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 Flower
Where everyone travels, in the middle of the road,
there is a wonderful flower.
It’s been lying there and rotting for several days now.
The wind blows it around,
and it cries out and weeps a great…
Torah Curtain from Prague
This Torah ark curtain was donated to a synagogue in Prague by Leib ben Hezekiah Tausk Nagelstock and his wife Reykhl, daughter of Lemel Lichtenstadt. The composition of the curtain is stylized…
Kiddush Cup from a Synagogue in Lublin
Kiddush cups are used for the ritual blessing over wine. This one, partially made of gold, was crafted in Nuremberg, Germany, and was used in a synagogue in Lublin, Poland. The engraved plant and…
Torah Curtain
This very early Torah ark curtain from Pesaro was embroidered by Rachel Olivetti and donated to the synagogue in honor of her marriage to Judah Montefiore. The Hebrew text is a poem celebrating and…
Emblem of the Jewish Butchers’ Guild
The merchants’ and artisans’ guilds introduced into Eastern Europe beginning in the thirteenth century by German immigrants resembled those in Western Europe in their exclusion of Jews. Jews therefore…
Scroll of the Book of Esther
Like Torah scrolls, the scroll of the biblical book of Esther, read ritually in the synagogue on the holiday of Purim, must be completely unadorned. However, in the sixteenth century, for reasons…
Klausen Book of Psalms
According to the colophon, the scribe in Prague who produced the Klausen Book of Psalms, Shabbetai Sheftel ben Zalman Auerbach (d. 1738), was descended from a family expelled from Vienna in 1669/70…
Kabbalistic Diagram
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…
Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
This edition of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was printed in Sabbioneta, Italy by Cornelio Adelkind for Tobias Foà. The twelfth-century work was an attempt to reconcile Aristotelianism with…
Text of an Excommunication
This text of an excommunication, found in David Aboab’s manuscript of Sefer emet ve-yatsiv (True and Certain), chronicles a conflict in the Sephardic congregation of Curaçao. The first Jews arrived in…
Druksland
Druks was commissioned to create this self-portrait in the form of a topographical map, by Steendrukkerij de Jong & Co., a large European printing house, who used it as a promotional gift for their…
Moon
Late in his career, Guston turned from abstract expressionism to figurative art, creating iconoclastic, allegorical paintings. Moon is a combination of still-life, self-portrait, and landscape. In the…