Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
The Avenue de l’Opéra, Sunlight, Winter Morning
In late 1897, Camille Pissarro, the noted impressionist artist, known for his many landscapes and cityscapes, came to Paris and rented a room in the Hôtel du Louvre, which gave him a good view of the…
Little Hans: Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy
The first reports about Hans date to the time when he wasn’t yet three years old. At that time, he demonstrated—in various ways of talking and asking—a particularly vivid interest in that part of the…
Memories of the Meldar: An Ottoman Jew’s Early Education
Did you go to a meldar as a child? Have any of you been so lucky and blessed? I am sure that, seeing these two questions, you will all object that you had no idea what a meldar was and that you went…
Social Hygiene of the Jews
For Jews, social hygiene embraces the entire domain of religious laws and customs of Judaism on maintaining the purity and health of the body. These traditions partially, and certainly at their core…
Interpolation of the Sokolover Rebbe
The [Babylonian] Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin [109b] brings a statement that when a stranger came to the city of Sodom, he would be placed on a bed. Someone who was taller than the bed would have his…
The Dance of the Demons
Meanwhile Reb Zalman, all undeterred, was arranging a match for Deborah, and one evening he arrived with a brand new proposal, one that was—in these hard modern times—almost too good to…
The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz
What does the Voice of Auschwitz command?
Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are commanded to remember…
Menorat zahav (Golden Menorah)
When Rabbi Zusya went to suffer the exile in Germany, he came to a city of Reform Jews. When they saw his ways, they mocked him and thought he was crazy. When he came into the synagogue, some of them…
From the Editor, El Jurnal israelit
From the Editor:
With God’s help, the time has come for our newspaper to appear before the community, and I am sure that at first our esteemed subscribers will not judge us for its errors, because all…
The 1670 Expulsion of the Jews from Vienna
This illustration, from an antisemitic publication, Jüdische neue Zeitung vom Marsch aus Wien und anderen Orten der jetzigen zwölff Jüdischen Stammen (Jewish Newspaper from the March to Vienna and…
Pre-Yom Kippur Customs
This woodcut from Libellus de Judaica confessione siue sabbato afflictionis (A Pamphlet Concerning the Jewish Faith or the Sabbath of Affliction), the second treatise of a zealous Christian convert…