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.
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…
Sefirotic Diagram of the First Man
According to the colophon, Natan Hammerschlag’s Ilan de-adam kadmon (Sefirotic Diagram of the First Man) was copied from the writings of Ḥayim Vital, the most prominent disciple of Isaac Luria…
Torah Ark Curtain
This Torah ark curtain from Venice was made by Simḥah, the wife of Menachem Levi Meshuallami, a member of a prominent family in the Venice ghetto. It is embroidered in silk and silk-metallic thread…
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…
Jacob Huli’s Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue)
The masterpiece of eighteenth-century Ladino literature is the encyclopedic commentary on the Bible, Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue), by Jacob Huli, the first volume of which was…
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…
Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum I
This is the frontispiece to the first volume of Blasio Ugolino’s Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, a thirty-four-volume collection of Latin treatises on Jewish customs, laws, institutions, and sacred…
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…
Hanukkah Lamp. Unorthodox Menorah II
Otterson was first inspired to explore the multiple symbolic meanings of the menorah after a trip to Israel in the early 1990s. He made the branches of his reimagined Hanukkah menorah out of copper…