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.
Sermon on B’nai Mitzvah Celebrations
A male child becomes obligated to observe the commandments at the age of thirteen years and one day. Therefore, on the first day of his fourteenth year, a father grasps his son in his hand and says,…
A Tale of Rebbe Yisroel of Ruzhin
Our master, the holy rabbi, told a tale of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (may his memory be for a blessing to the life of the world to come!). There was once a matter involving great danger to the human life of…
Russia
Russia! If my faith in you were any less great
I might have said something different.
I might have complained: You have led us astray,
And seduced us young wandering gypsies.
Precious to us is each…
Unity
When God’s holy law is read out
Do you think I forget one bold lust?
And enjoying each lust with fearing,
Do you think I know not God’s law?
Translated by David Soeterndorp.
Midnight
A late crescent drips, its blood still red,
And the tranquil grasses of the night
Bend their small heads, one upon another,
Slumbering, arm beneath cheek,
In its peaceful light.
A weary wanderer…
Portrait
This is what he must have looked like,
Christ in the autumn, like me with my
twenty-two summers: still beardless,
blond, and the girls couldn’t help it,
dreamed of him night after night!
Translated…
Freckled Childhood
I certainly had an obscure childhood
but intensely my own,
a childhood which wanted to be dashing
but had the features of a caricature.
Yes, a caricature. For example:
that absurd love for Sophie,…
Fabius Lind Is Riding the Wind
Fabius Lind clings to the flowing mane
Of young spring,
Galloping on the free highways of desire.
Voluptuous desert-winds around him,
Voluptuous desert-winds inside him.
Fabius Lind surrenders to…
Fall in Vilna
Yom Kippur, when the narrow alleys of the shulhoyf
cradle the small shtibls, pious and scared,
householders hurry with their taleisim
and old men shuffle along in their socks—
I feel the narrow…
A Joyful Mother of Children
I entitled this volume Em Habanim Semeḥah [Psalms 113:9], based on the Jerusalem tractate of Berakhot (toward the close of the second chapter) which portrays Erets Yisrael as the mother of Israel and…
In the Army
With evening a whistle. Again the sweating store room
opens its throat wide, and we march out in formation
worn down by the heat wave and a day so long:
hard working soldier-women.
And why should…
Half of Nothing
Antisemitism is not an Argentine disgrace; we did not invent it. Other countries preceded us. Not even the far-right Tacuara Nationalist Movement of the 1960s invented it. Before that, there was the…