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.
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…
The Diary of a Young Girl
Dearest Kitty,
Mr. Bolkestein, the Cabinet Minister, speaking on the Dutch broadcast from London, said that after the war a collection would be made of diaries and letters…
A History of the Jews in North Africa
[ . . . ] [A]n attempt will be made to present the history of the Jews of the African Maghreb, a large, well-defined diaspora which in some respects is different from other Jewish groups generally and…
The Message of the Scrolls
In late November 1947, in what had once been a quiet suburb of Jerusalem, I first heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was at the time Chief of Operations of Haganah, the Jewish underground self-defence…
Leviathan
Having laid out for the reader my thoughts about religion, revelation, and faith/belief, their manifold aim and their various components, I now consider…
A Summary of Modern Jewish History
The Jews are everywhere, in the old world and in the new. They can be found in Jamaica, in New England, in Washington’s America as well as in Bolívar’s, and even in Austral lands. If this people were…
Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals…
Circumcision Ceremony
Between 1723 and 1737, illustrator Bernard Picart partnered with the Dutch bookseller and publisher Jean-Frédéric Bernard on Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Religious…