title: Dymshits, Veniamin Emmanuilovich

abstract: (1910–1993), Soviet government figure. The son of a white-collar worker, Veniamin Dymshits was born in Feodosiia. In 1931, he began working as a construction foreman at the Kuznetsk Metallurgical Plant, and later participated in building the Azov (Azovstal’) and Krivoi Rog (Ukr., Kryvyy Rih) metallurgical plants. In 1941, he was appointed director of the Magnitostroi Trust, which constructed blast furnaces at metallurgical sites. From 1946 to 1950 he headed the Zaporozhstroi Trust, which rehabilitated large-scale industry in Zaporozh’e (Ukr., Zaporizhzhia). In 1945 and again in 1950, he was awarded a Stalin Prize.

text: anti-Zionist campaign


title: Tse‘ire Mizraḥi

abstract: Youth movement of the Mizraḥi religious Zionist movement. The movement combined Mizraḥi’s religious Zionist vision with a call for productive labor and for the construction of a new and just society. Tse‘ire Mizraḥi’s social revolutionary views, which were influenced by the secular Zionist labor movement, were presented by Mizraḥi as religious values. The organization also incorporated elements from Hasidism and the German neo-Orthodox Torah ‘im Derekh Erets (Torah Study and Secular Culture) movement.

text: Youth movement

text: Mizraḥi

text: Zionist

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Bucovina

text: Hungary


title: Moldavia

abstract: (Rom., Moldova), region of Romania. Moldavia was a principality founded in the middle of the fourteenth century. Its princes were vassals of the Ottoman Empire from about 1456 until Moldavia’s political union with Walachia in 1859, followed by an administrative union in 1862. Moldavia included Bucovina until 1775 and Bessarabia until 1812. The capitals were Câmpulung, Baia, Siret (fourteenth century until ca. 1380), Suceava (ca. 1380–1565), and Iaşi (1565–1862).

imgDesc: View of the Great Synagogue, Soroca (now in Moldova), ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Romania

text: Walachia

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Câmpulung

text: Siret

text: Suceava

text: Iaşi

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Karaite

text: Ukraine

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary

text: Kamieniec

text: Galați

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: crafts

text: Iaşi

text: Suceava

text: Siret

text: Dorohoi

text: Botoşani

text: Piatra Neamț

text: Târgu Neamț

text: Bârlad

text: Focşani

text: Galați

text: Bacău

text: Cernăuți

text: Soroca

text: Chişinău

text: guilds

text: Poznań

text: Târgu Neamț

text: Galicia

text: money

text: kahal

text: Hasidim

text: Ruzhin-Sadagora

text: Lubavitch

text: Buhuşi

text: dress

text: Beniamin Schwarzfeld

text: Piatra Neamț

text: Roman

text: Galați

text: Iaşi

text: Bacău

glossary:
gzeyres takh vetat
kahal


title: About this Article (Relations between Jews and Non-Jews)

abstract: To treat the subject of the interaction between Jews and the majority populations of the areas of Eastern Europe in which they lived, this entry includes two articles. The first provides a historical overview, analyzing interaction at the community and personal level as well as the relationship between Jews and government authorities. The second article explores the image of non-Jews portrayed in works of Jewish literature. See also Antisemitic Parties and Movements; Assimilation; and Righteous Gentiles.

imgDesc: Jewish and non-Jewish members of the civilian militia organized during the German occupation during World War I, in the marketplace, Swislocz (Yid., Sislevich; now Svislach, Bel.), 1915. (Left to right) Alter Geler, Menakhem Finkelshteyn, the German captain of the militia, Velvl Goldshteyn, Avrom Faynsilber, and Matebush, a non-Jew. (YIVO)

text: Antisemitic Parties and Movements

text: Assimilation

text: Righteous Gentiles


title: Wengeroff, Pauline

abstract: (1833–1916), writer. Pauline Wengeroff is the author of the two-volume Memoiren einer Grossmutter, Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Juden Russlands im 19 Jahrhundert (Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century; vol. 1, 1908; republished with vol. 2, 1910; subsequent editions in 1913, 1919, and 1922). Written after the close of the era of the Haskalah, the memoirs offer a sweeping perspective on Russian Jewry’s passage from traditionalism to modernity. They paint a rich portrait of traditional society as modernity began to make inroads; depict the unraveling of this society under the impact of tsarist policies and the lure of Haskalah; and portray the devastating effect this dissolution had on families and, especially, women.

imgDesc: Rememberings (translation of Memoiren einer Grossmutter: Bilder aus der Kulturgeshichte der Juden Russlands im 19 Jahrhundert) by Pauline Wengeroff (Bethesda, Md.: University Press of Maryland, 2000). (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: memoirs

text: gender

text: Brest

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Talmud study

text: pilgrimage

text: Russia

text: Kovno

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Minsk

glossary: Haskalah yeshiva Talmud rebbe


title: Zweifel, Eli‘ezer

abstract: (1815–1888), moderate maskil, Jewish studies researcher, Talmud teacher at the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary, and a prolific writer in Hebrew and Yiddish. Born in 1815 in Mogilev, Zweifel’s early marriage was a failure and for many years he wandered from community to community, earning a living alternately as a rabbi, melamed (Talmud teacher), and private tutor to students from wealthy homes. At the same time, he was caught up in a frenzy of reading and studying, particularly Hebrew and German works of intellectuals from Central and Western Europe. During his travels, Zweifel established contact with a variety of maskilim: while in Kremenets he met Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon, a leader of the Russian Haskalah movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and in Odessa he met Betsal’el Stern, the principal of one of the first maskilic schools in the Russian Empire.

imgDesc: Ayzik Meyer Dik (center) and other maskilim; (clockwise from top) Mikhl Gordon, Yehudah Leib Gordon, Tsevi ha-Kohen Rabinovich, and Eli‘ezer Zweifel. (YIVO)

text: Seminary

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Russian Empire

text: Vilna

text: Zhitomir

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Hasidism

text: Misnagdim

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Naḥman Krochmal

glossary: maskil Talmud melamed Haskalah Misnagdim


title: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

abstract: One of the most famous and critically acclaimed Yiddish-language theaters in the world. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater (also referred to as MosGOSET or simply GOSET, from [Moskovskii] Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr) was, in the words of the Yiddish literary critic and cultural activist Nakhmen Mayzel, “our greatest theatrical marvel.” Widely considered one of the best theaters in the Soviet Union, it was often heralded by the government as a model of Jewish cultural achievement under communism.

imgDesc: Bay nakht afn altn mark (At Night at the Old Market). Isaak Rabichev, Moscow, 1925. Pen and India ink on paper. Poster design for a GOSET production of the play by Y. L. Peretz. (Hillel Kazovsky)

text: Moscow

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: theaters

text: Soviet Union

text: communism

text: Petrograd

text: Aleksandr Granovskii

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Marc Chagall

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: M. Daniel

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Land of Israel

text: Perets Markish

text: Birobidzhan

text: Perets Markish

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: anticosmopolitan campaigns

text: antisemitic


title: Bogrov, Grigorii Isaakovich

abstract: (1825–1885), pioneering Russian Jewish writer. Born in Poltava, Grigorii Bogrov was a typical maskil who rebelled against tradition and his family, first learning Russian and devouring secular books on the sly, then divorcing his wife. In 1863, he finished half of Zapiski evreia (Notes of a Jew), a semiautobiographical novel that ultimately was 600 pages long. It was completed and published serially in Otechestvennye zapiski (Fatherland Notes), a popular liberal journal, in 1871–1873. Bogrov then wrote stories and novels on Jewish themes and worked on two Russian Jewish publications, Slovo (Word) and Russkii evrei (The Russian Jew). Shortly before he died, he converted to Christianity to marry a gentile woman.

text: shtetl

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: assimilationism

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim


title: Russian Jewish Congress

abstract: Organization created in January 1996 at a founding congress in Moscow with the declared goal of unifying all Jewish organizations in Russia. The charter of the Russian Jewish Congress (Rossiiskii Evreiskii Kongress; REK) declares it to be “a Jewish social and nonpolitical organization operating on the territory of the Russian Federation.” It is registered as a welfare fund.

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia


title: Maiskii, Ivan Mikhailovich

abstract: (1884–1975), Soviet diplomat. Born in Kirillov, Novgorod Province, to the family of an assimilated army doctor and village school teacher, Ivan Liakhovetskii (Maiskii [Maisky] was a pseudonym he later adopted) became involved in revolutionary activities that led to his expulsion from Saint Petersburg University and exile to Siberia in 1902. In Siberia, he gravitated toward the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDWP). In 1908, he immigrated to Switzerland, and later obtained a degree in economics at Munich University. Proceeding to London in 1912, he adopted Lenin’s militant internationalist position and forged close relations with future Commissars for Foreign Affairs Georgii Chicherin and Maksim Litvinov. Maiskii returned to Russia in February 1917, shortly after the tsar was overthrown, but it was only in 1919 that he renounced his association with the Mensheviks and joined the Bolshevik Party. His command of foreign languages and familiarity with the international scene, clearly bolstered by his friendship with Litvinov, secured his meteoric rise in the Soviet diplomatic service.

