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.
Yemenite Aliyah to the Land of Israel
I, Shalom, the humble son of the honorable R. Joseph Alsheikh, God keep him and save him, wish to elucidate here the beginning of Yemenite settlement in Jerusalem, may it be built and established…
The Heder in Lithuania
The resolution of the heder commission and the OPE [The Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia] Committee indicates that our task went far beyond the limits of a…
Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn, 1856
This painting portrays an imagined meeting of Jewish scholar Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), and the Swiss theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801)…
Zekhut Yisra’el (The Merit of Israel)
A. Many great, wise, genius, and righteous men beseeched me to publish in a book that which I received from scribes and…
A Call for the Creation of a Sephardic Society for the Study of Jewish History and Culture
If there is one branch of study that is entirely neglected in our schools it is the history of our forefathers from the time of their dispersion across the globe until the present. . . . [True,] our…
Grand Synagogue of Paris
Designed in the neo-Romanesque style of many contemporaneous French churches, the Grand Synagogue of Paris followed the prevailing architectural aesthetic in France, integrating the architectural and…
Letter to Alfred Michaux
Dear Sir,
You ask me to write extensively about my life. As far as I can, I will gladly do so, but, unfortunately, I won’t be able to do all that much. Here are the reasons: maybe for future…
Tasks of Yiddish Philology
Understanding the positive and negative aspects of the language elements introduced by the intelligentsia is particularly important for Yiddish philology, since the task of philology does not end with…
The Last Breath
The Last Breath is one of the genre paintings depicting the lives of fishermen and their families for which Jozef Israëls was best known. In this scene, a woman is weeping over the body of her husband…
Shulamis
CharactersMaenoyakh, an old citizen of BethlehemShulamis, his daughterAvisholom, a young hero descended from the Maccabees.Fourth SceneAvisholom I shall not leave here until I have restedJerusalem is…
Truth from the Land of Israel
What more can I add? Will I tell my readers about the disreputable attributes that prevail among those coming from exile, about gratuitous hatred, discord, vain squabbles over a place in the synagogue…
Letter to Herzl from Egypt’s First Zionist Society
“Bar Kokhba” Jewish SocietyCairo, EgyptFounded the 1st of Adar I 5657February 1897Central HeadquartersMr. Theodor HerzlEditor of the “Neue Freie Presse”ViennaSir, dear coreligionist in your Jewish…