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.
Reactions in Mosul to the Young Turk Revolution
We have not had in Mosul—unlike our unfortunate coreligionists in Baghdad much to suffer from the fanatic and reactionary movement among the Muslims in recent days. The delegates of the Committee of…
The Wanderings of the Little Blue Butterfly in Fairyland
The little blue butterfly was born in the red bell of a morning glory. She had been a caterpillar before that and had lived for a while in a cocoon, but she could remember nothing about it.
She peeped…
Portrait of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Tsemakh Tsedek)
Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (1789–1866), the third rebbe of Chabad Hasidism, was a preeminent religious figure of nineteenth-century East European Jewry. The portrait is an early example of Boris…
Grininke beymelekh (cover)
Grininke beymelekh (Little Green Trees), no. 1 (Vilna: B. A. Kletzkin, 1914.) The title of this Yiddish children’s journal, the first of the genre to appear regularly, was drawn from the Yiddish poem…
Torah Scroll from Kaifeng
Jews first settled in Kaifeng, the capital of Henan province in central China, before 1127. According to scholars, they had come from India or Persia, spoke Persian, and worked as cotton dyers and…
Quai Blériot
It all began one wild dawn
The barges slid by under torrents of rain
The clouds raced past shredded and torn
above charcoal-glinting roofs
Two bourgeois dogs passed by with a sideways gait
The…
Uncle Misha’s Partisans
“At night the wolves were roaming the forest. By day the Germans were roaming the countryside. And I was in the middle, afraid to move. One day that Good Angel, the peasant, came to warn me that I was…
Tombs in the Holy Land
This map showing tombs in the land of Israel was drawn in Italy by a Jewish scribe and is an example of a “pilgrimage scroll.” Pilgrimage scrolls, also known as itineraries, included visual and…
Fools’ Tears and Prayers
When will he come? When? When?
Zelda Fradkina is sitting at the piano and playing a Bach fugue. There is no one at home other than the Osherova widow Golda, the cook and housecleaner. Father does not…
Kabbalistic Diagram
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…