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Maksim Litvinov

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: yeshiva

text: Chaim Weizmann

glossary: yeshiva Yishuv


title: Pale of Settlement

abstract: The territories of the Russian Empire in which Jews were permitted permanent settlement. Although large in size (approximately 472,590 square miles or 1,224,008 sq km), and containing areas of dynamic economic growth, the Pale (known in Russian as cherta postoiannogo zhitel’stva evreev; the English word pale was borrowed from the term applied to the area of English settlement in Northern Ireland, where the lands of the “wild Irish” were considered “beyond the pale”) was considered the greatest legal restriction imposed on the Jews of the empire.

imgDesc: The Pale of Settlement, ca. 1855.

text: Russian Empire

text: Moscow

text: Belorussia

text: Poland

text: Lithuanian

text: Vilna

text: Kovno

text: Grodno

text: Minsk

text: Vitebsk

text: Kiev

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Crimean

text: Moldavian

text: Bessarabia

text: Courland

text: Riga

text: servants

text: crafts

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: pogroms

text: trade

text: ORT

glossary:
Congress Poland
Pale of Settlement

subconcepts:
Origins of the Pale
Modifications of the Pale
Impact of the Pale
Public Debate on the Pale


title: Bocian, Volf

abstract: (d. 1625), merchant and banker. Although the Bocian family (also known as Poper or Popper) probably originated in Chęciny, its members were living in Kraków from the end of the fifteenth century. Volf (Ze’ev) Bocian, son of Yisra’el Gershon, was a merchant who became a supplier to the royal court of Sigismund III Waza.

imgDesc: Ark doors from the Bocian  synagogue.  Kraków, seventeenth century. Inscribed above the doors is the Hebrew saying: "Be strong as a leopard, light as an eagle, fleet as a stag, and strong as a lion [to do the will of thy Father]" (Pirke avot  5: 23). Heichal Shlomo Wolfson Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

text: Kraków

text: trade

text: Poland

text: Gdańsk

text: Wrocław

text: Prague


title: Morgnshtern

abstract: The sport organization of the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland from 1926 to 1939. Morgnshtern was also the name of the Polish Jewish section of the Socialist Workers Sport International (SWSI). With 5,000 members (more than 1,500 in Warsaw alone) and more than 170 branches, Morgnshtern was one of the largest sport organizations in Poland. Morgnshtern’s first national Congress (Land Tsuzamenfor) was held in 1929. Arbeter sportler, Morgnshtern’s monthly publication, was replaced in the 1930s by Folks-tsaytung far sport, a biweekly section of the Naye folks-tsaytung (the Bund’s daily newspaper).

imgDesc: Foot race on a city street for Morgnshtern members during a gathering of Tsukunft, the youth movement of the Bund, Warsaw, 1932. Photograph by Kuper Foto. (YIVO)

text: sport

text: Bund

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Zionism

text: Ha-Po‘el

text: Shtern


title: Melcer, Róża

abstract: (1880–1934), political figure. Born Róża Pomeranc in Tarnopol, Pomeranc married Izaak Melcer, legal adviser for the state railways in Lwów, in 1906 (the marriage was childless). Melcer studied at universities in Vienna and Paris, and also spent three years in Leipzig at a conservatory. She was fluent in several languages.

text: Tarnopol

text: Lwów

text: Galicia

text: Zionist

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Poznań

text: Stanisławów

text: Poland

text: Chwila


title: Dogs

abstract: The word dog is used as a derogatory term in numerous biblical texts (Ps. 22: 17; 59:7, 15). The Talmud poses numerous restrictions on owning dogs, including “keeping them on a chain” (Bava kama 7:7), and also not owning angry dogs (15:2). While the Talmud, Shulḥan ‘arukh, and other Jewish sources disagree on what counts as an “angry dog” (one that bites, attacks, or barks), it is generally agreed that Jews are not supposed to own dogs that intimidate other people.

imgDesc: Unidentified child with dog, Vilna, ca. 1905. Photograph by Serebrine. (YIVO)

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: dybbuks

text: demons

text: Poland

text: Yiddish literature

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: shtetl

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

glossary:
Talmud
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Fleckeles, El‘azar ben David

abstract: (1754–1826), rabbi. El‘azar Fleckeles was born to a well-off, patrician family in Prague; his father served as an elder of the Jewish community. Fleckeles studied in the yeshivas of Mosheh Kohen Rofe and Me’ir Fischels and then, for a decade, with his prime mentor, Yeḥezkel Landau, the rabbi of Prague, becoming his favorite disciple. Fleckeles’s wife, Esther, also belonged to one of the oldest and most prestigious Prague families, the Bondys.

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: kloyz

text: yeshiva

text: approbation

text: Haskalah

text: Akiva Yosef Schlesinger

text: Christmas

text: rabbinic literature

text: Hasidism

text: Sabbatianism

text: Wehle family

text: religious reform

text: Moritz Hartmann

glossary: yeshiva responsa Haskalah maskil Torah Kabbalah Talmud


title: Ostrog

abstract: (Pol., Ostróg; Yid., Ostre), town on the Goryn’ River (a tributary of the Pripyat’), a district center of Ukraine’s Rovno region. From the 1320s, Ostróg was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1569 it belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After 1793, it was in the Russian Empire, from 1796 a district center of Vohlin region; in 1921 it reverted to Poland and remained a part of that country until 1939.

imgDesc: View of the castle and church, which were connected by an underground passageway to the Maharsha synagogue at the other end of town, Ostrog, ca. 1920s. The synagogue was built in the mid-seventeenth century and named for Shemu’el Eli‘ezer ben Yehudah ha-Levi Edels (known as Maharsha). The tunnel was part of the city’s defensive system, built when Ostrog was one of the strategic bulwarks against Tatar raids in Volhynia. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Russian Empire

text: Poland

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: yeshiva

text: Shemu’el Eli‘ezer Edels

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: David ha-Levi

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Passover

text: Purim

text: Hasidic

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Tarbut

text: Soviet Union

text: Judenrat

text: Holocaust

glossary:
Torah
yeshiva
Council of Four Lands
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Zhytomyr

abstract: City on the Teterev River (a tributary of the Dnieper); administrative center of Ukraine’s Zhytomyr oblast. In existence since the ninth century, Zhytomyr (Rus., Zhitomir; Pol., Żytomierz) was from the 1330s attached to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1569 it was a district center of Kiev province in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1793, it belonged to the Russian Empire, and from 1795 it served as a provincial center.

imgDesc: Torah shield. Zhitomir, early nineteenth century. Silver: wrought, engraved. Ukrainian Museum of Historical Treasures, Kiev. Photograph by Dmytro Klochko. (MIDU Inv Nr DM-2106. Ukrainian Museum of Historical Treasures, Kiev)

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Kiev

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russian Empire

text: Hasidism

text: Shapira

text: book publishing

text: heders

text: trade

text: seminary

text: Haskalah

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Lazar (Eli‘ezer) Zweifel

text: crown rabbi

text: Bund

text: Zionist

text: pogrom

text: yeshiva

text: Lubavitch

text: Joint Distribution Committee

glossary: Haskalah Musar yeshiva


title: Slonik, Binyamin Aharon ben Avraham

abstract: (ca. 1550–ca. 1619), Polish rabbi, probably born in Grodno or nearby Tykocin, possibly in the territory disputed by both communities, for he was called Binyamin Horodno (Grodno) on the title page of the 1606 Italian translation of his 1577 work Seyder mitsves noshim. Slonik (also Solnik) served as rabbi in Podhajce and Silesia, and claims to have been “in Russia in [his] youth” (Mas’at Binyamin, no. 62), probably referring to southeastern Poland, that is, Ruthenia, sometimes known as Red Russia (Ruś Czerwona). He lived in Kraków for a time before and after the death of Mosheh Isserles in 1572, but there is a question about whether he served there as a rabbi.

text: Grodno

text: Tykocin

text: Silesia

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Lublin

text: Natan Note Spira

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: cantors

text: theater

text: liturgy

text: piety

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Torah
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Mohilewer, Shemu’el

abstract: (1824–1898), rabbi, halakhic authority, and a leader of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. Born in Głębokie, near Vilna, Shemu’el Mohilewer was ordained at the Volozhin yeshiva. He served as rabbi in a number of communities in Poland and Lithuania, including Suwałki (1860–1868), Radom (1868–1883), and Białystok (1883–1898).

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Vilna

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Suwałki

text: Radom

text: Białystok

text: Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer

text: Zionism

text: Orthodoxy

text: Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia

text: Russia

text: pogroms

text: Yosef Dov Soloveichik

text: Brest

text: Eliyahu Ḥayim Meisel

text: Łódź

text: Land of Israel

text: assimilation

text: Warsaw

text: Eliyahu Ḥayim Meisel

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Katowice

text: Białystok

glossary:
yeshiva
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
responsa


title: Landau, Leib

abstract: (1879–1943), lawyer, community leader, and Bundist. Leib Landau was born in Kirov, Russia, to a traditional Yiddish-speaking Jewish family. As a child, he moved to Przemyśl, the city in which he spent most of his life. Upon graduation from gymnasium, Landau studied law and became a celebrated attorney who defended Jewish civil rights. Between 1905 and 1914, Landau was a leading member of Galicia’s Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna (Jewish Social Democratic Party; ŻPS).

text: Bundist

text: Russia

text: Przemyśl

text: Galicia

text: Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna

text: Poland

text: Przytyk

text: Lwów


title: Orenstein Family

abstract: Wealthy and prominent rabbinic family. Many members of the Orenstein family filled major rabbinic posts in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Galicia, especially from the middle of the eighteenth century. The first to bear the family name was Mordekhai Ze’ev Orenstein (1745–1787), who by an early age had served as rabbi in several Polish communities. Following the First Partition of Poland, he held the position of assistant district rabbi in Galicia (1776–1778), and later as rabbi of Lwów until his death.

