Agnon House

Hometown and Homeland: The Dialectic Between Eretz Yisrael and Buczacz in Agnon's Late Works

On October 31, 2016 the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies hosted a conference on the works and influence of Nobel Prize-winning Israeli author S.Y. Agnon in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his award.
The lectures situate Agnon’s work in the context of his birthplace in Buchach, his adopted home in Jerusalem during the British mandate and early Israel, and the literary culture of his time.
For more info:

Amos Oz Reads Agnon

R. Jeffrey Saks discusses the influence of S.Y. Agnon on Amos Oz.
Agnon House, Jerusalem, July 11, 2019

The Vision and Reality of Israel- Ramah Israel Seminar 2017- חזון ומציאות בישראל

Cinematography & Editing: Nisan Hanania.
Website: bit.ly/NisanHanania_Home
Ramah Israel Seminar 2017

Agnon & Hebrew: The Sense of Smell

An exploration of the uniqueness of the Hebrew language, and the role of modern Hebrew literature and its authors, in S.Y. Agnon's story Chush HaRei'ach - translated as The Sense of Smell (in A Book That Was Lost, pp. 149-56).
Delivered by Rabbi Jeffrey Saks at the Nobel laureate's home, Beit Agnon.
Lecture resources available from:

S.Y. Agnon's Twofold - A Story for Yom Kippur

Study session with R. Jeffrey Saks delivered at the S.Y. Agnon House in Jerusalem on January 20, 2013, on the Yom Kippur story Twofold (Pi Shnayim in the Hebrew volume Samukh veNireh). Click here to download the translation of the story:


Visit for more recorded sessions.

Shai Agnon biography July 2011 Part 4.avi

Moshe Idel. Feminine Image of Jerusalem in Kabbalah / משה אידל. ירושלים כדמות נשית בקבלה

Hebrew with English and Russian subtitles

Prof. Moshe Idel's lecture at Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem as part of the festival Jerusalem as a Woman, organized by Eshkolot Project ( Study materials for the lecture:

הרצאתו של פרופ' משה אידל במסגרת הפסטיבל ירושלים כדמות נשית מטעם פרויקט אשכולות, בית אבי חי, יוני 2015
מקורות להרצאה

Лекция проф. Моше Иделя в рамках Фестиваля медленного чтения Иерусалим как женщина (июнь 2015), организованного проектом Эшколот ( Материалы к лекции:

First Grade Facts about Israel - Wise Religious School

Stephen Wise Temple
Center for Youth Engagement
Religious School first graders tell us facts about Israel's geography!

The Rebbe's Nigunim by Israel Edelson. Laura Melnicoff@Agnon Quartet

BH
Join our dear friend and rising cellist star, Laura Melnicoff with her musical friends in the Agnon Quartet, as they present soulful Chassidic Nigunim (melodies) taught by the Rebbe [TheRebbe.org] along with their transformative messages, beautifully arranged by master composer Israel Edelson.
The Agnon Quartet:


Avital Mazur, Violin
Daniel Zinn, Violin
Leikie Glick, Viola
Laura Melnicoff, Cello
At our home, on April 03, 2018 - 18 Nissan, 5778.
This video is a download of my Facebook Live stream of the event [ from my old Samsung s5 (hence the video quality).
The audio is from my Zoom H4n, matched to the video a few seconds into the recording, edited on MovieMaker for Windows.

That Tzaddik's Etrog by S.Y. Agnon

Rabbi Jeffrey Saks teaches S.Y. Agnon's short story for Sukkot That Tzaddik's Etrog at Agnon House in Jerusalem (February 6, 2011). For more details visit

Israel, Walking in Tel Aviv, Neve Tzedek district

Walking in Neve Tzedek is a neighborhood located in southwestern Tel Aviv, Israel
December, Wednesday 12:30 AM
Route on Google Maps:
All Routes on Google Maps:
Coordinates - Start of route: 32.06499, 34.76654
Link to this video:

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The second channel Dima Urban Walker:


#Walking #RelaxingWalker #Israel

Neve Tzedek was established in 1887, 22 years before the 1909 founding of Tel Aviv, by a group of Mizrahi Jewish families seeking to move outside of over-crowded Jaffa. Soon, additional small developments grew up around Neve Tzedek and were incorporated into the contemporary boundaries of the neighbourhood.

