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This brass Hanukkah lamp is thought to have been used in the First Mill Street Synagogue of Congregation Shearith Israel, which opened in New York in 1730 and was located on present-day South William…
While man explores, with curious eye,
The works of nature and of art,
He passeth real wisdom by,
Nor cares to read the human heart.
A stranger to…
Though this photograph of Orthodox Jews at the East River has long been captioned as having been taken on Yom Kippur, it is much more likely that it was taken on the first afternoon of Rosh Hashanah…
In a dingy kitchen
Facing a Ghetto backyard
An old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations,
Quaveringly,
Out of a Hebrew Bible.
The gaslight flares and falls . . .
This night,
Two thousand…
Dear Parents:
I hope my letter will ease your mind. You can now be reassured and send me one of the family to Charleston, South Carolina. This is the place to which, with God’s help, we will go after…
Shearith Israel was the first Jewish congregation established in North America, and the only Jewish congregation in New York City from 1654 until 1825. Between 1654 and 1730, it met in rented quarters…
The creator of the popular ritual of placing an orange on the Seder plate describes exactly how this innovation arose, its intended significance, and the problematic erasure of its origins.
The distinction between religious and secular music is not universally admitted. There is a considerable group of people, some of them very learned in the art and science of sound, who claim that…