayers themselves, tkhines gave the petitioner the ability to express herself directly to God in a language she understood on a range of issues not necessarily addressed in the standard texts. Examples include prayers for an uneventful pregnancy and birth, for religiously observant children and grandchildren, and for protection against children’s premature deaths. Other tkhines constituted more general pleas for sustenance, health, happiness, forgiveness of sins, protection from anti-Semitic violence, and redemption.
