BANET (Benet), NAPHTALI BEN MORDECAI

BANET (Benet), NAPHTALI BEN MORDECAI (1789–1857), Moravian rabbi and author, third son of mordecai banet . Banet officiated as rabbi and principal of the yeshivah in Safov (Schaffa, Moravia) from 1836 to 1857. He enjoined a fast and a penitential prayer to be recited on the 24th of Sivan in memory of the great conflagration of 1822 which almost destroyed the entire Jewish quarter of Schaffa; the custom was adhered to by the community until the Holocaust. Banet's writings include Berit Melaḥ on meliḥah (salting) laws (Prague, 1816); Emunat Yisrael, a catechism of the fundamentals of Judaism for Jewish youth, in Hebrew and German (ibid., 1832); Torat Dat Moshe ve-Yisrael, on the principles of Judaism, in Hebrew and German (ibid., 1826). The latter were intended to serve as a substitute for Herz Homberg's catechism Benei Ẓiyyon and expressed a conservative point of view. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A. Walden, Sefer Shem ha-Gedolim he-Ḥadash (1870), pt. 2, 8a, no. 97; D. Feuchtwang, in: Festschrift Adolf Schwarz (1917), 550; E. Faerber, Pe'er Mordekhai (1951), 55–58; B. Mevorakh, in: Zion, 34 (1969), 208ff. (Moshe Nahum Zobel)