“Kitzur Shulchan Aruch” published in Portuguese

By · February 19, 2008

Portuguese-speaking Jews will be able to study the landmark “Code of Jewish Law” in their mother tongue.

The two-volume set of the “Kitzur Shulchan Aruch,” or “Code of Jewish Law,” authored some 350 years ago by Rabbi Yosef Caro of Spain, was published in Portuguese by Maayanot, a Brazilian-based Chabad-Lubavitch publishing house.

What makes the edition helpful for Portuguese-speaking Jews, says publisher Rabbi Dovid Weitman, is that it also contains footnotes delineating the variant rulings among Sephardic Jews – Jews descended from the outcasts of Spain and Portugal during the Middle Ages, a population that includes many of Brazil’s Jews as well as Shasidim.

According to the publisher, Chabad-Lubavitch’s emissary in Sao Paulo, Rabbi Yossef Benzecry, spent more than four years on the translation.

Maayanot, which has published more than 120 volumes on Chasidic thought, Jewish stories and Jewish law, will distribute the books in Lisbon, Mozambique and Angola, as well as to all Chabad houses, Jewish bookstores and public libraries around Brazil.

The book, 100 copies of which were given to Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries at the conclusion of a rabbinical conference earlier this month, will be formally unveiled to the public at a March 6 luncheon in Buenos Aires.