Magda Teter
2025 marks the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. But March holds a special significance. It was the month when the world stopped. Friday, March 6th, 2020 was the last day we were on campus before the shut down. But when we left campus on that day, we did not know that we would not return to in-person instruction until Fall 2021.
That week, CJS held two events: On March 2, Stanisław Krajewski, from Poland, talked about Pope John Paul II’s meetings with Polish Jews, and, on March 4th, we hosted a standing-room-only presentation and discussion of Elissa Bemporad’s book Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets.
On Monday, March 9th, 2020, the university suspended in-person classes and cancelled all scheduled events. We scrambled. The first couple of weeks, we shared with you readings, book and film recommendations, and in April we resumed our programs, on zoom. Zoom and a “webinar” was fairly new at the time so we called our new online events “Fordham’s Zoominars in Jewish Studies.” We curated a series of events on Jews and Epidemics in History, starting on April 22, 2020 with a conversation between Joshua Teplitsky and Magda Teter about “Epidemics, Disease and Plagues in Jewish History & Memory.”
Between April 2020 and September 2021, when we returned to campus, we hosted over 30 such events.
Here are links to our newsletter from March 2020, documenting the sudden turn of events: March 2nd, 2020, March 11th, 2020, March 16th, 2020, March 23, 2020, and March 30, 2020.
To commemorate the pandemic, as it is fading into oblivion, we are preparing an exhibit at the O’Hare Special Collections and Archives at the Walsh Family Library, looking at the historical artifacts from both past epidemics and the one we lived through. The exhibit is co-curated by Miriam Krakowski FCRH ’27, Patricia Scully FCRH ’25, and myself. Among the items we are showing is a handwritten Hebrew prayer from eighteenth-century Italy for halting an epidemic of smallpox that was raging at the time [below right].
And the 1559 edition a book Mehir Yayin by the Polish rabbi, Moses Isserless [above left] in which he discussed his experience of fleeing Cracow for a small town Szydłów to escape a plague as “an exile”:
I, Moshe, the son of my honored father, the communal leader Israel (may he live many good years), who am called Isserles, from Kraków, was in the company of those who were exiled from our city in the year 5316 [1556] because of the fouling of the air (may it not come upon you!). We were strangers in a land not ours, in the city of Szydłów, a place without a fig tree or vine and almost without water to drink except by contrivance, a city where one eats bread in scarcity and there is no tree to lean on. We could not celebrate Purim there with drinking and festivity to banish woe and anguish.I decided to arouse myself and gladden myself through my efforts. My wisdom stood me in good stead, for the injunctions of the Lord are upright and gladden the heart. I took honey and milk under my tongue, and I set myself to expound on the meanings of the Megillah [scroll of Esther].
The exhibit includes both Jewish and non-Jewish works. One volume contains four works by Abraham de Santa Clara, which commemorate the plague that hit Vienna in 1680: Mercks Wienn, das ist : Dess wütenden Todts ein umständige Beschreibung, in der berühmten Haupt und käiserl. Residentz Stadt in Oesterreich, im sechzehen hundert, und neun und sibentzigsten Jahr, mit Beyfügung so wol Wissen als Gewissen antreffender Lehr. Zusammen getragen mitten in der betrangten Stadt und Zeit [Merck’s Vienna, that is: A detailed description of his furious death, in the famous capital and imperial residence city in Austria, in the sixteen hundred and seventy-ninth year, with the addition of both knowledge and conscience of the teachings encountered. Collected in the midst of the troubled city and time], T bound with Lösch Wienn, which was published a year later. While Merck’s Vienna describes viscerally the impact of the plague on everyone–it spared no one: neither priests, nor women, nor learned men, nor married people, nor soldiers, Lösch’s Vien addressed the survivors and admonished them not “to forget about the many thousands of deceased relatives and friends who, a year ago, during the harsh plague period, ended up miserably beneath the earth without the usual funeral service, without the company of friends, etc. Many of whom presumably died in the burning flames of purgatory.”
The third work by Abraham de Santa Clara, inspired by the devastating plague and bound with the other two, was Die grosse Totenbruderschaft (1681), or “The Great Brotherhood of the Dead, that is: A short outline of mortal life with an attached catalog or list of all those gentlemen, brothers, women and virgins, sisters who are from the highly praiseworthy soldiery of the dead.” The Great Brotherhood of the Dead lists the people of prominence who died during the plague of 1679-80. In this book, Abraham de Santa Clara argued “that after death the prince royal is as frightfully noisome as the newborn child of the peasant.”
Another short book bound in this volume is Abraham a Sancta Clara’s Oesterreichisches Deo Gratias, das ist, Eine ausführliche Beschreibung eines hochfeyerlichen Danck-Fests (Vienna: Pet. Paul Vivian, 1680) A detailed description of a highly solemn festival of thanksgiving “for the gracious averting of the extremely severe punishment of the plague in the imperial capital and residence city of Vienna, on June 17th, 1680,” included is “a short sermon which was delivered before a crowded assembly in the middle of the city near the columns of the Most Holy Trinity.”
The exhibit shows an impact of modern pandemics on Fordham as well: the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 and COVID. Some of the remnants are still around us, even as we try to forget. Below are photos I took around New York and Fordham this February and March, documenting these ever present reminders of what we went through five years ago.
The exhibition would not have been possible without the generosity of Eugene Shvidler, whose gift to Fordham’s Jewish Studies program helped start Fordham’s Judaica collection and Fordham’s former trustee Henry S. Miller, whose gift to Fordham’s CJS assures the continuous acquisitions of Judaica and internships for undergraduate students interested in working with the Judaica Collection and learning how to curate exhibits. We are also grateful to the Director of Fordham Libraries, Linda Loschiavo, for her support and to Gabriela DiMeglio and Vivian Shen of the Special Collections and Archives for their tireless support of students’ work and their help with setting up the exhibits.