Displayed here is the title page of a book of rabbinic opinions, Milhemet mitsvah, published in Sighet, Hungary (later Romania) in 1888. The book emerges out of the intense and contentious religious environment of the Hungarian Unterland, a region of Northern Transylvania that served as the incubator for a new current of Orthodox Jewry that came to be known as haredi and was fiercely resistant to "modernizers" of any sort. The book's title, "Commanded War," reflects the pervasive sense of peril and need for battle of the "Kehal ha-Ortodoksen" (the "Orthodox Community" in Sighet), which was summoned to resist "those who would rise up to destroy and deny all the regulations"—in this case, another group of observant Jews who established their own community several years earlier.

The top portion of the left page is an opinion issued by the late R. Yekutiel Yehudah Teitelbaum (1808-1883), known as the Yetev Lev, enjoining all Jews from eating meat slaughtered under the supervision of the less stringently observant Status Quo community. The Yetev Lev was the grandfather of R. Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), the founding rabbi of the Satmar Hasidic movement.