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.
Yitzhak Katzenelson (1885–1944) was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet from Łódź who was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he was extraordinarily prolific as a poet, playwright, translator and public…
The caption on the top image reads: The binding of Isaac [is] today; remember his seed with mercy. The top labels, right to left: Abraham; Isaac; angel; fire; ram. The caption in the middle picture…
Ephraim Lilien’s photograph of Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern political Zionism, depicts him staring off into the distance like a lonely prophet. The congress in Basel in 1901 was the…