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Even in the past, some thirty to forty years ago, when Jewish life in Russia was still very conservative, there was a difference between those cities and towns located…
“The living faith has vanished. . . . All that remains is poetry!” A superficial observer of life in the ghetto might come to more or less the same conclusion about the way…
This text of an excommunication, found in David Aboab’s manuscript of Sefer emet ve-yatsiv (True and Certain), chronicles a conflict in the Sephardic congregation of Curaçao. The first Jews arrived in…
Mordecai recorded these events. And he sent dispatches to all the Jews throughout the provinces of King Ahasuerus, near and far, charging them to observe the fourteenth and fifteenth days of Adar…
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.
This calendar, Almanac for the Year 5675: Souvenir der Hochschule Bar Iochai und Altenhaus in Miron, was probably a fundraising giveaway for an old-age home and for the high school that Eliezer Ya…
18 April 7 pm. News. Amzanak told us that the CO [commanding officer] had asked him how many men we had, what they were doing, and whether many could work with wagons, and Amzanak said that we had…
Dear readers! I am giving you a rare and precious treasure, which has hitherto been lying in a library for three hundred years. Jews have always been thinking and talking about this treasure…
And so let it be known to your Excellency what happened to the letter that your Excellency sent me with the etrogs [citrons]. The letter was not handed to me until the [week of the] Sabbath of Vayetze…
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…