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.
Pillared House
This drawing and the following replica of a pillared house are composites of many excavated houses from the Iron Age, 1200 to 586 BCE; none has been discovered standing. The images show domestic…
The Devil in Vienna
[…]Uncle Herbert was right, part of the time they made them use toothbrushes, for a joke. They sloshed bucketfuls of ammonia and other stuff that burns the skin and stings the eyes over the street and…
Lethargy
I dream that I’m standing in the doorway of my house, and I hear shouts, but I don’t want to go in. I’m eleven years old, and my hair is braided down my back.
A man asks me in the language of my…
The Book of Memories
It’s hard to imagine Uncle Silvester making Uncle Pucho eat soap.
Uncle Silvester was always a man of principles.
As proof, there’s the story…
The Dove Keeper
David and Nicolás raised a dove for me. They had her for about a month in the count’s house, trying to become fond of her because she was from the messenger race, and they wanted me to use her to send…
A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile
Bread
Very early in the morning we went to pick up fresh bread at Doña Blanquita’s. However, before arriving at her house that resembled the generosity of her hands and clay ovens, we had to cross a…
A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna
This morning I was in the children’s nursery. Women who work leave their children from 7 to 6. There are 150 children between the ages of three months and two years, [one…
Satan in Goray
It was Rabbi Benish’s practice to say his afternoon and evening prayers by himself in his study. When the news reached his ears he hurried to the prayer house. But it…
Sefer luḥot edut (Tablets of Testimony)
For it is not against me that these men have sinned, for what am I and what is my life? My days have passed like a transient shadow, and fly away as does a dream—like a dream upon…
Response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and…
Never Say
Inspired by the Warsaw ghetto uprising, this hymn became the anthem of the Vilna partisan fighters and many other Jewish efforts to resist the Nazis.