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.
Declaration of Human Rights
With the inevitable end of Hitler, the struggle begins, not of tank and plane, but of heart and soul and brain to forge a world in which humanity may live in peace. This new world must be based on the…
Terezín Diary
The end of summer is approaching and we can feel it. The days are still hot, but in the evening, there is a strange smell, the smell of leaves decaying and smoke, the smell of autumn…
Warsaw Courtyards
This was not a very big courtyard, a longish but narrow one, like hundreds of others of this type in the thickly settled part of Jewish Warsaw. One side, the innermost one, was a two-story…
Peace of Mind
Once, as a young man, I undertook to draw up a catalogue of the acknowledged goods of life. I set down my inventory of earthly desirables: health, love, talent, power, riches, and fame. Then I proudly…
Kedushat Levi (Sanctity of Levi)
We recite the blessing “Who performed miracles for our forefathers, etc.” on Hanukkah and Purim, but we do not do so on Passover, even though the Exodus…
An Address on Women’s Rights
October 19, 1851
[E]ven here, in this far-famed land of freedom and of knowledge, under a republic that has inscribed on its banner the great truth that all men are created free and equal and are…
Jewish Women from Adrianople (Edirne)
These depictions of Jewish women from Adrianople (present day Edirne, Turkey) is from a travelogue by French geographer Nicolas Nicolay, who is believed to have done his own illustrations. Considered…
Marriage Ceremony
This illustration depicting a Jewish wedding taking place under a huppah (wedding canopy) near a synagogue appeared in the book Jüdisches Ceremoniel (Jewish Ceremonial Customs), by Paul Christian…
Sefirotic Tree
Kabbalist Elijah Menaḥem ben Abba Mari Ḥalfan constructed this diagram, now stained and torn, with the assistance of his tutor Abraham Sarfati. It depicts the sefirotic system and includes Ḥalfan’s…
A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue
A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue was the first Hebrew-language manual printed in North America. Its author Judah Monis, knowing that all undergraduates at Harvard University were required to learn…
Bronze Physician’s Mortar
This bronze physician’s mortar from Verona, Italy, is decorated with a seven-branched candelabrum, flanked by the Hebrew letters mem and resh, likely the initials for the Hebrew term for “physician’s…
Sabbath
Gurvich began increasingly to focus his work on his Jewish heritage after his first trip to Israel in 1955. His paintings depict Jewish life and culture in dreamlike imaginary worlds, in a style and…