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.
Portrait of Menasseh Ben Israel
Born to converso parents and baptized as Manoel Dias Soeiro, Menasseh Ben Israel moved as a boy with his family to Amsterdam, where they reverted openly to Judaism. In 1626, he established the first…
Portrait of Yeḥiel Mikhel ben Nathan of Lublin
The rhymed Hebrew inscription below the picture of Yeḥiel Mikhel ben Nathan of Lublin notes that he had formerly been a cantor in Lublin and is presently serving in that role in Amsterdam, in 1699…
Cemetery (Altona)
The Jewish cemetery of Altona is made up of two separate cemeteries, one Sephardic (established in 1611 and later expanded several times) and one Ashkenazic (1616, also later expanded). In the…
Rema Synagogue (Kraków)
The Rema Synagogue, named after the famous rabbi and scholar Moses Isserles (known by the Hebrew acronym “Rema”), was built in 1553 in the city of Kazimierz (today a district of Kraków). It was…
Chodorów Synagogue (Poland)
The wooden synagogue in Chodorów, near Lvov, Poland (now Khodoriv, near Lviv, Ukraine), built in 1652, was destroyed by the Nazis. The austere outside—shown here in an early twentieth-century, black…
Daughters of Francisco Lopes Suasso
Don Francisco (Abraham Israel) Lopes Suasso (ca. 1657–1710), a prominent financier of Portuguese Jewish heritage, had ten children with his second wife, Leonora (Rachel) da Costa (1669–1749). In this…
Esther Scroll
The book of Esther is chanted aloud from a scroll (megillah) on the holiday of Purim. This example from the Netherlands is lavishly decorated, with the Hebrew text framed by arcades between which are…
Latin-Hebrew Edition of Jossipon
The supposed author of Josippon (an account of Jewish history from the Garden of Eden to the destruction of the Second Temple) was Josephus Flavius, though it is now generally believed that the book…
Moth
Ben-Zvi’s early paintings focused on ecology and nature. He often depicted human and ecological disasters, calling attention to the fragility of human and animal life. The birds and insects featured…
Untitled
Though Nikel’s style of expressionist abstraction has sometimes been characterized as lyrical abstraction, a style associated with Israel’s New Horizons group, she was not formally connected with any…
Former Tajik Barbers with Their Israeli Customers
In 1978, anthropologist Frédéric Brenner began traveling around the world with the aim of creating a visual record of the Jewish diaspora at the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of his…
Chronicle of Fez
I have found written in the handwriting of the sage, our master, the crown and glory that rests upon our heads, the perfect sage and excellent judge, who is modest and happy in all his affairs. His…