(Courtesy of Mesorah Heritage Foundation) The Mesorah Heritage Foundation held its first dinner in six years at the Brooklyn Marriott on Tuesday evening, June 5—commemorating the life and legacy of its founder, Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz. Over 1,200 guests marked the first yahrzeit of Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, president of the Foundation and founder of ArtScroll/Mesorah, the world’s leading Judaica publisher.
ArtScroll has published over 2,000 titles since Rabbi Zlotowitz founded it in 1976. Lord Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, the late chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, described ArtScroll as “the greatest publishing project across the length and breadth of Jewish history.” The Mesorah Heritage Foundation funds the more than 100 scholars and support staff. It was founded in 1988 at the initiative of Prof. Joel Fleishman, who was first senior vice-president of Duke University, to enable the publication of Jewish classics at affordable prices. The Mesorah Legacy Dinner was held both to celebrate the vision of Rabbi Zlotowitz and to raise much-needed funds to support the work he began.
According to Rabbi Gedaliah Zlotowitz, his father’s successor as president of the Mesorah Heritage Foundation and ArtScroll, “All the proceeds of the dinner will go to fund our 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 translations and elucidations of Jewish classics, in English, Hebrew, French, Russian and Spanish. Its Hebrew elucidations of the Schottenstein Editions 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 that over half of the 90,000 people who packed Metlife Stadium five years ago to celebrate the completion of the Daf Yomi Talmud cycle were users of the Schottenstein Talmuds.
Guests at the Legacy Dinner watched a video, the “Architect of a Revolution: The Life and Legacy of Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz,” and received an attache case filled with new Foundation titles and samples of forthcoming volumes. Mr. Jay Schottenstein, chairman of the international board of governors, opened the program. The guest speaker was Mr. Gary Torgow, member of the international board of governors, and Rabbi Gedaliah Zlotowitz closed the evening. The entire program can be viewed at: https://www.mesorahheritage.org/content/full_video.html.
Guests received the newly published biography of Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, by Rabbi Yisroel Besser of Montreal, which can be ordered at http://artscroll.com/Books/rzloth.html.
