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.
Simple Gimpl
Once, at night, after the seven days of mourning, while I lay on the sacks dozing, someone came to me, the Evil One himself, and said to me, “Gimpl, why are you sleeping?”
“What should I be doing,” I…
The Little Smuggler
Over the wall, through holes, and past the guard,
Through the wires, ruins, and fences.
Plucky, hungry, and determined
I sneak through, dart like a cat.
At noon, at night, at dawn,
In snowstorm…
For Years I Wallowed
For Years I Wallowed
For years I wallowed about in the world,
Now I’m going home to wallow there.
With a pair of shoes and the shirt on my back,
And the stick in my hand that goes with me everywhere…
How We Found the Manuscripts of the Martyred Writers
A people that forgets its dead is condemned to decay—Jules Guesde
We will never forget our dead. They still live among us and in our thoughts.
For that reason, immediately after the Liberation, we…
Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace
I cannot express my thanks to the German Book Trade for the honor conferred on me without at the same time setting forth the sense in which I have accepted it, just as I earlier accepted the Hanseatic…
Treblinka
Was there an element of cowardice in the attitude of the Jewish masses, who preferred to suffer the worst degradation rather than revolt? Given the terrible conditions created by the fierce anti…
Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood
[ . . . ] The two worlds, in my childhood, were not really separate. The synagogue in Graham Street, to which we walked across the Meadows every Saturday morning, was as much a part of the Edinburgh…
Things: A Story of the Sixties
For the first time they earned some money. They did not like their work; could they have liked it? But they did not dislike it a great deal either. They felt they were learning a lot from it. Year…
Shema
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust…
A Memorial and a Witness
Pinkes Varshe is a memorial erected by the immigrants from Warsaw in Argentina in honor of those generations of Warsaw Jews who, with their lives and struggles, with their heroism and spirituality…
The Second Scroll
And then—it was after I had returned from Tiberias to Tel Aviv to attend a literary soirée—then the creative activity, archetypical, all-embracing, that hitherto I had sought in vain, at last…
Yoine Bird
They were neighbors for many, many years. Thirty, forty, maybe half a century . . . ever since Colony D . . . was established back at the beginning of the eighteen-nineties.
Their parents grew up…