[below info from site
http://www.amazon.com/The-Legacy-Teaching-Lithuanian-Rabbis/dp/1592643620 ]
The Legacy: Teachings for Life from the Great Lithuanian Rabbis Hardcover - 2013
Two Orthodox rabbis, Wein the founder and director of Destiny Foundation, and
Goldstein the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, joined together to offer nine essays
about rabbis who lived in Lithuania and taught a people-oriented version of
Judaism. Rabbi Wein wrote three of the essays and focused on the history of the
country, the Jews in it, and their problems. He also wrote the appendix
"Historical Context." Rabbi Goldstein's six essays focused on the Lithuanian
rabbis' worldview and their teachings. Wein sometimes touched upon the
teachings and Goldstein upon history. Jews arrived in Lithuania in the
fourteenth century escaping from pogroms in Germany and Central Europe. By the
nineteenth century, Jews were the largest national minority in this strongly
Roman Catholic country. By 1920, they had a representative in the Lithuanian
parliament, but remained a distinct and unassimilated minority, and by 1939,
they numbered about 300,000. Wein writes that pleasantness is one of the
central teachings of these rabbis. "The key to pleasantness, and hence to
justice and fairness in life, is judging one's own behavior in the light of how
it affects others." He points out that "the Lithuanian rabbinic leadership was
almost totally wiped out in the Holocaust. Because of this, those who embodied
this idea of pleasantness and its value system - and had been in the forefront
of its dissemination in the wider Jewish world - virtually disappeared from the
Jewish scene." Goldstein gives details of this teaching. The rabbis taught Jews
are required to develop this type of behavior "the most important Torah
objective," this behavior comes before Torah, and many of its teachings are in
the Torah itself. Proper behavior, for example, includes treating all people,
Jews and non-Jews, properly, in all ways, including financial dealings.
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