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Kiddush cups are used for the ritual blessing over wine. This one, partially made of gold, was crafted in Nuremberg, Germany, and was used in a synagogue in Lublin, Poland. The engraved plant and…
This Sabbath lamp, cast in silver in Frankfurt am Main, was originally commissioned for a private home. It was made by Johann Valentin Schüler, a craftsman who also produced many other Jewish ritual…
To Freud, all forms of religious observance were foolish and superstitious. His wife Martha, on the other hand, took religion much more seriously, as her grandfather had been a prominent rabbi in…
Mah Tovu notes our coming into the house of God, symbolized by the words “tents” and “tabernacles.” Mah Tovu begins with a passage from the Torah (Num. 24), in which the pagan prophet Balaam blesses…
Weber was one of the few American modernists to paint religious subjects. He painted Sabbath around the time he became associated with a group of American Yiddish writers called Di yunge (The Young…
This silver kiddush cup is believed to have belonged to Judah Loew. Known as the Maharal of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel spent twenty years as rabbi in Moravia, moving in 1573 to the Bohemian…
Because observant Jews do not light fires or cook on the Sabbath, they prepare hot meals before the beginning of the Sabbath. In some communities, families brought their Sabbath stew (known as cholent…
An eruv (or eruv ḥatserot, merger of domains) is a symbolic expansion of an area outside a single home into a larger private domain. Within that eruv, certain activities prohibited in the public…
Gurvich began increasingly to focus his work on his Jewish heritage after his first trip to Israel in 1955. His paintings depict Jewish life and culture in dreamlike imaginary worlds, in a style and…
This woodcut depicts Jewish women and girls lighting candles to mark the beginning of the Sabbath or a holiday. The illustration appears in a Yiddish translation by Shim’on Levi Gintsburg, printed in…
