The Brooklyn Marriott will be the scene of a rare dinner of the Mesorah Heritage Foundation—its first in six years—commemorating the life and legacy of its founder, Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz. The expected 1,200 participants will mark the first yahrzeit of Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, president of the foundation and founder of ArtScroll/Mesorah, the world’s leading Judaica publisher.
Commonly known as “ArtScroll,” the company has published over 2,000 titles since Rabbi Zlotowitz founded it in 1976. Its repertoire includes many world-famous scholarly projects, most prominently the 73-volume Schottenstein Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, which was acclaimed by Rabbi Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, the late chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, as “the greatest publishing project across the length and breadth of Jewish history.”
The Mesorah Heritage Foundation was created in 1988 to fund the more than 100 scholars and support staff. It came into existence at the initiative of Prof. Joel Fleishman, who was first senior vice president of Duke University. Prof. Fleishman says, “From my experience at Duke and Yale, I knew that the marketplace alone cannot support works of such high-quality books at such a moderate price, less than half the cost of a comparable college textbook. So I undertook to set up an IRS-approved not-for-profit, which would enable ArtScroll to raise tax-free contributions.”
According to Rabbi Gedaliah Zlotowitz, his father’s successor as president of the Mesorah Heritage Foundation, “more than 100 scholars and support staff work on the scholarly projects. All the proceeds of the dinner will go to fund the scholars. Since my father passed away, we have begun several major new projects and more are on the way. We have an enormous Torah heritage, and we are bringing it to Jews all over the world.”
Mesorah Heritage Foundation funds works of Jewish scholarship and their translation in English, Hebrew, French, Russian and Spanish. Its Hebrew elucidations of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds are enormously popular even in the academies of Israel. They are used as far away as Hong Kong and Australia. It is estimated more than 90,000 people who packed Metlife Stadium five years ago to celebrate the completion of the Daf Yomi Talmud program were users of the Schottenstein Talmud.
Guests at the legacy dinner will receive a pre-publication biography of Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz by Sruly Besser of Montreal. The dinner will take place on June 5. For information and reservation, people can call (718) 921-9000 or (800) MESORAH.
