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.
Letter against Zionism
With the Grace of God, Sunday, [the week of parshat] Beshalaḥ 5658 [1898], SighetTo my honorable friend, the famous sage, who is both rooted in the knowledge of [Torah from Mt.] Sinai and who uproots…
Sermon: On David and Jeroboam
To understand this parable [of David and Jeroboam in b. Sanhedrin 102], we must say that Rabba bar bar Ḥana also describes people of two different kinds, whose deeds and way of life are different from…
A Story of Rabbi Levi Yitsḥak of Berditshev
Once upon a time the tsadik Rebbe Levi Yitsḥak of Berditshev was in the city of Polonnoye, and an acquaintance approached him. He [the acquaintance] was an extremely poor man, with three sons and two…
The Woman Poet
You hold me now completely in your hands
My heart beats like a frightened little bird’s
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is…
A Short History of Israel, Notes and Glosses
A hundred generations, yes, a hundred and twenty-five,
had the strength each day
not to eat this and that (unclean!)
not to say this and that,
not to do this and that (unjust!),
and with all this…
The Book of the Ghetto Wars: Between the Walls, in the Camps, in the Forests
The Book of the Ghetto Wars is intended to bring together a selection of the materials in our possession—testimony, journals and notes, documents, studies, poems, and stories—that were created during…
The Language of Faith: Selected Jewish Prayers
“Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. The religious sense prays as the intellectual organ thinks.” Prayer, to carry this saying of Novalis a step further, is a significant…
History of the Colony of Suriname
We will briefly mention several of his more important military expeditions. In the year 1731, Mr. Boeyé, Officer of the Christian Citizens Militia, received an order from the Council to carry out a…
Map of the City of Venice, ca. 1729
This eighteenth-century map of Venice includes the ghetto within which the city’s Jews were required to live from 1516 until Napoleon’s conquest of the Republic of Venice in 1797. The Venice ghetto…
The Esnoga (Portuguese Synagogue) in Amsterdam
To celebrate the opening of the Esnoga synagogue in Amsterdam in 1675, the Sephardic community commissioned the distinguished artist Romeyn de Hooghe to depict its dedication. In 1670, Amsterdam’s…
Jewish Divorce Proceedings
This engraving from a Dutch translation of Leone Modena’s Historia de’ riti Ebraici (History of the Jewish Rites) pictures a Jewish divorce ceremony in Amsterdam, in which the wife is presented with a…
Ketubah (Damascus)
This ketubah (marriage contract) from Damascus, signed on the 21st of Shevat 5466, or February 5, 1706, features a text set within an arch, and flanked on both sides and above with green and orange…