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 Queen of Sheba
Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba) is Karl Goldmark’s most famous opera. Premiering in Vienna in 1875, its imaginative plot revolves around a love triangle involving the Queen of Sheba, Assad…
Super flumina Babylonis
Charles-Valentin Alkan composed this setting of Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon”) in 1859, the same year that his friend Franz Liszt composed a setting for the same biblical verses. Unlike Liszt…
Map of Jerusalem
In this seventeenth-century map, Jerusalem is depicted as a fairly dense city within a wall, with only a few structures outside. Men in Arab dress stand in small groups conversing with one another in…
Portrait of Jud Süss
Joseph ben Issachar Süsskind Oppenheimer (1698–1738) was a financier and court Jew who served as adviser to Duke Karl Alexander. Economic reforms enacted by Karl Alexander (and informed by Oppenheimer…
Synagogue Service for the New Year
This illustration depicting Rosh Hashanah services in a synagogue appeared in the book Jüdisches Ceremoniel (Jewish Ceremonial Customs), by Paul Christian Kirchner, a Jewish convert to Christianity…
Huppah Stone (Traustein)
For German Jews, it was traditional in the wedding ceremony for the groom to perform the ritual of breaking a glass in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple by hurling it or banging it against…
Sefirotic Tree
This elaborate Italian kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot) in the shape of a tree (in Hebrew, ilan), or tree of life. Visualization plays an important part…
Yom Tov Lipmann Mühlhausen’s Sefer ha-nitsaḥon
This is an image of the title page of the first printing of Yom Tov Lipmann Mühlhausen’s Sefer ha-nitsaḥon (The Book of Victory). The book was first published in Altdorf in 1644 by the priest Theodore…
Silver Hanukkah Lamp
This Hanukkah lamp from Frankfurt am Main, like the earliest known silver Hanukkah lamps made in Germany, is shaped like a chest and resembles inkwells of the period. This one is relatively…
New York, ca. 1970
The street photographer Garry Winogrand said he was motivated by wanting “to see what the world looks like in photographs.” He did not regard his photographs as identical with the reality of the…
Commandment II
Commandment II is from a series of forged-iron sculptures Kirili began in the late 1970s. They are among his best-known works and reflect his strong interest in religious concepts and ancient texts…
History of Matzah: The Story of the Jews, Part I
The History of Matzah: The Story of the Jews, Part I, is part of a triptych series that employs text and three-dimensional elements in relief to chronicle Jewish history from Moses to the birth of the…