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: Żółkiew

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Haskalah

text: Yehudah Leib Mieses

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Brest

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Rzeszów

text: Yosef Sha’ul Natanson

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: Orthodoxy

text: seminary

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Broda

text: Stanisławów

text: Łódź

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Haskalah
Pale of Settlement
responsa


title: Ḥayim ben Shelomoh Tyrer of Tshernovits

abstract: (ca. 1760–1816/17), Hasidic rabbi and kabbalist. Born in Pribiluk, a small village near Buczacz, Galicia, Ḥayim ben Shelomoh Tyrer of Tshernovits (Ger., Czernowitz; Rom., Cernăuți; Ukr., Chernivtsi) was a leading disciple of Yeḥi’el Mikhl of Zlotshev. Tyrer also associated with disciples of Yeḥi’el Mikhl, among them Yisra’el of Kozhenits, Yisakhar Ber of Zlotsev, Meshulam Fayvush Heller of Zbarezh, and Mordekhai of Kremenets. Officiating as a rabbi in Galicia, Bucovina, Czernowitz (where he was district rabbi), Moldavia, and Ukraine, Tyrer ultimately immigrated to the Land of Israel (no later than 1814), settling in Safed, where he is buried. His grave is still a pilgrimage site for many Hasidim.

text: Buczacz

text: Galicia

text: Chernivtsi

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl of Zlotshev

text: Yisra’el of Kozhenits

text: Bucovina

text: Moldavia

text: Ukraine

text: Land of Israel

text: pilgrimage

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Sabbath

glossary: Haskalah halakhah


title: Košice

abstract: City in the center of eastern Slovakia. Košice (Hun., Kassa; Ger., Kaschau) belonged to Greater Hungary until World War I and was the seat of Abaúj-Torna county. Jews first settled in Kassa only after the Diet of 1839–1840 passed legislation permitting them to live in royal free towns. Until that time, Jews lived in nearby Rozgony and would come to the Kassa fairs. Town officials tried to impede Jewish settlement even after 1840, in an attempt to protect Christian trade guilds. Nonetheless, the Jewish community started to grow significantly after the 1850s: Kassa had 2,178 Jews in 1869 and 6,723 in 1910 (10% and 15.2% of the total population respectively), making it one of the larger Jewish communities in Hungary.

imgDesc: View of High Street and the theater, Košice, Austro-Hungary (today in Slovakia), ca. 1890. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Photochrome Collection, ppmsc-09491)

text: Slovakia

text: Hungary

text: guilds

text: Galicia

text: trade

text: industry

text: Miskolc

text: Oradea

text: 1868–1869 Congress

text: Orthodoxy

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Poland

text: Russia


title: Medem Sanatorium

abstract: Educational and clinical facility for children and young adults at risk for tuberculosis. This sanatorium, which functioned in Międzeszyn near Warsaw between 1926 and 1942, was named after Bundist leader Vladimir Medem (1879–1923), and was the best-known establishment of the Bund and of TSYSHO (the Central Yiddish School Organization) in Poland. Until World War II, it was recognized internationally for its reformist pedagogical approach and its left laicist orientation.

imgDesc: Children at the Medem Sanatorium clustered around the Folks-tsaytung, the newspaper of the Bund, Międzeszyn, Poland, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Bund

text: TSYSHO

text: Poland

text: Yekusiel (Noyekh) Portnoy

text: Aleksander Ford

text: Vilna


title: Yitsḥak ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

abstract: (1580–ca. 1646), halakhist and grammarian. Yitsḥak ben Shemu’el ha-Levi was born in Ludmir and was a student of Yehoshu‘a Falk. Yitsḥak’s younger brother was David, author of Ture zahav on the Shulḥan ‘arukh and known as Taz. After a period of time in Lwów, Yitsḥak ben Shemu’el served as rabbi of Chełm for an unknown number of years and was appointed rector of the yeshiva in Poznań in 1627. His responsa were published in Neuwied in 1736, and some of his insights are recorded in his brother’s Ture zahav. In his legal decisions, he was considerate of his congregants’ needs and tried to be lenient in rulings connected with running a Jewish household. With respect to other scholars, including great legal authorities, he was not afraid to express dissenting opinions.

text: Ludmir

text: Yehoshu‘a Falk

text: David

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Lwów

text: Chełm

text: yeshiva

text: Poznań

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
yeshiva
halakhah


title: Transylvania

abstract: (Ger., Siebenbürgen; Hun., Erdély), a province in the western area of current Romania. There is archeological and numismatic evidence of the presence of Jews in Transylvania as early as the times of the Roman rule over Dacia (106–275 CE). The next known reference to a Jew in Transylvania dates to 1357. Until the beginning of the sixteenth century, Jews worked in the main Transylvanian cities (Cluj, Sibiu, Braşov) as tradesmen and creditors, acting as middlemen in commercial and financial relations with neighboring countries (Moldavia, Walachia, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Hungary).

imgDesc: Students and teachers outside a yeshiva, Sacueni, Romania, 1925. (YIVO)

text: Romania

text: Cluj

text: Sibiu

text: Braşov

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Sephardic Jews

text: Alba Iulia

text: Banat

text: Satu Mare

text: Arad

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Ukraine

text: Sighet Marmației

text: Oradea

text: Arad

text: Timişoara

text: Congress of Jews

text: Orthodox

text: Zionism

text: Tarbut

text: Cluj

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

glossary:
Neolog
Status Quo


title: Madarassy-Beck, Nándor

abstract: (1840–1909), economist and banker. A nephew of Hungarian-born German poet Karl Beck, Nándor Beck was born in (Bács-) Madaras to poor parents; his father was a grocer. Beck (Madarassy-Beck from 1906) studied banking in Vienna and upon his return to Hungary in 1862 was employed at the Pest branch of the Credit-Anstalt für Gewerbe und Handel. From 1867, he was a senior clerk at the Anglo-Hungarian Bank.

text: Karl Beck

text: banking

text: Hungary

text: Mór Wahrmann

text: Budapest


title: Russian Federation (Russia)

abstract: Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in late 1991, its 15 component union republics became independent states. By far the largest of these in both size and population was the Russian Federation, which retained the precise borders of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Due to demographic processes underway over several decades, its Jewish population was among the oldest in the world (median age 52.3 in 1989), with roughly four deaths to every birth. The proportion of mixed marriages was high (73.2 percent for Jewish men and 62.8 percent for Jewish women in the late 1980s), yet the enlarged Jewish population—those living in mixed households—was also declining, along with the core population. The ratio of core to enlarged Jewish population was estimated at the end of the 1980s at 1:1.8.

imgDesc: A female cantor leading a Reform congregation, Hineni, during a Friday night service, Moscow, 2003. Lacking a synagogue, the congregation assembled in the House of Culture of Automobile Workers. Photograph by Karl Schatz. (© Karl Schatz)

text: Soviet Union

text: emigrated

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Holocaust

text: Federation of Jewish Organizations and Communities of the USSR

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Russian Jewish Congress

text: Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations in Russia

text: Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia

text: antisemitic


title: Kramsztyk, Izaak

abstract: (1814?–1889), teacher, author, and rabbi. Izaak Kramsztyk was a leading figure in the period of Jewish–Polish rapprochement in the 1860s and in the movement for religious reform. The son of a merchant and prominent member of the Jewish community of the Warsaw suburb of Praga, Kramsztyk hailed from a family with deep rabbinic roots. After receiving a traditional education, he decided, against his parents’ wishes, to attend the rabbinical seminary that had been founded in Warsaw in 1826. He stayed on at this school as a Talmud instructor from 1837 until its close in 1863. In keeping with the spirit of reform and acculturation, he conducted his lessons in Polish and, in 1852, became the first rabbi to preach in that language in a Jewish house of worship in Warsaw—the so-called “Polish” synagogue on Nalewki Street.

text: religious reform

text: Warsaw

text: seminary

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: Markus Jastrow

text: Bobruisk

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

glossary: Talmud musar


title: Šiauliai

abstract: (Yid., Shavli), town in northern Lithuania, center of Jewish learning and Haskalah. Šiauliai was a royal town during the period of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Jews were permitted to settle there under a charter from King Jan Sobieski in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the first synagogue was built in the early eighteenth century.

imgDesc: Jews performing the rite of tashlikh (the ceremonial casting away of sins on Rosh Hashanah), Šiauliai, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Lithuania

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Osip Mandel’shtam

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Passover

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Kaunas

text: yeshiva

text: Soviet Union

glossary:
Haskalah
Talmud
agadah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
yeshiva


title: Habimah

abstract: Hebrew repertory theater company founded in 1918 in Moscow and permanently reestablished in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. Habimah originated in the activities of Nahum Lazarevich Tsemakh (Heb., Naḥum Tsemaḥ; 1887–1939), a small-town teacher who assembled an amateur theater troupe that performed in Hebrew in Białystok, Vilna, and Warsaw from 1909 to 1914. In 1913 Tsemakh arranged for the publication of Hebrew translations of plays by Mark Arnshteyn, Osip Dymov, and Dovid Pinski. Trying to enlist the support of Zionist circles, Tsemakh had his troupe perform a Hebrew version of Dymov’s play Vechnyi strannik (The Eternal Wanderer) for the delegates to the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913, but without result. When World War I began, the troupe fell apart. Tsemakh, who reached Moscow along with other refugees, reconstituted his group from old and new participants. In 1916, supported by Chief Rabbi Ya‘akov Mazeh (Iakov Maze), he successfully petitioned the municipal authorities to register it under the name “Habimah Jewish Dramatic Society.” Ha-bimah means “the stage” in modern Hebrew, but bimah also designates the central podium for reading Torah in a synagogue.

imgDesc: “Theater Habimah in Moscow.” Page from an unknown Russian journal, featuring portraits of (top, left to right) Menaḥem Gnessin, David Vardi, Mosheh Halevi, Eliyahu Vinyar, Nahum Tsemakh, and (bottom) Miriam Elias. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Moscow

text: Białystok

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Osip Dymov

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Zionist

text: Iakov Maze

text: Evsektsiia

text: Aleksandr Tairov

text: theater

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Sholem Asch

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Dovid Pinski

text: The Dybbuk

text: Poland

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

glossary:
Torah
Central Zionist Archives


title: Folks-shtime

abstract: Yiddish newspaper published in Poland from April 1945 until December 1991. Folks-shtime (Voice of the People) was the main newspaper of Polish Jews after World War II. It began in Łódź and from October 1949 it came out in Warsaw. Until 8 December 1956 it was published under the auspices of the Polish United Workers Party. Thereafter it became the organ of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland. In its last period, from 1989 to 1991, the Ministry of Culture and Art financed its publication. Beginning in 1969, the newspaper added a section in Polish. From 1950 to 1968 Folks-shtime appeared four times a week; from 1968 to 1991 it was issued weekly. In Yiddish, it used standard rather than Soviet orthography.

