Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. Photo: Tazpit News Agency.

JNS.org – When Rabbi Ovadia Yosef died last October, the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas political party left behind a unique Talmud set originally published in Munich in 1949. Later this month, the Kedem Auction House in Jerusalem will publicly auction the set, a series of 19 books that is the first Talmud edition printed in its entirety after the Holocaust in Germany.

The set is expected to fetch between $40,000 and $50,000, and was designed to commemorate the fact that it was printed on German soil, featuring illustrations of a Jewish township and a concentration camp with the caption, “A labor camp in Ashkenaz in the days of the Nazis,” and a passage from Psalms (119:176) reading, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments.”