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.
The Last Stage of Deportation Is Death
[ . . . ] We have nooses fastened around our necks; when the pressure abates for a moment, we utter a cry. Its importance should not be underestimated. Many a time in history did such cries resound…
My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland
As for me, my youth began very early. At the age of ten, I was already a grownup, a Polner mentsh, as the Jews said. Besides my diligent studies, back then I was a “God-seeker.” I felt confined, and…
Chanukah in the Ghetto
“The living faith has vanished. . . . All that remains is poetry!” A superficial observer of life in the ghetto might come to more or less the same conclusion about the way…
America! America!
Shenandoah’s mother proceeded to explain in detail how insurance was a genial medium for a man like Mr. Baumann. The important thing in insurance was to win one’s way into the homes and into the…
Mail to the Promised Land
Old Levi turned his face away that was so easily stained by tears. Again, he felt a twinge of longing for his terrestrial home. How strange it was, this longing for a miserable land where one had…
Consciousness
our lightless awful days are passing
splinters of memories prick our brains
daily our Creator beats us using both hands
we are his dry weeds husked to the core
for us fire is no fire for us it is…
I Was a New Immigrant for a Month: The Aliyah from Yemen and the African Problem
In the living quarters of the [North] African [Jews] in the transit camps, here’s what you’ll find: you’ll find filth, card games, and money, drunkenness, and whoring. Many of them are afflicted with…
In the Negev Plains: A Play in Three Acts
Abraham:We only have a few minutes, and we have to decide whether the kibbutz should keep fighting, despite the army’s withdrawal, while we’re surrounded. It must be clear that any decision, one way…
The Stone Quarry
Nissim Levy dodged out through the back fence. He said goodbye to Danino, but instead of running away, he stood still, not far from there, and tried to pick up some words from the…
The Seagull
On a turquoise sea sails a ship. A sharp-eyed gull flies around the mast, swooping down from time to time to see what is happening on the ship, in all its decks. The boat has three decks and a bridge…
Life and Fate
Never, before the war, had Viktor thought about the fact that he was a Jew, that his mother was a Jew. Never had his mother spoken to him about it—neither during his childhood, nor during his years as…