An engineer by trade, Solomon (Shlomo) Dreizner joined a secret Zionist organization in Leningrad, his birth city, and was a member of the “Leningrad Nine” when Soviet authorities cracked down on the group. Along with his confreres, Dreizner thought that Jewish culture might flourish in a less repressive Soviet Union. The government thought otherwise. Dreizner was arrested, convicted, and sentenced in a trial whose outcome was a fait accompli. Upon his release, Dreizner promptly returned to activism. He fulfilled his long-deferred dream of emigrating to Israel, arriving just before the Yom Kippur War.
Work, tradesmen, shops, the town is there
with old maids polished down by emptiness
on haberdashers’ threshold where the antique sun
brushes off jewels dusty with being looked at.
Dressed up for…
Abel Pann devoted much of his artistic career to painting and drawing scenes from the Hebrew Bible. Like other Jewish artists who worked in this genre, such as Ephraim Moses Lilien and Ze’ev Raban, he…
The city modernizes more and more. One hardly sees those baggy, dark, unsightly breeches of old, the ones that Muslims, Christians, and poor Jews still wore in the middle of the last century. Until…