{"id":224517,"date":"2026-05-08T13:22:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/224517\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T13:22:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:22:40","slug":"brooklyn-jewish-book-dealer-asking-almost-25000-for-three-of-first-prayer-books-printed-in-america-israel-jewish-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/224517\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn Jewish book dealer asking almost $25,000 for three of first prayer books printed in America &#8211; Israel &#038; Jewish News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                            (<br \/>\n                                May 8, 2026<br \/>\n                                 \/ JNS<br \/>\n                            )<\/p>\n<p>Three Ashkenazi prayer books, reportedly the first known machzors printed in the United States, are up for sale for nearly $25,000.<\/p>\n<p>Dan Wyman, a Jewish rare book dealer in Brooklyn, is selling a two-volume Polish-rite set for $17,000 and a German-rite Rosh Hashanah volume for $7,500. The trio, which the Jewish publisher Henry Frank printed in New York in 1854, were made for newly arrived German and Polish immigrants seeking Jewish prayer books aligned with their traditions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen a book represents a \u2018first\u2019 in American Jewish book history, that makes it a big deal,\u201d Wyman told JNS. \u201cThese machzorim represent the first attempt to produce a machzor in America for Ashkenazi Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A Bavarian immigrant, Henry Frank, who printed the mahzors, also operated one of the earliest Jewish bookstores in the United States, according to Wyman. <\/p>\n<p>Speaking from Berlin, Wyman told JNS about a recent acquisition of his\u2014a 1947 photo album produced in a Jewish displaced-persons camp after the Holocaust.<\/p>\n<p>The handmade volume, which used photographic paper rather than a printing press and has Yiddish captions, is thought to be one of just a handful made. It documents life in the camp, according to Wyman, whose research suggested that residents of that camp were evacuated during the <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/history.state.gov\/milestones\/1945-1952\/berlin-airlift\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" data-cms-ai=\"0\">Berlin Airlift<\/a> in 1948-49, as Cold War tensions mounted.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s this sort of unexpected twist in the story,\u201d Wyman told JNS, of the album. \u201cThat\u2019s part of the fun when you start in these things and you kind of think it\u2019s going to go a certain direction and probably does, and then there\u2019s a, \u2018Wait, I wasn\u2019t expecting that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The dealer didn\u2019t want to speculate about how much the photo album might fetch.<\/p>\n<p>One of his larger sales, he said, was $79,000 for a set of journals by David Einhorn, a mid-19th century rabbi and leader in the Reform Judaism movement. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe was run out of Baltimore, because he opposed slavery and ended up in Philadelphia, and he founded a journal called \u2018Sinai,\u2019 which ran seven volumes,\u201d Wyman told JNS. \u201cSometimes you see one volume here or there. I had a complete set of it, and I had it nicely rebound.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The dealer\u2019s list of buyers includes \u201clots of librarians, but also collectors, scholars, amateur genealogists and Jewish book lovers of all kinds,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Though he doesn\u2019t get to keep the volumes, getting to handle them along the way is \u201cpart of the fun,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"( May 8, 2026 \/ JNS ) Three Ashkenazi prayer books, reportedly the first known machzors printed in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-224517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}