Funeral and Mourning Rituals in Halicz in the Yoke of Tradition Short Story: Evaluating Reuven Fahn’s Account in Terms of Facts
Funeral and Mourning Rituals in Halicz in the Yoke of Tradition Short Story: Evaluating Reuven Fahn’s Account in Terms of Facts

Summary/Abstract: This article seeks an answer to the question of the credibility of Reuven’s Fahn’s short story, Sevel Yerusha (Yoke of Tradition), as a source of historical knowledge about the funeral rites of the Karaite community from Halicz (in the former Kresy of Poland, now Ukraine). The short stories included in Fahn’s Me hayye ha-karaim are undoubtedly very important for the Karaite studies since we do not have sufficient information about the religious rites of the Karaites of Galicia, therefore the question of their credibility seems to be crucial. Fahn’s account has been compared with other, quite limited, sources (in particular the data from Jan Grzegorzewski and Tadeusz Kowalski preserved in the archives of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU) in Kraków). Lengthy parts of the story were translated from Hebrew into English and subsequently analysed. The conclusion is that the value of Sevel Yerusha as an ethnographic account is limited.

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