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 Book of Jerusalem Journeys
In 1930, Chaim Elazar Shapiro (Spira), the Hasidic rebbe of Munkacs, Czechoslovakia (today, Mukachevo, Ukraine), traveled by rail to Vienna and Trieste and by ship to Alexandria, where he and his…
Passover Letter
To my brothers Jedaniah and his colleagues the Jewish Troop, your brother Hananiah.May the gods seek the welfare of my brothers at all times.And now, this year, year 5 of Darius the king, word has…
Hester Street
Sol Libsohn co-founded The Photo League, a socially conscious photographers’ collective, around the time he took this photograph. It captures a moment in the daily life of the people of a tenement…
At the Restaurant
Though Benjamin-Eugène Fichel is better known for his historical paintings set in the eighteenth century, in this painting he documents modernity itself. Here a wealthy couple orders a meal in a…
The World Convention of YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) upon the Tenth Anniversary of Its Founding
Professor Fishl Shneerson (Warsaw): Out of great respect for YIVO…
Song of the Murdered Jewish People
And thus it came to pass, and this was the beginning . . . Heavens tell me, why?
Tell me, why this, O why? What have we done to merit such disgrace?
The earth is dumb and…
Corner of the Field
After a long stay in the city, I was glad to go out, to travel as far as the Sharon, full of eagerness for fields, colors, green light. But to my misfortune, I fell into a crowded bus, crammed…
Urim ve-tumim (The Urim and Thummim)
This preface represents not a collated anthology but is rather the result of forgetfulness on my part, insofar as I have been terse in the words I have written, which place on record that…
Nuptial Divorce
Orellana:[To Leber, about to dig into a towering salad] Hey there, you with the Jewish joke of a face, spit one out for us. That should perk you up. Nobody can tell Jewish jokes like a Jew. And now…
What Makes Sammy Run?
Three weeks before Sammy’s thirteenth birthday Papa came in too upset to eat.“Tonight when I come out of schule the rabbi wants to talk to me. ‘Max, my heart is like lead to tell you this,’ he says,…
Yellow Star and Swastika: A Story of Servitude
We learn upon waking that Admiral Esteva was brutally kidnapped during the night by some Germans who apparently forced him onto his plane.
A friend attached to Civil Defense, who was…
The Testamentary Instructions of Marc Bloch
When death comes to me, whether in France or abroad, I leave it to my dear wife or, failing her, to my children, to arrange for such burial as may seem best to them. I wish the ceremony to be a civil…