Born into a wealthy, Russian-speaking family that settled in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, the photographer Roman Vishniac traveled extensively in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, photographing pious and impoverished Jews. The images he created, which were widely distributed in the postwar period, shaped popular perceptions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. He came to America in 1940 and after the war worked extensively in photomicroscopy, building on his earlier training in biology, zoology, and endocrinology.
Menachem Vivante (b. 1650) was a rabbi in Corfu in the eighteenth century and a member of a prominent merchant family. In this oil portrait, painted when he was eighty-five years old, he is depicted…
I set the Yiddish letters with my own hands.
Elle, daughter of the respected rabbi Moses from Holland.
I am not more than nine years old.
Among six children I am the only daughter.
Therefore, if you…
Henriette de Lemos Herz (1764–1847) was a Berlin salon hostess famed for her beauty and literary engagement. She was highly educated, especially in ancient and modern languages. Following her marriage…