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 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…
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…