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Yiddish literature

text: Hersh Smolar


title: Lifshits, Il’ia Mikhailovich

abstract: (1917–1982), theoretical physicist. Il’ia Lifshits was a distinguished physicist, teacher, and loyal friend—a very dangerous combination in the Soviet Union, especially for a Jew who was not a Communist Party member. Not by chance, all his Soviet honors came much later than deserved, and only once—just six years before his death—was he allowed to travel beyond the Iron Curtain.

text: Soviet Union

text: Kharkov

text: Moscow

text: Lev Landau

text: antisemitism

text: Iulii Daniel’


title: Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak of Volozhin

abstract: (1749–1821), Torah scholar and rabbi; founder of the Volozhin yeshiva. Ḥayim was born in Volozhin, where his father, Yitsḥak, was a community leader. Ḥayim studied with Refa’el ha-Kohen and Aryeh Leib, author of Sha’agat Aryeh. At the age of 19, he was introduced to the Vilna Gaon and became his disciple. Six years later, Ḥayim was appointed rabbi of Volozhin, and remained in that position until he died, with the exception of one year (1790), during which he served as the rabbi of Wiłkomierz.

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Vilna Gaon

text: Misnagdim

text: Hasidism

text: yeshiva

text: Lithuania

text: Russia

text: Talmud Study

text: Minsk

glossary: Torah yeshiva Gaon Misnagdim Kabbalah pilpul Talmud responsa


title: Heller, Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen

abstract: (1745–1813), rabbi and Talmudist. Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller was born in Kałusz, Galicia. Known as the Ketsot ha-Ḥoshen after his famous work, he served as rabbi in Rożniątów and in 1788 was appointed district rabbi in Stryj, where he served until his death. Two of his sons also were rabbis, and his daughter married the Galician maskil Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, the rabbi of Tarnopol and Prague. Heller was a fierce opponent of the Hasidic movement.

text: Galicia

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Tarnopol

text: Prague

text: Hasidic movement

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Brody

text: Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
maskil
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Russian Civil War

abstract: With the retreat of the German occupying forces at the end of World War I in November 1918, much of the former Russian Empire was plunged into the chaos of another war as several forces sought to consolidate control over its various territories. A good part of the western region, well behind the German front lines, managed to assert demands for local authority, resulting in the recognition of several independent states during the interwar period, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. To the east, however, military and paramilitary forces clashed in a civil war that lasted two years.

imgDesc: Jewish self-defense unit during the Russian Civil War, Odessa, 1918. This unit was better organized and had a larger arsenal than most such groups, most of whom did not have uniforms or machine guns. (YIVO)

text: World War I

text: Russian Empire

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Estonia

text: pogroms

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: communism

text: Leon Trotsky

text: Russian literature

text: Isaac Babel

text: Elias Tcherikower

text: YIVO

text: Holocaust


title: Czerniaków, Adam

abstract: (1880–1942), Jewish communal leader, president of the Warsaw Judenrat. Born in Warsaw, Adam Czerniaków received engineering degrees from polytechnic institutes in Warsaw and Dresden. In interwar Poland, he helped lead the movement to improve vocational education for Jewish artisans and defended their interests against growing antisemitism. In 1931, he was elected to the Polish senate, but a technicality prevented him from serving.

imgDesc: Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Judenrat in the Warsaw ghetto (front row, in bowler hat), at a ceremony honoring Jewish police killed in the line of duty, Poland, 1941. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Żydowski Instytut Historyczny)

text: Warsaw

text: Judenrat

text: Poland

text: Bund

text: Maurycy Meisel

text: Khayim Mordkhe Rumkowski

text: Łódź

text: Jakub Gens

text: Vilna


title: Polish Theater (Theater)

abstract: Part of the Polish landscape—both real and imagined—for centuries, the figure of the Jew is also rooted in the history of Polish theater. The żydek (little Jew), a figure typically associated with laughter and entertainment, appears throughout Polish folk theater. With grotesque physiognomy, dressed in an exaggerated version of traditional Jewish attire, often with a hump, the żydek gesticulates, shouts, wails over the wrongs done to him, and dances and sings. In the theatrical interludes, monologues, farces, and sketches of the Polish gentry as early as the sixteenth century, the żydek is also common. This stage tradition flowered in the nineteenth century when many celebrated Polish comic actors were skilled purveyors of the żydek. The tradition also developed specialists, foremost among them Aleksander Ładnowski (1815–1891), whose Berek Kugelman was called “the personification of persecuted innocence” (Prokopówna, 1998, p. 133). By the end of the century, the żydek, singing couplets in a mixture of broken Polish and stylized Yiddish (a combination known as żydłaczenie) and performing a Jewish dance known as majufes, was a fixture of the popular Polish stage, recognizable even when transformed, in the plays of Feliks Schober (Szober, 1846–1879), into the figure of Józio Grojseszyk, an urban dandy privy to all the good-time secrets of the modern city.

imgDesc: “Rachel.” Helena Sulima in the role of Rahela in Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele (The Wedding). Poster by Karol Frycz, 1904. (Muzeum Narodowe, Kraków)

text: dance

text: money

text: Ezofowicz

text: tavernkeeper

text: Warsaw

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Wilhelm Feldman

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Russian Empire

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Antoni Słonimski

text: Marian Hemar

text: weddings

text: Aleksander Wat

text: Poland

text: ghettos

text: Holocaust

text: Bruno Schulz

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: The Dybbuk


title: Yiddish Theater (Theater)

abstract: In premodern times, a variety of performers, including cantors, preachers, jesters, and instrumental musicians, engaged Jewish audiences. Amateur companies known as purim-shpilers staged skits around the holiday of Purim. But a professional Yiddish theater did not emerge until the nineteenth century.

imgDesc:
Fanatik. An Operetta in
4 Acts and 9 Scenes by A. Goldfadn. Copy
of Fanatik with censor’s stamp of 8 April 1882. The Russian text reads: “Permitted for performance. St.
Petersburg, 15 April 1882. Correct. Head of the department of dramatic
censorship." The play was an early version of Di tsvey Kuni Lemls (The Two Kuni Lemls). (YIVO)

text: cantors

text: preachers

text: jesters

text: instrumental musicians

text: purim-shpilers

text: Purim

text: Warsaw

text: Brody

text: Broder Singers

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: yeshiva

text: Angels

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: Shomer

text: Galicia

text: Russian Empire

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Kaminski

text: Itsik Manger

text: Russian Revolution of 1905

text: Łódź

text: Vilna

text: Białystok

text: Lublin

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Poland

text: shtetl

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Perets Hirshbeyn

text: Yiddish literature

text: Soviet Union

text: Bucharest

text: Cernăuți

text: Sholem Asch

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Vilner Trupe

text: S. An-ski

text: Habimah

text: Moscow

text: The Dybbuk

text: Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater

text: Zygmunt Turkow

text: Yung-teater

text: Michał Weichert

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Jakub Rotbaum

text: kleynkunst

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Łódź

text: Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher

text: Michał Weichert

text: Avrom Morevski

text: Yiddish Actors Union

text: Avrom Morevski

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: State Yiddish Theater

text: Moscow

text: Kharkov

text: Minsk

text: Birobidzhan

text: Aleksandr Granovskii

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Perets Markish

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Holocaust

text: informers

text: police

text: Khayim Rumkowski

text: Jakub Gens

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Terezín

text: Czechoslovakia

text: ghettos

text: Piotrków

text: Kraków

text: Radom

text: Kovno

text: Włocławek

text: liturgy

text: Transnistria

text: Ukraine

text: Lublin

text: Wrocław

text: Jakub Rotbaum

text: State Yiddish Theater

glossary: yeshiva Torah


title: Moldova

abstract: The Romanian name for the historic region between the Carpathian Mountains and the Dniester River, also known by its Russian name, Moldavia. The principality was divided along the Prut River in 1812, when Russia seized the eastern portion, Bessarabia; the western portion forms part of the modern state of Romania [see Moldavia].  Moldova became an independent state in August 1991, succeeding the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia [see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics], which included Bessarabia and Transnistria. The latter region, dominated by a Slavic population, has been under the control of a breakaway government since 1990. (Transnistria is also the name given during World War II to a Ukrainian region to which many Jews, especially from Bucovina and Bessarabia, were deported.)

imgDesc: Romania and Moldova, ca. 2000.

text: Russia

text: Bessarabia

text: Romania

text: Moldavia

text: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

text: Transnistria

text: Bucovina

text: Kishinev

text: Bălţi

text: Tighina


title: Weigel, Katarzyna

abstract: (late 1450s–1539), convert to Judaism who was burned at the stake for apostasy in 1539. Weigel was also known as Katarzyna Malcherowa or Katarzyna Zalaszowska, and was the wife of a Kraków city councilman, Melchior Weigel.

text: convert

text: Kraków

text: Gniezno

text: Kraków


title: Hebrew Theater (Theater)

abstract: Hebrew theatrical activity in Eastern Europe began as part of the larger project of transforming Hebrew into a national language. By the end of the nineteenth century, sporadic attempts had been made in Łódź and Riga to put on performances in Hebrew. With the establishment of the Agudat Ḥoveve Sefat ‘Ever (Society of Lovers of the Hebrew Language) in Saint Petersburg in 1909, such initiatives received organizational support. The society encouraged Hebrew theatrical performances in order to spread the knowledge of the language and to raise funds for the society. Most performances were staged in the context of banquets that marked holidays and anniversaries of various sorts. Such performances were a significant tool in the modernization of the Jewish educational system. Organized and staged by teachers and students at the new Hebrew-language secular schools, they spread the new culture to the children’s families and communities. Indeed, the first Hebrew theater activists in Eastern Europe were schoolteachers who were both devoted to the revival of spoken Hebrew and had artistic ambitions.

imgDesc: Cover of the program for a Habimah performance of Karl Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta, Vilna, 1916. (YIVO)

text: Łódź

text: Riga

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Warsaw

text: Pinsk

text: Bobruisk

text: Gomel

text: Minsk

text: Odessa

text: Habimah

text: Białystok

text: Moscow

text: The Dybbuk

text: Land of Israel

text: Tarbut

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Miriam Bernstein-Cohen

text: Kovno

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Vilna

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Lwów

text: ghettos


title: Słonimski, Antoni

abstract: (1895–1976), poet, writer, playwright, publicist, and theater and film critic. Antoni Słonimski was the grandson of Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski, a prominent Warsaw maskil, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, and publisher of Ha-Tsefirah; and the great-grandson of Abraham Stern, a mathematician, inventor, and member of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Science.

imgDesc: Artykuły pierwszej potrzeby: Notatki i uwagi (Basic Essentials: Notes and Comments), by Antoni Słonimski (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1959). (Józef Piłsudski Institute of America. All rights reserved.)

