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.
How People Live in the Soviet Union
Signs of the new life and of the new “construction” in Trostinets can be discerned, strange as it may sound, in the destruction of the synagogues…
Zionism Needs a Living Content
In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people…
Unmasked
I have always had the illusion that my face did not clearly betray the calumny of my Jewish heritage. I have always taken care to conceal carefully the bitter secret that my father was a rabbi and my…
Me‘am Lo‘ez to the Song of Songs
Notice, dear readers, that one of the foundations of Judaism is the belief (אמונה) in השארת הנפש, the abidingness of the soul, which means the immortality of the soul, for a person’s soul does not die…
Periodization of the Eras and the Evolution of the Generations
Rabbi Elhanan related:
“I once asked the Hafetz Chaim:
“Granted that we are accustomed to a division of eras in Jewish religious history—the Tannaitic era separately, and the Amoraic era separately…
Jewish Music—National Music
“There is no Jewish music!” Thus concluded not only our assimilationists but also most of our nationalists.
We will not argue with the former at all, since, according to them, because there is no…
Tolstoy and the Jews
I have often been asked, and still am asked, whether I know from my frequent conversations with Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy about his attitudes toward the Jews. I am asked whether I spoke with him on…
Poem
On Russian fields, in the twilights of winter!
Where can one be lonelier, Where can one be lonelier?
The doddering horse, the squeaking sleigh,
the path under snow—that is my way.
Below, in a…
Conversation with a Countryman
An old Jew asked me near the Jaffa Gate:
“Is the Saxon Garden still there? The same as ever?
Is there a fountain? At the entrance from Czysta Street
In the old days confectioners had a shop there…
With Gentle Fingers
With gentle fingers
The rain is softly
Playing sad melodies
On the black instrument of night.
We are sitting in the darkness,
Each in his own house
(The children have fallen asleep)
Listening…
Red Evenings
Into its own gold, the evening melted.
Bullet laughed midair across to bullet.
Colossal city fought with city, giants—
The sky disintegrated in red fragments.
Hatless, soldiers fly across the…
Song of the Yellow Patch
How does it look, the yellow patch
With a red or black Star-of-David
On the arm of a Jew in Naziland—
Against the white ground of a December snow?
How would it look, a yellow patch
With a red or…