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.
Galut
The word “Galut” embraces a whole world of facts and ideas that have appeared with varying strength and clarity in every age of Jewish…
Meeting Notes: On Implementing a Full Hebrew Curriculum
23 Tevet 5656This week we took a great step forward in the history of the national Hebrew school. From this day on, all subjects in the school in Jaffa will be studied in Hebrew. It is needless for us…
The Advantages of Hebrew
MemorandumTo the Board of the Institute of Technical Sciences in Haifa Dear Sirs,The Supreme Institute of Technical Sciences, which the Board is working to establish, is a joy to all those concerned…
The Kaddish
They buried her into the darkness itself. As Miko was leaving the cemetery an old Jew took him by the hand. The man called out to his wife from the door: “I’ve brought him home . . . I couldn’t…
Sephardi, Not Oriental
I have noticed the change of the word “Oriental” to “Sephardi” in the masthead of the latest issue of the journal [La Amerika], “Organ of the Judeo-Sephardi (and no longer Oriental) Colony of America…
Letter against Zionism
With the Grace of God, Sunday, [the week of parshat] Beshalaḥ 5658 [1898], Sighet
To my honorable friend, the famous sage, who is both rooted in the knowledge of [Torah from Mt.] Sinai and who uproots…
Introduction to Ben Ish Ḥai’s Sefer da‘at u-tevunah (Book of Knowledge and Understanding)
This work is an anthology of various texts that provide precious foundations, crucial for the knowledge of the wisdom of kabbalah, hidden secrets that were revealed through the mightiest of heroes…
Masadah
On an autumn night, on a bed of sorrows, far from home and shattered hearth,
My mother died;
A last tear froze in her eyes as she gasped a dying blessing
To me, her son, setting forth…
Lullaby
Hush little baby. Forty-six years now
the night has rocked itself in my empty cradle
Now a gray head is rocked to sleep with the same tune:
Standing at the cradle’s head
No angel with two white wings…
The Israelite Epic
40. When the tradition concerning the opposition of the sea and its confederates to the will of the Creator of the…
Parting Words
We know that a writer has no power except in the pen. Nevertheless there are times when it behooves us to alter the ordinary manner of expression. There are times when the author, too, must depart…