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.
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…
Fish Bargain, NYC
Aron’s photographs of Jewish communities portray their vibrancy but also document aspects of Jewish cultural, religious, and economic life that are changing and/or in danger of vanishing altogether…
Dachau, 1985
Plachy took this photograph on one of her many trips to Central and Eastern Europe. A photojournalist, she has said that she is drawn to scenes peripheral to the actual news story. Here, reflections…
Scribe, N.Y.C.
Commissioned to document people in their workplaces by a magazine, Edelstein was inspired to launch a project of photographing workers all over the world. Part of his series focused on shopkeepers…
Memory: The Homosexual Memorial Imagination
Memory: The Homosexual Memorial Imagination was the winner of a contest held in 1998 by Beth Simchat Torah, a pioneering LGBT synagogue located in New York City, to choose an artwork memorializing the…
Shevet Yehudah (The Staff of Judah)
The slaughter that occurred there, in Lisbon:
I was out of the city, and when I returned after several days they told me that the two [events, namely, the massacre within Lisbon and in the surrounding…
Seder taḥanunim u-fiyutim u-fizmonim ve-kinot (Order of Additional Daily Hymns and Prayers)
The princes of the peoples gathered together [see Psalms 47:10] to restore the crown to its former glory and to pray in the great synagogue before sunrise, as was done previously and in past times…
Sefer ha-yashar (Book of the Upright)
And it happened that one day, the sons of Jacob went to graze their sheep in Shechem, for they still grazed in Shechem in those days. And when the sons of Jacob were grazing their flock in Shechem…
I am your God and Lord
I am your God and Lord
Who with infinite power
Freed you from Egypt
Where you lived in suffering
And harsh despair.
Do not revere
Foreign gods before me,
And make no trophies
In the likeness of the…
Shete yadot (Two Hands): Or Torah (The Light of Torah)
The first “finger” is called Or Torah (The Light of Torah), as it consists of my notes on the Torah. Now, these notes will be useful for all people, but will provide their fullest benefit only to…
Shirat dodi (Song of My Beloved)
“An accepted custom in Israel has the status of a biblical command” [see Tosafot on b. Menaḥot 20b], and we are required to study it [see, e.g., b. Megillah 28a], in order to…
Sha‘agat aryeh (The Lion’s Roar)
What does this man [who contemplates the giving of the Torah] think that Moses our master, may peace be upon him, sat and did for forty days and forty nights when he stayed with the Lord on…