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 Founding of the Honorable Spanish Community in Vienna
This happened in the city of Madrid late at night, at the hour when nobody was in the streets, when all people were in bed resting from the exhaustion of the previous day. Suddenly, there was a knock…
The Red Heifer
It happened on a Saturday night at the end of summer. Reuven and his household were sitting at twilight and enjoying their heifer. His youngest were patting her, the older were praising her. The…
The Man from Buenos Aires
Riding a train doesn’t have to be dull if you manage to fall in with good company. You can meet up with merchants, men who know business, and then the time flies, or with people who have been around…
Luna
A month later, when a young man, about eighteen years old, Mulla Ovadia’s nephew, came to his father’s property and saw all that his uncle had done in it, he was told that his uncle had a wife in…
Shabos-Nakhamu
This is how things go with your average Jew. But Hershele is not your average Jew. It wasn’t by chance that he was famous in all of Ostropol, in all of Berdichev, and in all of Vilyuisk.
Hershele…
Arriving Family, King George Street, Johannesburg
In this photograph, David Goldblatt captured a Black family newly arrived in Johannesburg, looking small and vulnerable as they pass the tall pole of a streetlamp, with massive buildings looming…
My Tiny, Ugly World
Never have I been content with my narrow, dark, gloomy world, and always am I aware of the contrast between the great, beautiful world and my tiny, ugly world. And always I say, “The place is too…
Memoirs of a Grandmother
In these years of the 1880s, as anti-Semitism raged all over Russia, there were only two ways for the Jews. Either give up all that had become essential to them, in the name of Judaism; or take the…
Medal from Dedication of the Munich Synagogue in 1826
I. W. Loewenbach’s medal commemorating the dedication of the new synagogue in Munich (1826) is among the earliest German synagogue medals. On one side of the medal, one sees the façade of the…
Thesaurus of Hebrew-Oriental Melodies: Songs of the Yemenite Jews
A systematic collection of the traditional songs of Oriental Jews is of great importance, both for the elucidation of the vocal music used in synagogues and for the study of the origins of…
Annunciation
In this baroque Christian altarpiece that Anton Raphael Mengs painted for the Catholic church, the Colegiata of Castrojeriz, which is near Burgos, Spain, the Madonna is holding an open book. The angel…
Letter to the Alliance Israélite Universelle
I am in the process of preparing a rather copious work on Salonica, its past, and its present. The history of the [Jewish] community has given me quite a headache. I have gone through a pile of…