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Abraham Stern

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Poland

text: assimilation

text: Holocaust

text: Sholem Asch

text: Itsik Manger

glossary: publicist maskil


title: Nasz Przegląd

abstract: Polish-language Zionist daily published in Warsaw. Nasz Przegląd (Our Review) published a total of 8,962 issues between March 1923 and September 1939, with circulation estimates varying from 20,000 to 50,000. The paper’s key executives included Saul Wagman, Daniel Rosencwajg, Jakub Appenszlak, and Samuel Hirschhorn.

imgDesc: Customers at a newsstand that displays the Jewish newspapers Haynt (Today), Vort (Word), Folks-tsaytung (People’s Newspaper), Moment, Shpilki (Barbs), Nasz Przegląd (Our Review), and Letste nayes (Latest News), Łódź, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Jakub Appenszlak

text: Samuel Hirschhorn

text: Poland

text: assimilation

text: antisemitism

text: Zionists

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Folkists

text: Samuel Hirschhorn

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Janusz Korczak

text: Matthias Mieses

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Bernard Singer

text: Maurycy Szymel

text: Mieczysław Braun

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: David Frishman

text: Sholem Asch

text: I. J. Singer

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Medem Sanatorium

text: YIVO

text: Przytyk


title: Medzhibizh

abstract: City in the Podolian region of Ukraine. Medzhibizh (Rus., Medzhibozh; Pol., Międzyboż; Yid., Mezhbizh) documents its history from the twelfth century, and the Jewish community’s from 1511. Located at the convergence of the Boh and Buzek Rivers and at the intersection of several trade routes, Medzhibizh, with its multiethnic population, was an important regional military, commercial, and administrative center from the sixteenth century through the early Soviet period.

text: Ukraine

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: Kiev

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Hasidism

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: yeshiva

text: Yo’el Sirkes

text: kahal

text: Misnagdim

text: Apt

text: Zionist

text: Bund

text: Holocaust

text: ghetto

text: pilgrimage

glossary: yeshiva kahal Misnagdim aktion


title: Folks-tsaytung

abstract: Yiddish Social Democratic newspaper published from 25 November 1921 to 26 September 1939 and from February 1946 to January 1949 in Warsaw. Folks-tsaytung (People’s Newspaper) was the central organ of the General Jewish Workers Union in Poland (the Bund) and the successor to the Bundist daily organ Lebens-fragen (Vital Questions). In 1923, it changed its name three times: to Di naye tsayt (The New Times), Unzer tsayt (Our Times), and finally Unzer folks-tsaytung (Our People’s Newspaper). As of 17 January 1926, it was called Folks-tsaytung (People’s Newspaper), and one day later it adopted the name Naye folks-tsaytung (New People’s Newspaper). It was permanently in opposition to the authorities, was confiscated dozens of times, and was suspended on 5–11 October 1932. It began as a weekly, and from 1922 to 1939 was published daily. During its postwar revival it appeared only once every three to four weeks. It had four through eight pages and an approximate circulation of 10,000 in 1929; 18,000 in 1935; 14,000 in 1938; and 4,000 in its last year. It was the last Jewish newspaper in Warsaw at the beginning of the Nazi occupation.

imgDesc: Young man with Folks-tsaytung, Daugavpils, Latvia, ca. 1921. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Bund

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Józef Jaszuński

text: I. J. Singer

text: Yoysef Tunkel

text: Itsik Manger

text: Yoshue Perle

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk

text: Yisroel Shtern


title: Lifshits, Khaye Malke

abstract: (1880–1943), Bundist and Communist leader. Khaye Malke Lifshits (known variously as Ester; Ester Frumkin; Maria Iakovlevna Frumkina; and Ester Aronova) was the most prominent female leader of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia (until 1921) and then a leader in the Evsektsiia (Jewish section) of the Russian Communist Party (RCP). In contrast to most other members of the Jewish revolutionary intelligentsia in Russia, Ester Frumkin receiveda strong Jewish education at home and was fluent in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Originally from Minsk, after graduating from high school in her hometown Frumkin continued her studies in philology and Russian literature at the Pedagogical University in Saint Petersburg.

imgDesc: Khaye Malke Lifshits (Ester Frumkin) in the audience (front row, fourth from right) at the first conference of GEZERD (The Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land), Moscow, 1926. (YIVO)

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Evsektsiia

text: Russia

text: Minsk

text: Saint Petersburg

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Czernowitz

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: February 1917 Revolution

text: Communist Party

text: Moscow

text: Aron Isaakovich Vainshtein

text: Evsektsiia

text: Soviet Union

text: Yiddish schools


title: Fleischmann, Gisela

abstract: (1897–1944), president of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) in interwar Czechoslovakia and a leading activist of the Pracovna Skupina (Working Group), an informal leadership group of Slovak Jewry during World War II, who dedicated her life to rescue and welfare efforts. Born in Bratislava to an Orthodox family, Gisi (as she was known) was a relative of Rabbi Mikha’el Dov Ber Weissmandel, later her colleague in the Working Group. Instrumental in social and communal work, she became chairperson of HICEM (the combined acronym for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society [HIAS], Jewish Colonization Association [ICA], and Emigration-Direct, a German organization) and a much-trusted member of the Joint Distribution Committee and of the Zionist federation executive committees. Most notable are her efforts to render support and organize escape routes for refugees from Germany (1933), Austria (1938), and the Protektorat (1940) who were trying to work their way to safer Hungary or to Palestine.

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Bratislava

text: Mikha’el Dov Ber Weissmandel

text: Hungary

text: Judenrat

text: labor camps

text: Slovakia

text: Poland


title: Dolgopolski, Tsadok

abstract: (1879–1959), Yiddish writer. Born into a poor family in Horodok, near Vitebsk, Tsadok Dolgopolski began working at a factory in Nevel while still young. In the late 1890s, he became an active member of the Bund and was imprisoned in Białystok. Self-taught, he passed the qualifying examinations for teachers and organized a school for Jewish children in his hometown. By 1898, he was writing short articles on labor issues for illegal and legal Yiddish periodicals.

text: Vitebsk

text: Bund

text: Białystok

text: Boris Kletskin

text: El Lissitzky

text: Minsk

text: Ber Orshanski

text: State Yiddish Theater

text: pig

text: shtetl


title: Melits, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew newspaper. Ha-Melits (The Advocate) was the first Hebrew-language weekly to appear in tsarist Russia. Between 1860 and 1870 it was published in Odessa, and in 1871 it was relocated to Saint Petersburg where it remained until its last issue in 1904. From 1883, the paper was printed twice weekly, and in 1886—to compete with the new Ha-Yom newspaper—it became a daily. Throughout its history it was forced to contend with a number of interruptions in its production, the longest of which lasted from 1873 to 1878.

imgDesc: Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki (right), with (left to right) Hebrew writers Iakov Maze and Leon Rabinovich, editor of the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melits, 1885. Among the portraits of other Hebrew writers on the table is (center) one of Perets Smolenskin. (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Odessa

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Yom

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Haskalah

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: agriculture

text: Yiddish literature

text: Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky

text: Zalman Epstein

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionism

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Land of Israel

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Hebrew literature

text: Avraham Uri Kovner

text: Avraham Ya‘akov Paperna


title: Kossovskii, Vladimir

abstract: (1867–1941), Bundist leader. Vladimir Kossovskii (pseudonym of Nokhem Mendl Levinson) was born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia) and attended high school in Kovno (Kaunas). As a result of his revolutionary activities, he was expelled in 1885 shortly before he was expected to graduate. In 1894, he moved to Vilna and became involved in the social democratic (Marxist) revolutionary circles of Jewish workers. A major advocate of the idea that Jewish revolutionary circles should be united under one party, Kossovskii was instrumental in creating the Jewish Labor Bund.

text: Daugavpils

text: Latvia

text: Kaunas

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Minsk

text: assimilation

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Pinsk

text: Soviet Union


title: Kielce

abstract: (Yid., Kielts), city in southeastern Poland. Until the end of the eighteenth century, Kielce belonged to the bishops of Kraków, who forbade Jews to settle there. The partitions of Poland brought the city under Russian rule. Although Kielce’s residents maintained contact with Jewish traders in neighboring towns, Jews were not allowed to settle. Nevertheless, beginning in 1833 Jews began to move into Kielce. By 1860, some 31 Jewish families, who formed a branch of the Jewish community of Chęciny, lived in the city. Two years later, Alexander II allowed Jews to settle freely in places previously closed to them, including Kielce. No large influx of Jews into Kielce occurred, however, until some decades later. In 1870, the Jewish population of Kielce numbered 992, though by 1897 it had risen to 6,137 (representing 30.2% of the city’s population).

imgDesc: Jews on Duża Street, Kielce, ca. 1920s. (Tomasz Wisniewski, www.szukamypolski.com)

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Hasidic Jews

text: Ger

text: Aleksander

text: Bund

text: pogrom

text: crafts

text: Łódź

text: Poznań

text: Prague

text: Judenrat

text: labor camps

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland


title: Homel’

abstract: City in southeastern Belarus on the right bank of the Sozh River. The origins of Jewish settlement in Homel’ (Rus., Gomel’; sometimes Homiyah in Jewish sources) are obscure but date after the annexation of the town to Lithuania in 1537. Contemporary chroniclers first described the town in relation to the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising in 1648, when many wealthy Jews from Ukraine fled to Homel’ for safety. The head of the fortified town allowed peasant rioters to massacre a large number of Jews. Poles reasserted their authority in Homel’ in 1665, and in 1765 the community reported 685 Jewish families.

imgDesc: View of Rumantshevsky Street, Homel’, ca. 1910. (YIVO)

