Born into a wealthy, Russian-speaking family that settled in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, the photographer Roman Vishniac traveled extensively in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, photographing pious and impoverished Jews. The images he created, which were widely distributed in the postwar period, shaped popular perceptions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. He came to America in 1940 and after the war worked extensively in photomicroscopy, building on his earlier training in biology, zoology, and endocrinology.
I was born on 19 February 1758 in Nový Bydžov [in Bohemia] of well-to-do parents who destined me at birth to be a rabbi, a common practice among the Israelites then. For at that time, when all…
Inscriptions on the stems of these silver Torah finials indicate that they were made by Joseph Arvatz and Chaim Maman in Morocco, and inscriptions on their rims state that they were owned by Rabbi…
Don Francisco (Abraham Israel) Lopes Suasso (ca. 1657–1710), a prominent financier of Portuguese Jewish heritage, had ten children with his second wife, Leonora (Rachel) da Costa (1669–1749). In these…