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.
Beyond the Test
Information juive is back. For nearly fourteen years it was, under the aegis of the Jewish Algerian Committee for Social Studies, the voice of a community of almost 150,000 souls in Algeria; it…
The Sacrifice
The train was beginning to slow down again, and Abraham noticed lights in the distance. He shifted his body only slightly so as not to disturb the boy, and sank back into the familiar pattern of…
The New Jews
The American Jewish community is only beginning to come to terms with the meaning of this prostitution of Judaism to the status quo, and it is doing so…
There Is No News from Auschwitz
The most terrible thing of all, somehow, was that at Brzezinka the sun was bright and warm, the rows of graceful poplars were lovely to look upon and on the grass near the gates children played.
It…
The Family Moskat
Five years after the death of his second wife Reb Meshulam Moskat married for a third time. His new wife was a woman in her fifties, from Galicia, in eastern Austria, the widow of a wealthy brewer…
The Jewbird
The bird cawed hoarsely and with a flap of its bedraggled wings—feathers tufted this way and that—rose heavily to the top of the open kitchen door, where it perched staring down.
“Gevalt, a pogrom!”
“…
Aaron Hart and His Children
Dear Mo:
I se no way for you to keep Pesah at William Hanry thear fore you had batter come over hear the Sunday before than you neat not due any thing to your house to git the hamez out of your house…
Memoirs
For the two reasons specified below, I have given myself the surname “Wasserzug”; the first reason is that when I was five or six years of age, I was playing with some young children, I believe, in a…
The Book of the Governing of My Household
The man should not purchase meat until he has taken counsel with his wife to see which type of meat she wants him to take, so that the wife cannot later say that it is dark meat…
The March 17th Decree
Laws are always tainted by the passions and the prejudices of the legislator.
—Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
In 1807, Mordecai Blum, his wife Rebecca, and his son David were living in a…
A Story about a Rabbi, Followed by a Letter (in Kol mevaser)
One of the most important things that the government has introduced in Russia to improve education among Jews is the decree that each community must choose a…