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.
Jewish Street in Amsterdam
Jewish Street in Amsterdam is one of the many landscapes that Tina Blau painted in her career. It is painted in the style of Austrian Stimmungsimpressionismus (atmospheric impressionism), which was…
My Life
[ . . . ] In the country as well as in the town, I lived in a petty-bourgeois environment where the principal effort was directed toward acquisition. In this respect, I cut myself off both from the…
Jewish Women in the Midwifery School of Vilna University
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, women did not participate in the free professions regularly because at that time institutes of higher education had not yet opened their doors to them. The…
Retribution Is Not Enough
We Jews who live in the staid serenity of America have failed to grasp the immensity of the tragedy which has befallen our people and this failure is perhaps the greatest part of the tragedy. Were the…
L’Arche, Dictionary of French Judaism, “North African”
One must hurry to grasp it; yesterday, it did not exist; tomorrow it will be no more. Yesterday there were Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, discovered by…
My First Day in the Twentieth Century
The truth, the mathematical truth, is that a new century begins on January 1 of the year one of the new hundred-year time span. But it is the custom to celebrate a new century on January 1 of the last…
Prayer against the Hasidim
“Blessed are you, God, God of our ancestors, the great, awesome, and holy God. You have bequeathed human understanding (da‘at ha-enoshit) to humanity. You have gifted us with the knowledge of your…
Progress: The Meaning of Passover
Once again, following our custom of addressing readers [of the weekly journal Jutrzenka (Dawn), April 3, 1863] in view of the upcoming celebrations, we open the book of books, our holy Torah, in order…
Likute Yosef (The Compilation of Joseph)
Likute Yosef (The Compilation of Joseph), a commentary on prayers, is an important source of information about the Jewish religious culture of Worms, Germany, one of the oldest and most important…
Title Page of Moses Cordovero’s Tefilah le-Moshe (Prayer of Moses)
Moses Cordovero was a revered scholar and teacher in the kabbalistic center of Safed, which stressed the importance of mystical prayer and kavanah (mystical intention). Tefilah le-Moshe contains kavan…
A Woman Drawing Water from a Well
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
D-C
In the late 1970s, after a period in which he painted only in black and white, Held began using bright colors in his paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, enabling him to explore space, volume…