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Steinhardt was one of the founders of a group of artists in Berlin called Die Pathetiker (The Sorrowful Ones), early practitioners of what later came to be known as expressionism. Expressionists…
Paper cuts have been a tradition of Jewish folk art, with the earliest record of one dating to the fourteenth century. Given the widespread availability of paper in Europe by the mid-nineteenth…
“Shir ha-ma‘alot (Song of Ascents),” Psalm 126, is customarily recited or sung before the Grace After Meals on the Sabbath and festivals. There are many different tunes for the song. A Yiddish…
This decorated manuscript of the prayers for a circumcision ceremony was owned by one Joseph ben Samuel. On its title page (not shown) is an unidentified coat of arms decorated with the Order of the…
Moses Cordovero was a revered scholar and teacher in the kabbalistic center of Safed, which stressed the importance of mystical prayer and kavanah (mystical intention). Tefilah le-Moshe contains kavan…
Kehunat Avraham (The Priesthood of Abraham), completed in Venice in 1719, is an interpretation and retelling of sections from the book of Psalms in verse. The Hebrew text in this illustration comes…
This painting of a service at the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam is similar to a painting for which Jacques-Émile-Edouard Brandon received a medal at the Paris Salon of 1867. Both are views of the…
In 1919, when Kramer painted The Day of Atonement, modernist art depicting Jewish rituals was considered new and radical, especially in tradition-bound England. When the Jewish community of Leeds…
This siddur from Greece contains the prayers of the Romaniote (Greek-speaking Jewish) community of the eastern Mediterranean. It is open at a piyyut (liturgical poem) called “God’s Beloved Daughter,”…
This illustration from a book of prayers for the Jewish Gravediggers Society depicts the cycle of life. Figures of men and women in pairs ascend and descend the staircase, progressing from youth to…
