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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…
My eldest sister was getting married and the nuptials were held in our cottage courtyard. I can see the scene clearly before me. The courtyard neatly swept and the heap of manure in front of the…
That was how she watched over the samovar all night long, so that it would boil properly. Occasionally, Grandfather stayed over for several nights at the home of one of the gentry. Then, she would…
[ . . . ] I have always felt it as a particular honor that a man of such outstanding importance as Theodor Herzl was the first to champion me publicly from his exposed and therefore responsible…
Things were looking pretty bleak, when my wife’s prewar acquaintance brought a ray of hope into our small room.
If you too were an artist, you might be able to appreciate how impatiently my wife and I…
I have the good luck to be a Polish Jew.
If I were a Greek Jew, a Dutch Jew, a Turkish Jew, or some other kind of Jew, I would be miserable. Who would pay any attention to me and who would be…
I was sent to school at Iwenez, about fifteen miles from our abode, and here I began to study Talmud. The study of the Talmud is the chief object of a learned education among our people. Riches…
I was born on 19 February 1758 in Nový Bydžov [in Bohemia] of well-to-do parents who destined me at birth to be a rabbi, a common practice among the Israelites then. For at that time, when all…
I must now say something of the condition of the Jewish schools in general. The school is commonly a small smoky hut, and the children are scattered, some on benches, some on the bare earth. The…
When our teacher Rabbi Solomon, who was a rabbi here in Aleppo, passed away without any male children, the rabbis [of the city] consulted among themselves, and with the elders of the people and the…