The residents preferred to construct the new quarter with low-rise buildings along narrow streets. These homes frequently incorporated design elements from the Jugendstil/Art Nouveau and later Bauhaus art movements and featured contemporary luxuries such as private bathrooms.

At the beginning of the 1900s, some artists and writers made Neve Tzedek their residence. Most notably, future Nobel prize laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon, as well as Hebrew artist Nachum Gutman, used Neve Tzedek as both a home and a sanctuary for art. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was the first Rabbi of Neve Tzedek; he even maintained a Yeshiva there. During his time in Neve Tzedek he became very close friends with many of the writers, especially Agnon.

However, as Tel Aviv began to develop away from the Jaffa core, the more affluent people started to move out from the southern end of the city to inhabit the newly-developing northern areas. With its buildings abandoned, neglected and subjected to the unsightly corrosive effects of the shore atmosphere upon concrete and stucco, Neve Tzedek degenerated into disrepair and urban decay. As with the rest of South Tel Aviv, after 1948, it became a predominantly Mizrahi area. By the 1960s, city officials deemed the neighbourhood – by this time almost a slum – incompatible with the modern image of a busy, bustling city. However, plans to demolish the historic neighbourhood to make way for high rise apartments were eventually cancelled as many Neve Tzedek buildings were placed on preservation lists. At the same time, the old, worn-out neighbourhood was also becoming appreciated as an oasis of the semi-pastoral and picturesque amidst the modernist development of the city center.

English Project Shay Agnon

English Project for Hanuka

The People of the Book in a Digital Age

JEWISH LIFE, LEARNING, LITERATURE … AND BOOKS
A conversation between ADAM KIRSCH & JEFFREY SAKS on the role of reading and books in Jewish life. What does it mean to be the “people of the book” in a digital age? How is Jewish culture the product of its books? How can so-called “secular” literature contribute to religious life? Join us as two bibliophiles – a leading American literary critic, poet-author and an Israeli rabbi-educator-bookworm – discuss these topics.
Sunday, May 7, 2017 at Lincoln Square Synagogue

Adam Kirsch is the author most recently of The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (W.W. Norton). A contributing editor at Tablet Magazine, his writing appears regularly in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and other publications.

Rabbi Jeffrey Saks is the founding director of ATID and its WebYeshiva.org program. He is the series editor of the Toby Press S.Y. Agnon Library and Director of Research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem.

Moderator Shaul Robinson is the Rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue in New York.

Co-sponsored by: Agnon House, Lincoln Square Synagogue, WebYeshiva.org, Toby Press and Maggid Books

MAX STERN: EPILUDES, suite for solo contrabass (after S.Y. Agnon) with Keshet Margalit, dancer

MAX STERN: EPILUDES suite for contrabass solo
after S.Y. Agnon story: Bid'mi Yameha (In the Bloom of Her Days)
Max Stern, contrabass / Keshet Margalit, dancer
Israel Composers' League Concert
Felicia Blumenthal Auditorium, Bialik Library, Tel_Aviv June 6, 2001

Epiludes is a suite based on incidental music to a monodrama originally staged and directed by Michal Govrin at the Jerusalem Khan Theater in 1977.

Narrative: The story is told from the perspective of an adolescent girl falling in love and marrying her teacher, whom she discovers was her late-mother's first love.

1. Prelude 2. Night Shadows 3. Lament 4. Silence 5. Yearning 6. Love 7. Home 8. Yearning 9. School Days 10. Winter 11. Legend 12. Passover 13. Wind and Leaves 14. Wings 15. Epilogue

Netania-Israel

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1966 Nobel Laureate in Literature (A Meditation)

Abortion's Handmaid: The Depersonalized World of Dianna Murphy





இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ——

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, (July 17, 1888 -- February 17, 1970) was a Nobel Prize laureate writer and was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew fiction. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon (שי עגנון). In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon.

Agnon was born in Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Ukraine). He later immigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, and died in Jerusalem, Israel.

His works deal with the conflict between the traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world. They also attempt to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl (village). In a wider context, he also contributed to broadening the characteristic conception of the narrator's role in literature. Agnon shared the Nobel Prize with the poet Nelly Sachs in 1966.

Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in Buczacz (Polish spelling, pronounced Buchach) or Butschatsch (German spelling), Galicia (then within the Austro-Hungarian Empire), now Buchach, Ukraine. Officially, his date of birth on the Hebrew calendar was 18 Av 5648 (July 26), but he always said his birthday was on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B'Av, the Ninth of Av.

His father, Shalom Mordechai Halevy, was ordained as a rabbi, but worked in the fur trade, and had many connections among the Hasidim. His mother's side had ties to the Mitnagdim.

He did not attend school and was schooled by his parents. In addition to studying Jewish texts, Agnon studied writings of the Haskalah, and was even tutored in German. At the age of eight, he began to write in Hebrew and Yiddish. At the age of 15, he published his first poem -- a Yiddish poem about the Kabbalist Joseph della Reina. He continued to write poems and stories in Hebrew and Yiddish, which were published in Galicia.

In 1908, he immigrated to Jaffa. The first story he published there was Agunot (Forsaken Wives), which appeared that same year in the journal Ha`omer. He used the pen name Agnon, derived from the title of the story, which he adopted as his official surname in 1924. In 1910, Forsaken Wives was translated into German. In 1912, at the urging of Yosef Haim Brenner, he published a novella, Vehaya Ha'akov Lemishor (And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight).

In 1913, Agnon moved to Germany, where he met Esther Marx. They married in 1920 and had two children. In Germany he lived in Berlin and Bad Homburg vor der Höhe (1921--24). Salman Schocken, a businessman and later also publisher, became his literary patron and freed him from financial worries. From 1931 on, his work was published by Schocken Books, and his short stories appeared regularly in the newspaper Haaretz, also owned by the Schocken family. In Germany, he continued to write short stories and collaborated with Martin Buber on an anthology of Hasidic stories. Many of his early books appeared in Buber's Jüdischer Verlag (Berlin). The mostly assimilated, secular German Jews, Buber and Franz Rosenzweig among them, considered Agnon to be a legitimate relic, being a religious man, familiar with Jewish scripture. Gershom Sholem called him the Jews' Jew.

In 1924, a fire broke out in his home, destroying his manuscripts and rare book collection. This traumatic event crops up occasionally in his stories. Later that year, Agnon returned to Jerusalem and settled with his family in the neighborhood of Talpiot. In 1929, his library was destroyed again during anti-Jewish riots.

When his novel Hachnasat Kalla (The Bridal Canopy) appeared in 1931 to great critical acclaim, Agnon's place in Hebrew literature was assured. In 1935, he published Sippur Pashut (A Simple Story), a novella set in Buczacz at the end of the 19th century. Another novel, Tmol Shilshom (Yesteryear), set in Eretz Yisrael of the early 20th century, appeared in 1945.

*** Prayer and Torah study groups will continue to be held around the world in the merit of Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin and his family.

Ariel Hirschfeld. Feminine Image of Jerusalem in Brenner and Agnon (עברית)

Hebrew with English and Russian subtitles

Prof. Ariel Hirschfeld's lecture at Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem as part of the festival Jerusalem as a Woman, organized by Eshkolot Project ( Study materials for the lecture:

הרצאתו של פרופ' אריאל הירשפלד במסגרת הפסטיבל ירושלים כדמות נשית מטעם פרויקט אשכולות, בית אבי חי, יוני 2015
מקורות להרצאה

Лекция проф. Ариэля Хиршфельда в рамках Фестиваля медленного чтения Иерусалим как женщина (июнь 2015), организованного проектом Эшколот ( Материалы к лекции:

Agnon's In the Heart of the Seas (Part 1 of 3)

Agnon's In the Heart of the Seas (Part 1 of 3)
S.Y. Agnon's tale In the Heart of the Seas (Bilvav Yamim) is a legend of love for the Land of Israel as a group sets out from 19th century Buczacz on Aliya, accompanied by a mysterious and miraculous man of spirit. This midrashic and lyrical weaving of history and mystery is explored in this 3-part series on the Nobel laureate's novella with Rabbi Jeffrey Saks. Delivered at Jerusalem's Agnon House (November--December 2011).
Visit for all archived class materials.