There are seforim you open to learn from, and there are seforim you hold and feel.
Machon Yerushalayim has spent more than fifty years bringing those two worlds together.

In batei midrashim across the globe, their volumes sit quietly on the shelves: carefully restored texts, clarified manuscripts, editions that make demanding Torah accessible without flattening its depth. To many learners, Machon Yerushalayim is simply part of the furniture of serious learning.

But behind these books are stories few people ever hear.

Some manuscripts arrive from forgotten corners — attics, basements, private collections whose owners barely realize what they possess. Others have survived war, fire, exile, and upheaval, preserved not through planning but through what can only be described as pure hashgachah pratis.

One editor described the experience of working with Machon Yerushalayim as “holding history in our hands.” On a visit to the Cambridge University Library, the editorial team examined original manuscripts of the Geonim and the Rambam. Among them was a letter written in the Rambam’s own hand, bearing tiny holes in the parchment.

Those holes, Rabbi Moshe Buxbaum explains, may have been formed by tears.

The letter relates to the death of the Rambam’s brother, Rabbi David — the man who supported him financially and enabled his Torah greatness. Rabbi David drowned at sea while traveling on business. Years later, the Rambam would write that no loss in his life compared to that tragedy. To encounter that letter centuries later is not just to read history, but to feel it.

Other manuscripts tell different kinds of stories.

During the war years, Rabbi Natan Netta Olevsky, exiled to Siberia and later Kazakhstan, refused to stop learning or writing Torah. Paper was scarce. His solution was to gather discarded Red Army shooting targets after military drills — sheets riddled with bullet holes and stamped with official insignia. On those frozen, perforated pages, he wrote Torah that would one day be studied in warmth and safety, far from the camps in which it was composed.

In another instance, an essential section of Shaarei Torah was missing during the editing process. The editors debated how to proceed, resigned to the possibility that it had been lost forever. Then, unexpectedly, a widow living far from any Torah center called to say she had a bundle of old papers left behind by her husband. Inside was the missing opening section — recovered just in time to complete the sefer.

Stories like these are not the exception. They are the rule.

Founded by Rabbi Yosef Buxbaum zt”l and sustained today by a team of over 150 talmidei chachamim, Machon Yerushalayim approaches its work with a quiet sense of responsibility: to rescue Torah, restore it faithfully, and present it with clarity and dignity. Each volume represents years of comparison, correction, annotation, and consultation with leading scholars — and a deep awareness that these texts are not merely academic artifacts, but living Torah.

This year, as Machon Yerushalayim marks its 16th annual sale (17 Kislev through 15 Teves; December 7, 2025 – January 4, 2026), many of these seforim, including newly released works and long-awaited editions, will be available at special prices. But the sale itself is almost beside the point.

Because when one opens a Machon Yerushalayim sefer, one is not only engaging with the Torah on the page. One is encountering the journeys it traveled, the hands that preserved it, and the sacrifices made so that it could be learned at all.

And that knowledge, as many have found, changes the learning itself.

Don’t miss the chance to bring these treasured seforim into your home and beis medrash. Explore the full collection and discover the Torah that awaits you this year. 

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