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.
Halakhic Man
[ . . . ] The duality in the attitudes of cognitive man and homo religiosus is rooted in existence itself. Cognitive man concerns himself with a simple and “candid” reality. He does not seek to closet…
The Hiding God
For us, contemporaries and survivors of history’s most terrible horrors, it is impossible to meditate about the compassion of God without asking: Where is God?
Emblazoned over the gates of the world…
Farewell to Salonica: City at the Crossroads
Our classroom was on the upper floor and in the rear of the building. Its two large windows opened on a garden which, because it could be reached only by crossing M. Shalom’s apartment, was forbidden…
Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968
Two months after liberation, people had stopped cheering and embracing. They were not giving away food and clothing anymore, but selling it on the black market. Those who had compromised their…
Everything Will Remember
Everything will remember
That I was here.
The ships will be the color
Of my clothing,
The birds will use my voice for singing,
The fisherman on the rock
Will ponder my poem,
The river
Will follow my…
A Jewish Peddler’s Diary
On the eve of the New Year I found myself with a new career before me. What kind of career? “I don’t know”—the American’s customary reply to every difficult question. . . . I was in New York, trying…
Zikhronot u-masa‘ot (Memoir and Journeys)
Those who seized the youths to put them into the army in the city where I was born, desired to have, as a residence for themselves, a house adjacent to the one in which my father…
Jewish Robbers
This engraving depicting “Jewish robbers” is from the book Des bekannten Diebes, Mörders und Räubers Lips Tullians, und seiner Complicen Leben und Ubelthaten (The Known Thief, Murderer, and Robber…
Pre-Yom Kippur Customs
This woodcut from Libellus de Judaica confessione siue sabbato afflictionis (A Pamphlet Concerning the Jewish Faith or the Sabbath of Affliction), the second treatise of a zealous Christian convert…
Maḥzor
This maḥzor (holiday prayer book), containing the Jewish prayers according to the Italian rite, was written by the scribe Eliezer ben Abraham of Pisa, for Yema, the widow of Moses of Modena (referred…
Illustration of the (Aristotelian) Cosmos
This illustration of the (Aristotelian) cosmos appears in an eighteenth-century manuscript of Neḥmad ve-na‘im (Nice and Pleasant), David Ganz’s posthumously published book on astronomy.