JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

loch
tion of several architectural journals. Bloc died of a fall while
visiting a temple in India.
Bibliography: H. Schaefer-Simmern, Sculpture in Europe
Today (1955); Gisiger, in: Werk, 51 (1964), 271–2.
BLOCH, family of U.S. book publishers. The Bloch Publishing
Company was founded by EDWARD BLOCH (1829–1906),
who emigrated to the United States from Bohemia. He learned
the printing trade in Albany, New York, and in 1854 set up a
company in Cincinnati, which published newspapers and
books of specific Jewish interest in English and German. His
publications included The American Israelite and Die Deborah.
Later the company diversified its activities, and one of
its regular clients was a monastery to which he supplied religious
books.
In 1885 Edward’s son, CHARLES (1861–1940), established
a branch of the company in Chicago. He took over the management
of The Chicago Israelite, an edition of The American
Israelite, and in 1891 he co-founded the Chicago-based Reform
Advocate. He succeeded his father as president in 1901
and moved the Bloch Publishing Company to New York City
where, in addition to publishing, it was also one of the leading
bookstores in the U.S. representing several publishing houses.
It concentrated on books of Jewish interest. Charles was also
highly active during his years in New York in the Reform
movement, taking part in 1907 in the founding of the Free
Synagogue of New York, of which he later served as president,
and in 1922 of the Jewish Institute of Religion. On his death,
Charles was succeeded by his son EDWARD H. (1898–1982),
who headed the company for 40 years and under whose management
the company’s activities continued to expand. Reaching
its fifth generation, the company continued to serve the
cultural life of American and world Jewry through its publication
and distribution of Judaic and Hebraic literature.
Bibliography: S. Grayzel, in: JBA, 12 (1953–55), 72–76.
[Abraham Meir Habermann]
BLOCH, ANDRÉ (1873–1960), French composer. Born in
Wissembourg, Alsace, Bloch studied with Guiraud and Massenet
at the Paris Conservatory and received the Prix de Rome
in 1895. After World War I he conducted the orchestra of the
American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. In 1931–32 he composed
the symphonic poems Béquinage, Kaa, and Les moissons
de l’éternité with cello as principal instrument. His two operas,
the one-act Brocéliande, and Guignol, were first performed,
respectively, at the Opéra Garnier in 1925 and at the Opéra
Comique in 1949. In 1948, following the creation of the State
of Israel, he composed his most interesting piece, the Suite
Palestinienne, with cello as principal instrument.
[Amnon Shiloah (2nd ed.)]
BLOCH, CAMILLE (1865–1949), French historian, archivist,
and librarian. A professor at the Sorbonne, Bloch was
an authority on the French Revolution and its economic and
social antecedents; he was secretary-general of the Society
for the Study of the French Revolution. He was archivist of
the Aude departement (1891–96) and the Loiret departement
(1896–1904) and in 1904 became inspector general of libraries
and archives. In World War I he became director of the
War Library and War Museum in Paris, and historian of the
war period. His Les causes de la guerre mondiale (1933; The
Causes of the World War, 1935) is an important work. During
the Nazi period, Bloch was hidden in southern France. After
1945 he supervised for the French government the recovery
of books looted by the Germans. He left an unfinished study
on the Munich Pact of 1938.
Bibliography: P. Renouvin, in: Revue Historique, 202 (1949),
147–9; Dictionnaire de biographie française, 6 (1954), 677; New York
Times (Feb. 16, 1949) 25.
[Herbert A. Strauss]
BLOCH, CHAIM ISAAC (1867–1948), Orthodox rabbi.
Bloch was born in Lithuania and studied under Rabbi Simcha
Sisel Ziv at the Yeshiva of Grubin (1880–83) and then in
Volozhin, Poland (1883–91), under Rabbi Naphtali Ẓevi Judah
*Berlin and Rabbi Ḥayyim *Soloveichik. He received his rabbinical
ordination from Rabbi Soloveichik and Rabbi Eliezer
*Gordon of the Telshe Yeshivah in 1890. He founded a yeshiva
in Plunge in 1895, and served at its head until 1899, when he
became a pulpit rabbi in Palanga, a nearby town. While he was
there, he also earned the equivalent of a high school degree
from the local gymnasium.
From 1905 to 1912, after Rabbi Abraham Isaac *Kook left
for Palestine, Bloch served as chief rabbi of Bauska in Courland,
now Latvia, and became the district rabbi by governmental
appointment. In 1914, he was elected chief rabbi of
Antwerp but could not accept the position because of the
outbreak of World War I. In 1915, he fled to Russia, where
he served as an army chaplain, and in 1916 he organized a
yeshivah for exiled Jewish children in the Crimea. He then returned
to Bauska in 1920. In 1922–23, he left for America and
settled in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he was the pulpit rabbi
of Congregation Agudath Shalom. He founded talmud torahs
and societies to encourage people to observe the Shabbat (the
Sabbath Alliance) and encouraged a five-day workweek.
For many years, Bloch was dean of Yeshiva of Hudson
County, then a fledgling day school and now known as the
Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey with almost 1,000 students
from kindergarten through mesivta, located in the cities
of River Edge and Newark in New Jersey, and also served on
the board of Yeshiva University. He was an avid Zionist and
member of Mizrachi and the Religious Zionists of America,
as well as a member of the Agudat Harabbonim, where he
served as treasurer in 1925 and vice president in 1931. He
was also treasurer of Ezrat Torah. During World War II, he
worked with the Va’ad ha-Haẓẓalah to help rescue the Jews
of Europe.
Bloch’s literary career began in 1897, when he edited a
column for *Ha-Ẓefirah, a weekly Hebrew newspaper in War-
758 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3