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.
To the Reader of Ha-Me‘orer
Look: the life and death of this organ [publication] is in your hands. If you wish, it will expand, flourish, and branch out in quality and quantity, and, if you wish, it will dry up, wither, and fade…
Smugglers
Pantel the wagon driver stretches out under the covers and sits up, yawning. The house is dark but a faint light is just beginning to penetrate through the peepholes in the shutter.
“It’s…
The Affirmation of the Diaspora
We all recognize the tragic aspects of the Diaspora and we cannot hope to achieve in the Diaspora as full and complete national-cultural development as is possible for a nation living in its own…
Zoo, or Letters Not about Love
About Grzhebin on canvas, about Grzhebin in the flesh. Since the letter is written in a penitent mood, the trademark of the Grzhebin Publishing House is affixed. Here too are several…
Rag Pickers
Always, by the time the humid, breathless, summer night lifted its veil and a quiet, rosy dawn emerged, when some glimmers of soft, opaque light began to filter through the dried muddy, dusty window…
Manifesto
Many skeptics have denied the existence of Jewish music. Some lump it together with Oriental music; others refuse to admit its independence a priori, by virtue of the nomadic fate of the Jews, who…
The Great Madness
For the past four years I had not seen the morning sun. The newspaper work generally ended about three o’clock in the morning and who can go to sleep right after work? After work one…
The Library, Center of Social and Cultural Life
In this city there are, in effect, for an approximate total of 60,000 Jews, about thirty Israelite culture groups, which are developing with relative prosperity and an excellent measure of success…
When the Candle Was Burning
Father had been able to save a little from his earnings and felt that it would last till the end of the war—but he used that money to buy back those prayers shawls! So now we were penniless.
Father…
Tendencies in Jewish Education
3.
There is no doubt that the Jewish parochial school is the easiest and most alluring method of preserving Jewish religious life in…
A Dancer
At home they called her “dummy” and other names like that because she was always so quiet and still, never stirring when she was called. When she was nine years old, she went to school and began…
Azarel
Saturday is the worst of the week. Whenever I touch anything on this day, straightway there comes a voice: Don’t do that, today it’s a sin.
“Sin?” I ask.
Says Mother: “Sin is that for which the Good…