About the Narrator, Abraham Shmueloff

Abraham Shmueloff is the narrator of these MP3 recordings of the

Hebrew Bible. Abraham Shmueloff was born in 1913 in the Meah
Shearim district of Jerusalem. He was born into a large Ultra-Orthodox
Jewish family which had migrated from Persia at the end of the 19th
century, the youngest of sixteen children.

Abraham Shmueloff went to school at the "College des Freres", and later

became a companion of Menachem Begin in the Irgun. In World War II
he joined the British army and fought in the Jewish legion, but he was captured in 1941.
While a prisoner of war, Abraham Shmueloff was deeply moved by reading the New
Testament in Hebrew. When he was released four years later, Abraham Shmueloff
returned to London, where he accepted Yeshua as the Messiah, and was baptized into
the Anglican Faith. Back in Jerusalem, Abraham Shmueloff's family tried to persuade
him to return to the Judaism, but he persisted and became a Roman Catholic and later
joined the Greek Catholic Church.

Abraham Shmueloff was ordained priest by Archbishop Hakim in Nazareth in 1956 and
served the Melkite community as a parish priest at Gush Chalav. He spoke perfect
Arabic as well as his native Hebrew, but as he encountered more and more difficulties
in serving the Arabic community, he joined "La Maison d’Isaia" in Jerusalem founded
by the French Dominicans, where he collaborated on developing a Hebrew Liturgy with
Fr. Jacques Fontaine. It was at this time that Abraham Shmueloff took on the task of
recording the entire Tanakh in Hebrew.

Abraham Shmueloff's later years were spent in Jerusalem where he frequently

associated with the Jesuits at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. Fr. Francesco Rossi de
Gasperis would often bring students and pilgrims to hear his endless recounting of
stories in the Land of Israel. The last few years of Abraham Shmueloff's life were spent
in Bethany, where he was convalescing at the Casa Mater Misericordiae. He died there
on March 23, 1994. His close relationship with the Dominicans and the Melkites
continued and he was buried in their garden at the monastery of St. John in the Desert,
just west of Jerusalem, below Moshe Even Sapir, near En Karem.

By recording the entire Hebrew Bible, Abraham Shmueloff has done an enormous
service to students of the Tanakh. His work is awesome, and his recording is first rate.
He narrates the Hebrew Bible with an Israeli accent, articulating all the letters correctly,
and using the Hebrew accents (teamim) correctly to give the correct emphasis on words.