Want to daven from Marilyn Monroe’s siddur?

Want to daven from Marilyn Monroe’s siddur?

Something that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe is being put up for auction — and it’s not quite what you’d expect, at least if you hadn’t read the headline. Next month, one lucky fan of the late actress will be able to acquire a Jewish prayer book that she owned.

The cream-colored siddur, which was published in 1922, is being sold at auction by J. Greenstein & Co. on November 12 in Cedarhurst, on Long Island. The starting bid is $4,600.

Arthur Miller with Marilyn Monroe in 1956. (Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Monroe converted to Judaism in 1956, before she married Jewish-American writer Arthur Miller. Though the couple divorced five years later, the blond bombshell said that she would not abandon her new faith.

Rabbi Robert Goldburg of Congregation Mishkan Israel in New Haven, Connecticut, who oversaw her conversion and officiated at her wedding to Miller, said that she told him that she was still committed to being Jewish.

The siddur now is owned by an American who lives in Israel and bought it from Monroe’s estate in 1999, the Jewish Chronicle reported. This isn’t the owner’s first attempt to sell it — it was put up for auction in 2017 but went unsold.

Monroe seems to have used the siddur. The description says that it contains notes that are “apparently in her hand” and that the spine is nearly detached.

JTA Wire Service

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