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This tombstone of a Torah scholar from Sieniawa, Poland includes motifs and symbols often found on Jewish tombstones in Poland, such as a crown and palm trees. Other common symbols on Jewish…
The Rema Synagogue, named after the famous rabbi and scholar Moses Isserles (known by the Hebrew acronym “Rema”), was built in 1553 in the city of Kazimierz (today a district of Kraków). It was…
Joseph Karo’s Shulḥan ‘arukh (Set Table)—printed together with the additions of Moses Isserles’s Mapah (Tablecloth) and first published in 1565—was a codification of Jewish law that was easy to use as…
The text on this inscription, dating from the establishment of the Rema Synagogue in Krákow, reads, in part: “The man, R. Israel ben Joseph (of blessed memory), gathered his strength, for the honor of…
Hecker’s design for the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews (Polin) proposed a complex of two buildings: one a rectangular concrete block and the other a lighter metal and glass structure. The…
This photograph of a heder, a traditional Jewish boys’ elementary school, has become an iconic photograph of pre-World War II Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The heder was often a one-room classroom…
The wooden synagogue in Gwoździec, eastern Galicia (modern-day Poland), was one of more than two hundred wooden synagogues that existed in Poland before World War II. Wooden synagogues were a…
The young Jewish intellectuals of Barcinski’s generation were interested in pushing boundaries, including by employing Christian imagery, as Barcinski did in this portrait of John the Baptist. The…
In 1920 and 1921, Broderzon, the guiding force of Yung-yidish (Young Yiddish), a literary and artistic group he co-founded in Łódź, published over half a dozen books of poetry and plays. Prolific and…
German Chancellor Willie Brandt went down on his knees at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on a trip to Poland. He was there to sign the Treaty of Warsaw, a key element of his “Ostpolitik,”…
