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.
Table Lamp with Elaborate Silver Lampshade
During the time that Erich Goldberg served on the faculty of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, he produced several silver objects, inspired by Yemenite silver craft. Green stones of…
The Artist’s Wife with Cat
Menahem Shemi was a member of the Land of Israel movement, a group of artists who, in the 1920s, broke with the conventions of the Bezalel School to create a modern art of Jewish revival. In The…
Léon Weissberg
Dobrinsky was a member of the School of Paris (École de Paris), a group of young artists, many of whom were Jews from Eastern and Central Europe. Dobrinsky’s friend and fellow artist Léon Weissberg…
Budapest Ghetto
Yevgeny Khaldei took this photograph of a man and a woman on or near the site of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest in January 1945 soon after it was liberated by the Red Army. They wear the yellow star…
Nocturne (Death of a Soldier)
Nocturne was painted after Marcel Janco and his family moved to Palestine. Showing two men ministering to a mortally wounded soldier, surrounded by weeping, lamenting figures, the painting creates a…
The Boy Prophet
Mariette was preparing for her first communion. This was serious:
“The most beautiful day of my life, you understand!”
I didn’t understand.
“There’ll be bells ringing and music and lights…
A Conversation with Gorky
On Sunday, 6 Tammuz, 5681 [July 12, 1921], I visited the author Maxim Gorky [ . . . ] and I told him the alarming news that had come to me from various cities about the horrible pogroms that had…
Testimony at the Eichmann Trial
Presiding Judge: I declare the sixty-eighth Session of the trial open.Decision No. 72We confirm the request of the Attorney General and will permit the…
Nine Suitcases
These nocturnal passenger trains in wartime have their own peculiar sounds. The deportation wagons have a way of screeching, like an eagle or a vulture—whereas this kind of train whines and groans as…
In the Grip of Cross-Currents
Now that the cup of poison is broken, there is no way out but to drink the cup of sorrows. . . .
My affirmation of life demanded that I should dedicate all the powers…
Givat ha-moreh [Commentary to Maimonides’ Moreh nevukhim, Guide for the Perplexed]
The telos (takhlit) of man’s activities, in the aspect (behinah) of having will and choice, is the ultimate human good (ha’hatslahah ha’enoshi’it). This excellence necessarily comes after the…
The Rigors of Jewish Historiography
The historiography of no people is so beset with the pretentious and condemnatory views of dilettantes as is that of the Israelites, which everyone fancies to know from the relevant sources. Thus, no…