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.
Glass for a Burial Society’s Annual Banquet
This beaker was used by the members of a burial society in Prague at their annual banquet, held on the day traditionally designated as the anniversary of Moses’ death. The painted scene depicts a…
Moses Narboni’s Commentary on Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥay ibn Yaqzan
Ḥay ibn Yaqẓān, composed by the Muslim philosopher Abū Bakr ibn Tufayl al-Qaysi (1110–1185), relates the story of Ḥay ibn Yaqẓān, literally “Alive, son of Awake,” as he grows up alone on a deserted…
Self-Portrait
This portrait of Jacob Judah Leon Templo, one of three that are known, is believed to be a self-portrait. In it, he clutches a coat of arms featuring a lion, which he himself designed, and holds a…
Silver Hanukkah Lamp
This Hanukkah lamp was made in Nuremberg, Germany, where it was characteristic in the eighteenth century for Hanukkah lamps to include a parchment with the blessings for lighting. At the time, however…
Nathan ben Samson of Meseritsch (scribe and artist), Psalms
This elaborately decorated title page is from a book of Psalms created by the scribe Nathan ben Samson in Gross Meseritsch, Moravia (today Velké Meziříčí, Czech Republic). On the left is Aaron in his…
Tombstone of David ben Solomon Gans
This is an image of the tombstone of David Ganz, Prague. Born in Lippstadt (now North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany), Ganz (1541–1613) was a chronicler, mathematician, historian, astronomer, and…
Jewish Woman
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
End of Day XXXV
Like many of Nevelson’s best-known works, End of Day XXXV is made of wood painted a matte black, a color she characterized as “visually weightless.” Many of her sculptures were built from found…
Flight into Egypt
The title of this painting, Flight into Egypt, refers to the story in the Christian Gospels in which Joseph and Mary flee with the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the wrath of King Herod. Rabin, born…
Untitled
Baron’s abstract collages were made from found materials, such as scraps of paper, string, and bits of fabric, which she sometimes found in junkyards. She considered them personal and political…
Displaced
In the 1970s, Gitlin was one of several Israeli artists in New York who began to challenge the conventions of minimalist sculpture that favored a stark aesthetic and the use of materials such as iron…
A Bat Mitzvah Party at the 20th Century Fox Movie Studio Commissary, West Los Angeles
This photograph of girls at a bat mitzvah was shot by Greenfield for a project about teenagers in Los Angeles. She was interested, she has said, “in how kids in Los Angeles seem to grow up quickly…