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 Polish Lad
If my father had been able to foresee even a thousandth part of the trials I was to endure he might have been rather less ardent on the night my mother conceived me. . . . Now, of…
Jewish Man and Woman from Frankfurt
The Jewish couple in Frankfurt am Main depicted here are wearing distinctive clothing that would have clearly identified them as Jews: the man’s collar, hat, and cloak, and the woman’s ruff and winged…
Tikun keriyah le-kol laylah ve-yom (Supplications for Every Day and Night)
The frontispiece of this book of penitential prayers, printed in Amsterdam by David de Castro Tartas, proclaims the pro-Sabbatean beliefs that were then widespread in the Amsterdam Jewish community…
Jacob Huli’s Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue)
The masterpiece of eighteenth-century Ladino literature is the encyclopedic commentary on the Bible, Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue), by Jacob Huli, the first volume of which was…
Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum I
This is the frontispiece to the first volume of Blasio Ugolino’s Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, a thirty-four-volume collection of Latin treatises on Jewish customs, laws, institutions, and sacred…
Hanukkah Lamp. Unorthodox Menorah II
Otterson was first inspired to explore the multiple symbolic meanings of the menorah after a trip to Israel in the early 1990s. He made the branches of his reimagined Hanukkah menorah out of copper…
Minhage Vormeiza (Customs of Worms): On Weddings
On Tuesday afternoon prayers, when the cantor reaches Taḥanun [prayers of supplication], the groom walks to the door of the synagogue while the congregation recites Taḥanun, and…
Sheloshah perushim (Three Commentaries) on the Song of Songs: On the Edition
One day, I was reading a certain book, which contained eight commentaries on the Song of Songs. More precious than pearls they are; all of their commentaries are sapphires, the words of the living God…
Colophon: Tefilah le-Moshe (Prayer of Moses)
All the letters in this beautiful new prayer book,
from beginning to end, I set with my own hands.
Gele, daughter of R. Moses the printer
and Frau Freide, who bore me among ten children, may they…
On the Glory of the Eggplant
Various eggplant recipes have been passed down to us.
the first is one inherited from the late Morena:
you cut it into slices and throw them into the main dish
for that is how she was taught her by…
The Tale of a Kite
It’s safe to say that we Jews of North Main Street are a progressive people. I don’t mean to suggest we have any patience with freethinkers, like that crowd down at Thompson’s Café; tolerant within…
Gayness and God: Wrestlings of an Orthodox Rabbi
I am an Orthodox rabbi and I am gay. For a long while I denied, rejected, railed against this truth. The life story that I had wanted—wife, kids, and a family that modeled Torah and hesed—turned out…