Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women

For women seeking a window into the inner lives of our foremothers, as well as a precedent for women’s prayers, the tkhine literature is a wonderful resource. However, the tkhines, written in Yiddish and often printed in a specific typeface called vaybertaytsh, are mainly inaccessible to today’s English readers. Devra Kay’s book is a valuable translation of and commentary on an early collection of tkhines that first appeared in 1648 and continued to be printed and reprinted for about 70 years, often within the regular siddur. This collection has not been translated before. Kay shows how Seyder Tkhines presented an alternative daily liturgy for women to that of the siddur, and explains how the individual tkhines were based on a restructuring and reformulation in Yiddish of the individual Hebrew prayers in the siddur, extending their contents to encompass mitzvot that do not appear in the standard liturgy and are relevant only to women. While most of the tkhines of the past were printed, there are a few manuscript tkhines that have survived. Kay translates a 17th century Yiddish manuscript of a collection of prayers specially written by hand for an individual pregnant woman, as well as some other prayers and Yiddish songs. While it is unfortunate that the Yiddish texts themselves are not included in this volume, Kay has done us a great service in providing these translations together with her suggestive analysis of the texts and their contexts.