Some siddurim have a few opening pages of addendums like how to put on tefillin. I noticed that the Nusach Ari siddur has a page of alef-beis and nekudos, plus a page of letters combined with nekudos. Is this simply an easy way to get a primer in a siddur, or is there another purpose?
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2Many of these siddurim are used in yeshiva for younger students, so it is always practical to have those fundamental materials accessible.– samJan 11, 2022 at 2:45
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If by "Nusach Ari siddur" you mean סדור תהלת ה, right after the page of alef-beis and nekudos and the page of letters combined with nekudos, it has a page with prayers for young children to say, with "קטן משיודע לדבר אביו מלמדו" at the top. My understanding is that all those are conveniently placed (i.e. at the beginning of the siddur) aids for a father to teach his young child.– Tamir EvanJan 11, 2022 at 4:29
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Sometime I used to pray with who studied some קבלה would, before each morning's service, read that page to himself.– msh210 ♦Jan 11, 2022 at 5:39
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2Related: judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/98135/…– Joel KJan 11, 2022 at 12:17
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1The chabad siddur isn't the only siddur to do that btw– ezraJan 11, 2022 at 19:37
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3 Answers
I once saw Rabbi Shlomo Goldstein of Diaspora Yeshiva in Jerusalem using such a page in a siddur to show a student the difference between certain letters in the typeface used in that siddur, specifically between a samech and a final mem, and it seemed to me that that it was for this very purpose that these pages are included.
Many siddurim have this, including the very popular Artscroll Hebrew siddurim. In the younger grades, our Rebbeim could use those pages to help teach aleph-beis. I have also seen fathers who had their little children with them in shul use those pages to give their kids something to do/look at during services.
It is a primer for children. First a child learns the alef-beis, then the nekudos, then the sounds of the different combinations of letters and nekudos. It is much like the teaching tool Movo Likriya. It is explained in the introduction to the "eizer" of that book that it was based off the siddur because a siddur is the first real sefer a child will ever use. Therefore it uses the traditional teaching style (komotz-alef: o, komotz-beis: bo, etc.) and uses vocabulary from the siddur to enforce this idea.