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Bund

text: Zionists

text: pogroms

text: Kishinev

text: yeshivas

text: Evsektsiia

text: heder

text: ghettos

glossary: Ḥabad heder


title: Wessely, Wolfgang

abstract: (1801–1870), jurist, publicist, and scholar. Born in Třebíč (Trebitsch), Moravia, to the family of a local leaseholder, Wolfgang (Binyamin Ze’ev) Wessely studied at yeshivas in his hometown, Polná, and Prague. He then studied philosophy and law at Prague’s Charles University and in 1829 was the first Jew to be awarded a doctorate in philosophy from that institution. Four years later, he earned a doctorate in civil law and also applied for one in canon law but was rejected because he was Jewish. After graduating, Wessely was hired as a private tutor for the family of the Viennese merchant Ernst Wertheimer. In 1831 he was appointed teacher of Jewish religion at a secondary school, and from 1837 he taught at the Jewish Normalschule of Prague.

text: Moravia

text: leaseholder

text: Prague

text: Normalschule

text: rabbinic literature

text: Mosheh Yisra’el Landau

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Samuel Freund


title: Nakhalnik, Urke

abstract: (1897–1942?), pseudonym of Yitskhok Farberovitsh, writer of books on the Polish Jewish criminal underworld. Urke Nakhalnik was born in the Łomża region in 1897 to a middle-class family. As a boy, he went to heder and later attended the local yeshiva with the intention of becoming a rabbi. At the age of 14, following the death of his mother, he ran away to Vilna, where he taught Hebrew and Bible. While there, he was caught stealing from his employer and was sentenced to prison for a short time. Following his release, he worked at a variety of jobs, including as an assistant to a wagon driver. This association led him into the company of professional thieves and criminals. From that point on, he spent much time in and out of prison.

imgDesc: “Urke Nakhalnik will give a lecture on the topic Underworld and Overworld.” Polish/Yiddish poster. Artwork by Kultura. Printed by Filharmonja, Łódź, 1934. (YIVO)

text: Łomża

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Vilna

text: Poznań

text: Haynt

text: Riga

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: YIVO

text: argot

text: Mordekhai Anielewicz

glossary: heder yeshiva


title: Kramsztyk, Roman

abstract: (1885–1942), Polish painter and illustrator. Roman Kramsztyk was a scion of two of the most prominent Jewish families of Warsaw, the Kramsztyks and the Fajans, who belonged to the Polonizing Jewish elite. This small group played a significant role in the social and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Poland. Baptized as an infant, Kramsztyk considered himself a Pole and a Polish artist. It was only during World War II that Jewish motifs began to appear in his work.

imgDesc: Portret żony artysty (Portrait of the Artist’s Wife). Roman Kramsztyk, Poland, before 1925. Muzeum Górnośląskie, Bytom, Poland. (Image courtesy Renata Piatkowska)

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Holocaust


title: Kosov-Vizhnits Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: An extensive line of tsadikim of the Hager family, active from the end of the eighteenth century in Galicia, in Bucovina, and especially in Transylvania and Subcarpathian Rus’. Its descendants serve as rebbes to this day in Israel, the United States, and Britain.

imgDesc: The Vizhnitser rebbe Yisroel Hager (right) and another member of the Kosov-Vizhnits Hasidic Dynasty, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Transylvania

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Kolomea

text: Hasidism

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Transylvania

text: Suceava

text: Borşa

text: Oradea

text: Siret

text: Land of Israel

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl of Zlotshev

text: Hungary

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Zionism

text: Mizraḥi

text: yeshiva

glossary: rebbe tsadik yeshiva


title: Landau, Lev Davidovich

abstract: (1908–1968), theoretical physicist. Born in Baku, Lev Landau graduated from Leningrad University at the age of 19. For the next two years, he was a doctoral student at the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute; he also published his first two seminal papers. Then from 1929 to 1931 he studied in Europe, mostly in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, whom he visited again in 1933–1934 and considered to be his principal teacher.

text: Moscow


title: Judenräte and Other Representative Bodies

abstract: Appointed by the Germans during World War II, a Judenrat (pl., Judenräte) was a Jewish council; an Ältestenrat (pl., Ältestenräte) was a council of elders. The activities of the Judenräte mark one of the most controversial issues of Jewish life during the Holocaust: some regard the councils as institutions that weakened the internal strength of the Jewish communities, while others claim that Judenräte helped the Jewish public carry on its struggle for survival.

text: Holocaust

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: ghettos

text: killing centers

text: Warsaw

text: Adam Czerniaków

text: Łódź

text: Khayim Rumkowski

text: Białystok

text: Efrayim Barash

text: Vilna

text: Jakub Gens

text: Kovno

text: Slovakia

text: Bratislava

text: informers

text: Bucharest

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Samu Stern


title: Landau, Yisra’el

abstract: (1758–1829), Hebrew-language printer in Prague and an influential figure in that city’s Haskalah. Yisra’el Landau, the third son of Yeḥezkel Landau (chief rabbi of Prague from 1754 to 1793), was born in Prague. In his youth, he studied in Brody with Yisra’el Zamość (ca. 1700–1772), the Talmudist and early maskil, who had previously taught Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin. Landau was actively involved in the Prague Haskalah, as were such other influential figures as Baruch Jeitteles (1762–1813).

text: Prague

text: Haskalah

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Prague

text: Brody

text: Yisra’el Zamość

text: Haskalah

text: Baruch Jeitteles

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh Landau

glossary:
Haskalah
maskil
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Maimonides


title: Dubnow, Simon

abstract: (1860–1941), Russian Jewish historian and ideologue of Jewish Diaspora nationalism. Simon Dubnow was born in Mstislavl in the Belorussian sector of the Russian Pale of Settlement to a religiously observant family; his father worked in the lumber business, a common Jewish occupation at the time. One of Dubnow’s brothers, Wolf, became a Biluist (a group of Russian Jewish youth who pioneered modern settlement in the Land of Israel) and emigrated temporarily to Palestine after the pogroms of 1881–1882. Their grandfather Bentsiyon was known throughout the region as an esteemed rabbinic scholar who taught according to the rigorous methods of the Gaon of Vilna.

imgDesc: Simon Dubnow (left, with white beard and holding bouquet) being greeted by dignitaries at the railway station during a visit to Vilna, 1934. The white-haired man in the center of the picture is probably Tsemaḥ Szabad, the well-known physician and communal leader. (The Institute for Labour Research in Memory of Pinchas Lavon, Tel Aviv, Israel)

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Land of Israel

text: pogroms

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Vilna

text: Dinaburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Voskhod

text: Russia

text: pogroms

text: Moscow

text: Odessa

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Zionist

text: Hasidism

text: Bund

text: Russian Revolution of 1905

text: Folkist

text: Gintsburg

text: Poland

text: Henryk Erlich

text: YIVO

text: Riga

glossary:
Diaspora
Pale of Settlement
Gaon
Haskalah


title: Kranz, Ya‘akov ben Volf

abstract: (ca. 1740–1804), preacher and exegete known popularly as the Dubno Magid, and dubbed “the Jewish Aesop” by Moses Mendelssohn. Ya‘akov Kranz was born in the town of Zietil (Dzyatłava) to Ze’ev Volf and Hinde, daughter of Naḥum, rabbi of Kobrin. After a failed business venture with his father-in-law, he was forced to preach professionally. His homiletic style was marked by folksy, incisive parables that often highlighted the different treatment accorded the poor and the rich, a disparity made painfully clear after his own impoverishment.

text: Dubno

text: Żółkiew

text: Kalisz

text: Chełm

text: Zamość

text: Hasidism

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Vilna

text: Shelomoh Kluger

text: yeshiva

text: Passover

text: Przemyśl

glossary: Magid pilpul Gaon ‘agunah yeshiva


title: Năsăud

abstract: Town in northern Romania, on the Someşul Mare River, 24 km north-northwest of the city of Bistrița. The first documented reference to Năsăud (Ger., Nussdorf; Hun., Naszód) dates to 1264. In 1762, imperial authorities turned this small market town into the center for a regiment of frontier guards; it remained as such until 1851.

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Hasidism

text: Cluj

text: Jewish Congress

text: Hungary

text: Orthodox

text: ghettos


title: Shvadron, Shalom Mordekhai

abstract: (1835–1911), rabbi and halakhic authority. Shalom Mordekhai Shvadron was born in Złoczów, Galicia. At the age of 16, he married in Biały Kamień and for two years was supported by his father-in-law. He then returned to Złoczów and for several years engaged in commerce, trading in wine, timber, flax, and cattle.

text: Galicia

text: Belz

text: Stratin

text: Zhidachev

text: rabbinate

text: Buczacz

text: yeshiva

glossary: responsa yeshiva Torah


title: Zirelson, Yehudah Leib

abstract: (1859–1941), rabbi, public figure, and writer. Yehudah Leib Zirelson (also Tsirel’son) was born in the shtetl of Kozelets, Chernigov province (mod. Ukr., Chernihiv). After receiving rabbinical ordination, he was chosen to serve as the spiritual rabbi of the town of Priluki in Poltava province. In 1907, he was also appointed to be the town’s crown (government-approved) rabbi, and from 1908 he served as both the spiritual and crown rabbi in Kishinev.

imgDesc: Article by Yehudah Leib Zirelson, 1937 (?). Manuscript of article by Yehudah Leib Zirelson, "Hatsa'at ha-Rav Tsirelson" (Rabbi Zirelson’s Proposal), published in Ha-Pardes, vol. 11 (September 1937), Kishinev. Zirelson addresses the question of what preparations are needed for a “Kingdom of Israel” (Mamlekhet Yisra’el) after two thousand years of exile. He calls upon Agudas Yisroel to examine the issue according to the spirit of the Torah, quoting from Proverbs, the Zohar, the Jerusalem Talmud, and other sources. He compares the redemption of Israel to the dawn whose light breaks slowly, but continues to grow stronger. Hebrew. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F69.8.3. (YIVO)

text: shtetl

text: crown rabbi

text: Kishinev

text: Russia

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Der yud

text: Zionist

text: Warsaw

text: Mizraḥi

text: Vilna

text: Orthodox

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Katowice

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Mendel Beilis

text: World War I

text: Romania

text: Bessarabia

text: antisemitism

text: Holocaust

glossary: Magid responsa


title: Heller, Ḥayim

abstract: (1879–1960), rabbi and biblical scholar. Born in Białystok, Ḥayim Heller earned a doctorate from the University of Würzburg in Germany and was appointed rabbi of Łomża in 1912, a position that he resigned from within months. In 1914, he was elected rabbi of Suwałki, but World War I broke out before he could accept the position, and he moved to Gomel.

text: Białystok

text: Łomża

text: Suwałki

text: Gomel

text: Warsaw

text: seminary

text: Mizraḥi

text: Bet ha-Midrash

text: yeshiva

text: rabbinic literature

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

glossary:
Bet ha-Midrash
yeshiva


title: Argots (Talk)

abstract: Among the social dialects of Yiddish are the argots or slangs of various professions. Unlike regional dialects, which may differ from the standard language in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon, argots are distinctive primarily in their vocabulary. The best documented Yiddish argots are those of musicians (klezmer-loshn) and of the underworld (ganovim-loshn [thieves’ language] or hentshke-loshn [lit., glove-language]), but in the linguistic literature on Yiddish there are accounts of, or at least references to, the slang of wagon drivers and coachmen (balagole-loshn), actors, cantors, typesetters, tailors, shoemakers, merchants, butchers, jewelers, barbers, and soldiers.

