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.
Who Will Praise Israel’s Bravery
Tartakover is best known as a graphic artist and for his political posters. He considers himself a “local designer” with an obligation to speak out on Israeli political and social issues, especially…
The Peace Rider
Disabled from childhood polio, Mizrachi creates sculptures that relate to the physical form of his subjects. His work, as in the Peace Rider, expresses his political position and vision for the future…
Megilas Vintz (The Scroll of Vintz)
Every day they took from us whatever their hearts desired. They said to us, “We are needed to protect you from the mob.” We had no choice but to believe them. We had to take being cheated. They…
Yosef omets (He Will Be Stronger): On Yom Kippur Eve
985. The ancient custom of kaparot [having a chicken slaughtered after symbolically transferring one’s sins to it] is well known; I will only write that my custom is also to say, based on the Maharal…
Regulation: On Shavuot Observance
During the days of Shavuot, quite a number of householders, accompanied by their sons, their wives and their infant children, would rise early each morning and walk outside the city, and outside the…
The Present State of the Jews: On Circumcision
Circumcision has so peculiar a veneration among the present Jews, that if all other parts of their Religion were to be changed, this like Mount…
Netsaḥ Yisra’el (The Strength of Israel)
It has been clarified for you that the survival of Israel in their state of exile depends on their unity and their connection with each other, and their separation from the idolatrous nations. It is…
Your eyebrow, dear, is like a charm
Your eyebrow, dear, is like a charm
that draws to you life’s greatest joys.
Rounded like a bow, that brow,
or like a moon in half eclipse.
Your eye, beside it, is a pool,
all sparkle, like a…
The Story of Amīnā and His Wife
Listen, my friends, pay attention!
Be silent, do not restrain me,
Nor say, “That fellow Amīānā’s been unfaithful,
His heart and tongue in two directions pull;
If not, why did he leave his native…
Europe
I have always backed off from the word.
In the Thirties Europe meant French. But was it only then? Not in earlier centuries? A bloody lesson learned that Europe was Balmazújváros as well as Notre…
Mother’s Day, Coney Island: Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Home
And veins web her temples,
and my father pins on the orchid,
and my card names her the best mother.
But Alzheimer’s or arteriosclerosis (the end is the same)
praises him ad nauseum,
but accuses my…