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.
David Oppenheim (1664–1736) was the chief rabbi of Prague. Born in Worms, he was the son of a communal leader and nephew of Samuel Oppenheim (1630–1703), financier and war contractor to Habsburg…
Mané-Katz was a prominent member of the School of Paris (École de Paris), a group of young artists, many of whom were Jews from Eastern and Central Europe. Mané-Katz painted in a modernist style but…
Commissioned to document people in their workplaces by a magazine, Edelstein was inspired to launch a project of photographing workers all over the world. Part of his series focused on shopkeepers…