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Russian Revolutions of 1917

abstract: In the Russian Empire, the year 1917 brought two revolutions, one that ended hundreds of years of tsarist rule and the other that inaugurated nearly three-quarters of a century of Bolshevik or Communist rule. Almost all Jews in the Russian Empire and abroad welcomed the first revolution, which came in February (new style, March), but initially, few were enthusiastic about the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks eight months later. Within weeks of the first revolution, on 22 March (new style, 2 April) the Provisional Government—in power until a Constituent Assembly could be called to determine the character of the successor Russian state—abolished all the legal restrictions on ethnic and religious communities, including Jews. For the first time since they had been admitted to the Russian Empire, Jews gained full equality with all other citizens. The tsarist regime had confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement and had severely restricted their opportunities in agriculture, the professions, military service, and education. It had completely closed off governmental and civil service positions to them, unless they agreed to convert to Christianity. During World War I the authorities had expelled thousands of Jews from their homes in the western part of the empire on the grounds that they might collaborate with the Central Powers invading from the west. Ironically, it was this expulsion that broke the confinement of Jews to the Pale, at least de facto, and brought large numbers of them to the interior of Russia. When the Provisional Government abolished the Pale de jure, large numbers of Jews made their way to the two capitals, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as to other Russian cities and towns formerly closed to them.

imgDesc: Drawing depicting Red Army cadres ousting capitalists and other enemies of the Russian Revolution, from a handmade Yiddish book produced in a Jewish orphanage in Bershad (now Bershad’, Ukr.), 1924. (YIVO)

text: Russian Empire

text: Pale of Settlement

text: agriculture

text: military service

text: World War I

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: civil war

text: Zionist movement

text: Bund

text: Fareynikte

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Fareynikte

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Poland

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Folkspartey

text: Orthodox

text: Ukraine

text: Trotsky

text: Evsektsii

text: communism

text: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

text: Romania

text: pogroms

text: Poland

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
kehilah
Diaspora


title: Population and Migration before World War I (Population and Migration)

abstract: Demographic sources for the entire period before the end of the nineteenth century are not nearly as reliable as those for more recent times. Readers should note, therefore, that the data presented below are speculative and based on the “best guesses” of scholars. A partial exception is material gleaned from the 1764–1765 census of Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is somewhat better documented.

imgDesc: Yoysef Grinblat, a member of the Labor Zionist party Tse‘ire Tsiyon, with a letter and a copy of Der yidisher emigrant (The Jewish Emigrant), 1910. Inscribed in Hebrew at upper left, “To where?” and on the back in Yiddish, “Hard to decide which country to emigrate to.” Photograph by M. K. Stavinski. (YIVO)

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Crimea

text: Khazaria

text: Kiev

text: Vladimir-Volynski

text: Przemyśl

text: Ashkenazic

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: Kalisz

text: Gniezno

text: Lwów

text: Karaites

text: Lithuania

text: Trakai

text: Grodno

text: Brest

text: Kraków

text: Kalisz

text: Poznań

text: Gniezno

text: Sandomierz

text: Warsaw

text: trade

text: Lublin

text: Łuck

text: Ostróg

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: Sephardic

text: Zamość

text: Hungary

text: Moldavia

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Walachia

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Brody

text: Leszno

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: Hungary

text: Bucovina

text: Galicia

text: Belarussia

text: Hasidim

text: Misnagdim

text: Krymchaks

text: Romania

text: Courland

text: Saint Petersburg

glossary:
Karaites
de non tolerandis Judaeis
Misnagdim


title: Rapoport, Shloyme Zaynvl

abstract: (1863–1920), Russian and Yiddish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary activist. Shloyme Rapoport (known more commonly as S. [Semen Akimovich] An-ski) is most acclaimed for two Yiddish works: his play Der dibek: Tsvishn tsvey veltn (The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds) and the Jewish Labor Bund’s anthem known as “Di shvue” (The Oath). He is also famous for landmark ethnographic expeditions that he led to Volhynia and Podolia in 1912–1914. Rapoport distinguished himself from other Yiddish writers of his generation by his successful career as a journalist in Russian, his intense involvement first with the Russian populist movement and then with the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, and his professional interest in the social sciences. He was also known by the pseudonyms S. Vid’bin, Z. Sinanni, and S. Sinani.

imgDesc: Members of the Vilner Trupe, Poland, ca. 1919, including Dovid Herman (top row, left), M. Kowalski (second from left), Alter Kacyzne (third) Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport (fourth), Frieda Blumenthal (next to Rapoport), Chaim Sznejer (to Blumenthal’s left), Sonia Alomis (front row, left), and Leyb Kadison (front row, right). (YIVO)

text: The Dybbuk

text: Bund

text: ethnographic expeditions

text: Vitebsk

text: heder

text: Voskhod

text: Russia

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Bund

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Vladimir Gintsburg

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Solomon Iudovin

text: Yoel Engel

text: folk songs

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Warsaw

text: Habimah

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Vilna

text: A. Vayter

text: yeshiva

text: assimilation

text: Hasidism

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

glossary:
heder
Talmud
Pale of Settlement
yeshiva
Kabbalah
Rebbe

subconcepts:
Life
Major Achievements


title: Lilienblum, Mosheh Leib

abstract: (1843–1910), Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian writer; maskil. Mosheh Leib Lilienblum was born in Kaidan (Kedainiai), Lithuania, where he received a Talmudic education. His father married him off at the age of 13 to a girl of 11, and he moved into his father-in-law’s house in Wilkomir (Ukmergė). In addition to his intense Torah studies, Lilienblum began to study medieval Jewish philosophy and was exposed to modern Hebrew literature. He began an association with the moderate Haskalah movement and published articles in the Hebrew press—specifically, Ha-Magid and Ha-Karmel. This change in Lilienblum’s faith and worldview (though he continued to live as an observant Jew) provoked persecution at the hands of the uncompromising religious authorities of Wilkomir.

imgDesc: Portrait and summary biography of Mosheh Leib Lilienblum on a postcard, part of a series on Hebrew writers and intellectuals (Stanisławów: Verlag Hatchijah, 1910). (YIVO)

text: Lithuania

text: Hebrew literature

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: Passover

text: Russian Empire

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Kol mevaser

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: parody

text: Ukraine

text: pogroms

text: Land of Israel

text: Yehudah Leib (Lev) Pinsker

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yehoshu‘a Ravnitski

text: historiography

glossary:
maskil
Torah
Haskalah
Magid
Talmud
Mishnah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Beggars and Begging

abstract: In Poland–Lithuania, the emergence of Jewish beggars as a large group with its own subculture can be traced to the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres of 1648, which destroyed much of the Jewish communal wealth and infrastructure. It has been estimated that up to 20 percent of the Jewish population belonged to the class of beggars at the end of the seventeenth century. East European governments regularly harassed the Jewish poor. In March 1773, Habsburg authorities ordered the expulsion of Betteljuden, Jewish beggars, from Galicia. At the same time, Poland closed its borders to impoverished Jewish refugees. Residents of Oświęcim, a town close to the border of Poland and Prussia, witnessed “caravans of beggars” who were expelled from Galicia but were not admitted to Poland. In 1898, a total of 35 percent of Russian Jews depended on charity institutions to maintain their existence.

imgDesc: Beggars approaching visitors at the gate of the Jewish cemetery, Płock, Poland, 1938. Photograph by Sport Films. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres

text: Galicia

text: charity

text: Russia

text: ghettos

text: Holocaust

text: kahal

text: charity

text: Poland

text: money

text: Sabbath

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Marc Chagall

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Elijah the Prophet

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Itsik Manger

text: Isaac Babel

text: Grodno

text: The Dybbuk

text: An-ski


title: Kiev

abstract: (Ukr., Kyiv; classical Heb., Kiyov), capital of Ukraine. Jewish settlement in Kiev dates to the first years of the city, in the ninth century, when it was the capital of Kievan Rus’ and an important stop on the trading route between Europe and Central Asia. Although sources are few, in the ninth century there were probably both Karaite and Rabbinite Jews in Kiev. The communities included branches of Byzantine Jewry as well as Khazars.

imgDesc: Kiev (Based on Evreys'ki adresy Kyeva [Kyiv, 2001])

text: Ukraine

text: Karaite

text: Khazars

text: Lithuania

text: Russia

text: Belorussia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Dubno

text: trade

text: crafts

text: carting

text: Brodskii

text: industry

text: pogroms

text: Soviet

text: Kultur-lige

text: Evsektsiia

text: Zionists

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: state Jewish theater

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Der Nister

text: Perets Markish

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Babi Yar

text: Einsatzgruppen

text: Moscow

text: Leningrad

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: anticosmopolitan campaign


title: Kotik, Yekhezkl

abstract: (1847–1921), Yiddish memoir writer and public activist. Yekhezkl Kotik was born in Kamenets Litovsk (Grodno [Hrodna] province; now in Belarus), to a well-to-do family of communal officials and leaseholders who had been town leaders for several generations. His father was a Hasid who had rebelled against his family’s Misnaged lifestyle. Kotik received a traditional education but in time also rebelled against his father’s legacy and rejected Hasidism. This intergenerational tension shaped and influenced the course of his life.

