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.
Haggadah (Mantua)
This Haggadah from Mantua, published by the Christian printer Giacomo Rufinelli under the supervision of Isaac ben Solomon Bassan, relies heavily on the Prague Haggadah of 1526, with the addition of…
A Ruling on the Printing of the Zohar
The earth made noise as did the heavens, and the doorposts are shaking at the voice crying out that it would be wrong to publish hidden and sealed materials and to break through the fence established…
Livro de ascamot (Book of Regulations): On a Banned Book
In meetings of the community’s Mahamad [board of governors], past and present, discussions were held about a book that Gideon [Abudiente] ordered printed concerning the…
Kaddish for a Child Not Born
A Holocaust survivor grapples with the question: should one bring children into the world after experiencing the horrors of the death camps?
Responsum: On Reciting the Shema‘ in the Presence of Bareheaded Women
‘Arukh ha-shulḥan, oraḥ ḥayim § 75:7And now come and let us shout out against the licentiousness of our generation, on account of our many sins. For it has now been many years that the daughters of…
Responsum: On Civil Marriage
I set the Lord before me always. Karcag [Hungary], eve of the holy Sabbath, the week of [the reading of] Koraḥ, 5659 [June, 1899]. Abundant blessings and rejoicings to my dear friend, the eminent…
Responsum: On Civil Marriage
Question: Whether in those marriages contracted under civil marriage law—without betrothal according to the rite of Moses and Israel—the woman can leave without a get [Jewish religious writ of divorce…
A Zionist Manifesto
To the Jewish People: The second of November, 1917, is an important milestone on the road to our national future; it marks the end of an epoch, and it opens out the beginning of a new era. The Jewish…
Nerves
A perfumelike smell, which came from the low clumps of acacia trees, or “mimosas,” as some liked to call them, scented the air of the small Jewish colony in southern Palestine. In the expanse of sky…
Pillared House
This drawing and the following replica of a pillared house are composites of many excavated houses from the Iron Age, 1200 to 586 BCE; none has been discovered standing. The images show domestic…
The Devil in Vienna
[…]Uncle Herbert was right, part of the time they made them use toothbrushes, for a joke. They sloshed bucketfuls of ammonia and other stuff that burns the skin and stings the eyes over the street and…
Lethargy
I dream that I’m standing in the doorway of my house, and I hear shouts, but I don’t want to go in. I’m eleven years old, and my hair is braided down my back.
A man asks me in the language of my…