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“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…
Where everyone travels, in the middle of the road,
there is a wonderful flower.
It’s been lying there and rotting for several days now.
The wind blows it around,
and it cries out and weeps a great…
In 1735, Eleazar ben Samuel arrived in Amsterdam to take up the post of chief rabbi of the Ashkenazic community. To mark the occasion, Joel ben Lippman Levi minted a medal. On the front of the medal…
Joseph ben Issachar Süsskind Oppenheimer was a financier and court Jew who served as adviser to Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. Economic reforms enacted by Karl Alexander (and informed by…
Designed in the German neoclassical style, the Wörlitz synagogue was modeled on Rome’s Temple of Vesta, featuring a circular building with a conical roof. It was commissioned by Prince Leopold…
Janów, Poland, was home to a unique wooden synagogue. The town was settled by Jews toward the end of the seventeenth century, and, by 1739, the Jewish population formed the majority of the town’s…
The Grand Synagogue of Lyon was built shortly after the establishment of a regional consistory by Emperor Napoleon III and the appointment of a regional chief rabbi. In 1858, a new synagogue for the…
This postage stamp with an image of King Leopold I of Belgium was the first stamp issued on the European continent.
The ketubah is a religious and legal contract of marriage. Traditionally, it outlines the conjugal and economic conditions of a marriage and is written in Aramaic. This printed ketubah created by…
“Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. The religious sense prays as the intellectual organ thinks.” Prayer, to carry this saying of Novalis a step further, is a significant…