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.
Making Jam
Aunt Feiga is making jam today. She has to hurry. The raspberry season will soon be over. So Aunt Feiga is all in a swivet; she has bought a huge bowl of raspberries and fifteen pounds of sugar and is…
Excerpt from a Letter to A. D. Gordon on Labor and Nature
[ . . . ] For the whole day after I received your letter, I had the same celebratory mood that one feels after a cleansing and encouraging spiritual moment. Yet I am too weak to hold on to it. In…
Battles
It is often said that among the Gentiles there are men of noble lineage whose features and outward appearance show that nothing but the purest and most refined aristocratic blood…
Lacking a Family Life
One of the causes of the failings in the lives of the young workers [in Palestine] is certainly the lack of family life. Here, too, there is room for observation. Here we have a phenomenon that is not…
Awake and Sing!
One year later, a Sunday afternoon. The front room. Jacob is giving his son Mordecai [Uncle Morty] a haircut, newspapers spread around the base of the chair. Moe is reading a newspaper, l…
Return, Israel
A statement of reproof and a reminder and warning and a correction to our brothers, the Jews of Tunis, may the Almighty maintain it, amen, may God preserve them and sustain them, written by the dayyan…
The Open Grave
Crowds of people had been gathering since dawn at the morgue next to the city hospital. Drowsy, shivering, in damp gray clothes, they warmed themselves by huddling in one another’s breath. Their faces…
Day Grows Darker
Day grows darker
And darker.
Mobs are advancing on the town,
Mobs clotted with blood,
Made remorseless by killing children,
Lustfully they advance,
To rip off heads,
Feeble, melancholy heads.
They…
The History of Borsszem Janko (Johnny Peppercorn)
I was lying in bed sick when, on January 5th, 1868, the first issue came out. Understandably, the party line and the competition tried to alienate from me János Jankó, the illustrator of the…
Di shvue (The Oath)
Brothers and sisters—all working poor
Wherever you might be scattered on earth
This banner’s now waiting for you, together.
Waving, wrathful, this flag is blood red.
We swear! We swear by the…
Pass On, You Lonely Grandfathers . . .
Pass on, pass on, you lonely grandfathers,
With frightened beards covered with snow,
In the last sorrow, in the final grief
You’re still here, the final witnesses.
Pass on, pass on, you lonely…