HOUDINI’S FATHER SPEAKS!

He has stayed mysterious and silent for more than one hundred years, but today the Rev. Dr.  M. S. Weiss, Houdini’s father, speaks!

Buried in the archives of the Outagamie County Historical Society in Appleton, Wisconsin are two documents, written in old German by Houdini’s father. We do not believe they've ever been published before.

The first is a prayer delivered on October 28, 1878 for consecration of Appleton’s first synagogue, Temple Zion. According to the text, it was composed and spoken by Rabbi Weiss. These are his own words.

Young Ehrich Weiss, the future Houdini, was four years old. We believe he would have been present at this momentous occasion. His father’s words were a prayer of hope, words which the Weiss family would soon need to apply to itself:

“Hither may those in distress bear their problems, the worried their pain and their grief and be relieved of them. Fill with courage and hope their anxious souls. 

“.… To me, the preacher of your holy word, give the ability and the strength of the word to encourage the weary, to lift up those bowed down, to shore up the despairing….”

Houdini's father's words provide a clue as to Harry's own beliefs about life after death. Houdini is legendary for his skepticism about the supernatural. And yet his writings and movies - particularly the mystical Man From Beyond - show a clear belief in an afterlife. What did he learn at his father's knee? Rabbi Weiss's consecration includes this significant passage:

"... it is certain that man is not only a transitory child of dust like the animal of the forest and the flowers of the field which are destined to come, to feed, to propagate and to vanish again, but that man is of a higher origin than of this earth and has a different destiny than to eat and drink and a different destination than the grave, if he is a child of God, an inheritor of heaven who will share in immortality and future bliss."

Although the afterlife is a core belief of the Jewish religion, rarely is it mentioned in synagogue services.  As we'll see in our next exhumation of Rabbi Weiss's words, Houdini's father had a gift for connecting our everyday lives with a greater reality.


Next: Houdini's father gives personal advice.




[Images courtesy Outagamie County Historical Society. Thanks to Tom Boldt for the tipoff.]

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