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.
A Ruling on the Printing of the Zohar
The earth made noise as did the heavens, and the doorposts are shaking at the voice crying out that it would be wrong to publish hidden and sealed materials and to break through the fence established…
Livro de ascamot (Book of Regulations): On the Education of Children
Rules and regulations of Talmud Torah, now consolidated, and the general council of our community of Hamburg, whereby the members of the general council shall elect as parnasim (community leaders)…
The Late-Comer
He will surely come with songs of joy, carrying the child, in the full assembly. My friends, wait here for the bridegroom of blood.
He should be coming down the road. Why is the child so late? You…
The Vow
I saw your figure in my dream, gazelle, flashing like lightning. It gave light to my darkened eyes, and I saw that your face was a model of the heavens. The sun and moon are set in it, the stars and…
After the Vision
How can I hew out a song when the hammer of my senses is coated with rust? How can I play the lute when my hand is ensnared in fetters of fear? For my heart has entered the gazelle’s paved [palace]…
Face to face
Face to face, the Lord spoke with your whole community, who fear his name.
Indeed, you saw his greatness at Sinai; indeed, you heard the voice of his speech.
He revealed to me the secret of the law…
The Innkeeper’s Love Song
O you paragon of glory and grace, listen to the call of Papos and his cry! He is bellowing like a bull, braying at you like a donkey, for you are his cow and his she-ass. His heart is already parched…
Missing Person
Vichy. An American car stops by the Parc des Sources, opposite the Hôtel de la Paix. Its bodywork is spattered with mud. Two men and a woman get out and walk toward the hotel entrance. The two men are…
Bedbugs
During the night I have a vision of bedbugs in congress. A concrescence of male and female. The polluted mass pulsates, masculine organs pullulate, grow into dangerous spikes that, blinded by passion…
Kaddish for a Child Not Born
A Holocaust survivor grapples with the question: should one bring children into the world after experiencing the horrors of the death camps?
In Babylon
Emmanuel Hollander worked at, and believed in progress, but progress was not a religious notion for him, as it was for his future wife. He was an engineer and knew that every machine began as a…
Exotic Birds
During the bitterest days of my European exile, I turn to the photo album where I keep, along with more recent memories, a few images from my childhood—images that enlarged and corrected, come back to…