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.
Julie and the Miracle
People like to get something for their money, doing business is entertainment as well, and indeed there would be precious little fun to be got out of life in Polana if it were not so. It is equally…
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…
The Mound
After you, the killed of the Ukraine;
After you, butchered
In a mound in Gorodishche,
The Dnieper town . . .
Kaddish
No! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards.
Out of my mouth’s brown streams…
Aftergrowth
Behold I have not plowed nor have I planted,
I have not prayed for the rain.
And suddenly, see! My fields have grown
Sun-blessed grain instead of thistle.
Is it the aftergrowth of ancient produce,…
The Weeping of Generations
On the white garments of my great-grandfather
the cross of the middle ages flames anew.
My great-grandfather sits at the seder,
holding a staff from a wild almond tree
to rouse the forefathers.
Not…
The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution
The meaning of the Jewish revolution is contained in one word—independence! Independence for the Jewish people in its homeland! Dependence is not merely political or economic; it is also moral…
Diary
As I thought, I couldn’t manage it the next day, or the day after that. I continued to struggle to write even after three days. And now, too (four days later), I didn’t think I’d…
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 New Wave in Hebrew Fiction
The inception of literature is certainly not merely a matter of ideas and ideology. Not only are the contents connected to the forms and dependent on them, but the development of the forms has its own…
Green Aquarium
“Your teeth are bars of bone. Behind them, in a crystal cell, your shackled words. Remember the advice of an elder: the guilty, those that dropped poison pearls into your goblet—let them go free. In…