text: Hrodna

text: Belarus

text: Hasidism

text: Kiev

text: pogrom

text: Warsaw

text: Lithuania

text: Shmuel Yankev Yatskan

text: Haynt

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: memoir

text: Yiddish literature

text: shtetl

text: Misnagdim

glossary: melamed Misnagdim


title: Memory

abstract: Memory per se was not an operative category among East European Jews. Rather, in the premodern period, Jews had their master metaphors organized around saints, sanctuaries, and sacred times. In this way, each generation of Jews shaped the model life, the model community, and the model time. In periods of crisis, the function of Jewish memory was to transcend the ruptures of history. At such times, the precise levers of inner-Jewish transformation were the historical archetypes that embodied the covenantal relationship between God and Israel: God’s command of lekh-lekho (Go forth) to Abraham, the binding of Isaac, the Exodus, Sinai, the Mosaic curses, the destruction of the Temple, the Valley of the Dry Bones, the Battle of Gog, the Megilah of Purim. The chronicler, preacher, or synagogue poet could either invoke any of the relevant archetypes, reminding God, as it were, both of His promise and of Israel’s steadfastness in the past, or, more boldly, could provoke God’s response by throwing the present sacrilege in His face. “It is for Your sake that we are slain all day long,” says Psalm 44 (23–24), “that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. / Rouse Yourself: why do You sleep, O Lord? / Awaken, do not reject us forever!” In the face of national catastrophe, the Jewish response is dialectical: the worse the present expulsion order, or massacre, or blood libel, the more it recalls the most sacrilegious event of the past.

imgDesc: Montage of portraits of members of the committee for the celebration of the centennial of Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh) at the I. L. Peretz Jewish Library, Ejszyszki, Poland (now Eišiškės, Lith.), 1936. (Bottom, center) Yiddish writer Daniel Tsharni. (YIVO)

text: Purim

text: Passover

text: Ashkenazic

text: theater

text: purim-shpil

text: parody

text: Poland

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Nemirov

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Lubavitch

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Misnagdic

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Zionism

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Russia

text: historiography

text: Saul M. Ginzburg

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Odessa

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Itsik Manger

text: Yiddish literature

text: Hebrew literature

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Kotsker Rebbe

text: Sholem Asch

text: Ger Tsedek

text: Alter-Sholem Kacyzne

text: Frank

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Sabbatian

text: Bund

text: Hirsh Lekert

text: Vilna

text: pilgrimage

text: Shmerke Kaczerginski

text: Warsaw

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Łódź

text: armed resistance

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Grodno

text: Brest

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: heder

text: operettas

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: kahal

text: shtetl

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk

text: memoir

text: YIVO

text: Landkentenish

text: Max Weinreich

text: Landkentenish

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Itsik Kipnis

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Kishinev

text: pogrom

text: censorship

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: Ukraine

text: ghettos

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

glossary: Gift of Solomon R. Guggenheim, 41.440. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York / © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

subconcepts:
The Liturgy of Remembrance
The Politics of Memory
Memory and the Model Person
Memory and the Model Place


title: Fleischmann, Karel

abstract: (1897–1944), physician, graphic artist, and writer. Karel Fleischmann was born in Klatovy, Bohemia, and he finished secondary school in České Budějovice, a southern Bohemian town with a small Jewish population, before studying at the faculty of medicine in Prague. In 1925, Fleischmann returned to České Budějovice, where he practiced dermatology and pursued literary and artistic interests. His father, a graphic artist and calligrapher, had long encouraged his son’s talents.

imgDesc: Children Only Allowed to Go for Short Walk. Karel Fleischmann, Terezín, 1942. India ink wash drawing. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Terezín


title: America

abstract: The United States of America became home to the largest Jewish community of the Diaspora because one-third of the Jews of Europe emigrated there over the course of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century. The transformation of a peripheral outpost of Jewish civilization into its major hub outside the boundaries of Israel was a long-term process that was keenly observed as it took shape. Still, the catastrophic finality with which history bestowed that distinction on American Jewry, after the Holocaust, cast new light on its importance and on the participation of European Jewry in its creation—with East European Jewry contributing by far the greatest share. All the while, Old World Jewry had, in turn, been affected by the growing Jewish presence in the New World and by the rise of the United States as a world power. The orbit of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was partly shaped by the magnetic force exerted by America.

imgDesc: “Shlof mayn kind” (Sleep, My Child). Words by Sholem Aleichem. Arrangement by Max Persin (New York: Jos. Y. Katz). The words to the lullaby include the claim that in America, where the child’s father is, everyone is happy and Jews eat challah even on weekdays. (YIVO)

text: Holocaust

text: Kraków

text: Hasidism

text: Poznań

text: Shklov

text: Haskalah

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Haskalah

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Russia

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Odessa

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Shemu’el Mohilewer

text: Eliyahu Meisel

text: Yisra’el Me’ir Ha-Kohen

text: folk songs

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Shomer

text: Land of Israel

text: Iaşi

text: Russia

text: pogroms

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Moscow

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: theater

text: censorship

text: Poland

text: World War I

text: Russian Revolution

text: Soviet

text: philanthropists

text: Ukraine

text: Crimea

text: agriculture

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Bund

text: Poland

text: Henryk Erlich

text: Wiktor Alter

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Holocaust

text: ORT

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Romania

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Slánský

text: Boris Pasternak

text: Jackson-Vanik Amendment

text: Refuseniks

text: YIVO

text: Lubavitch

glossary:
Diaspora
Mikveh
Haskalah
maskil
Musar
Pale of Settlement

subconcepts: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Period: 1917–2000


title: Židovské Zprávy

abstract: (Jewish News), Czech-language Zionist journal published from 1918 until 1938. Following the short-lived Židovské listy pro Hechy, Moravu a Slezsko (Jewish Paper for Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), which had been edited by Gustav Fantl and Jehošua Sušický from 1913 to 1914, Židovské zprávy was the first successful Zionist fortnightly published in the Czech language. It appeared initially in April 1918 and became a weekly at the end of that year.

text: Zionist

text: Maccabi

text: Ludvík Singer

text: Gustav Sicher

text: Holocaust

text: Jakob Edelstein


title: United Jewish Community of Ukraine

abstract: Created as an all-encompassing umbrella organization in April 1999, the United Jewish Community of Ukraine (Ob”edinennaia Evreiskaia Obshchina Ukrainy; OEOU) aimed to serve as the “political wing” of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress (Vseukrainskii Evreiskii Kongress; VEK). The latter was founded in April 1997 by a group of wealthy Ukrainian Jewish businessmen, led by Vadim Rabinovich and supported by Reuven Asman, a Lubavitch leader in Kiev.

text: Ukraine

text: Lubavitch

text: Kiev

text: Zionist

text: Joint Distribution Committee

text: Jewish Confederation of Ukraine

text: Maccabi


title: Avraham Trebitsch of Mikulov

abstract: (ca. 1759–1837), scholar and chronicler. Born in Třebíč (Ger., Trebitsch), Moravia, Avraham Trebitsch was the son of Re’uven Ḥayat and his wife, Fradl. He studied at yeshivas in Mikulov (ca. 1771) and Prague (ca. 1775). Later that decade, he was based in Mikulov, where he held the post of secretary to the Moravian Land Rabbinate and became a close associate of Mordekhai Banet and Neḥemyah Trebitsch. Trebitsch gained “familiant” status (i.e., the right to reside [and marry]) in Mikulov, started a family, and in 1799 purchased part of a house. He was, however, dependent on charitable donations from the Jewish community, and his daughters lived in poverty following his death.

text: Moravia

text: Mikulov

text: Prague

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: familiant

text: Haskalah

text: historiography

glossary: maskil Haskalah


title: Yehudis

abstract: (Pseudonym of Rokhl Bernshteyn; 1869–1942), Yiddish poet and writer. Virtually forgotten today, Yehudis is notable for her bold poems, several dramatic pieces, short stories, fragments of a novel, translations from Russian, and a memoir of her youth. Born into a well-to-do merchant family in Minsk, Bernshteyn was educated by private tutors and began working in her parents’ shop at age 12. Her subsequent exposure to the socialist movement, and through it to Russian culture, led her to read widely on her own. She and her husband, Shmuel Bernshteyn (whose family name was the same as hers), a leading Jewish intellectual in Minsk, hosted authors whose involvement in the new Yiddish literature inspired her to write.

text: Minsk

text: Yiddish literature

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Warsaw

text: 1917 Russian Revolution

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Ber Orshanski

text: Moscow


title: Jüdische Volksstimme

abstract: Pioneering Zionist newspaper of the Austrian Empire, published in Brno (Brünn), Moravia, from 1900 to 1934. Jüdische Volksstimme (Jewish People’s Voice) was founded by Max Hickl (1874–1924), who served as publisher and editor in chief until his death, with only a brief interruption from 1920 to 1922, when Arnold Steiner took his place. Jüdische Volksstimme began as a bimonthly in February 1900; it was issued three times a month from September 1907, and weekly from 1910.

text: Brno

text: Moravia

text: Max Hickl

text: Hugo Gold

text: Zionists

text: General Zionist

text: Hugo Bergmann

text: Nathan Birnbaum

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Dovid Pinski


title: Efros, Anatolii Vasil’evich

abstract: (1925–1987), theater and cinema director. In 1943 Efros began studying at Iurii Zavadskii’s acting studio at the Mossovet Theater, where he played his first small roles. In 1945, on Zavadskii’s recommendation, Efros studied at the directing department of the State Institute of Theatrical Arts in Moscow. He completed his studies in 1949, at the height of the anticosmopolitan campaign, which made it impossible for him to obtain steady work in a Moscow theater. His efforts to pursue graduate studies (aspirantura) also proved unsuccessful.

text: theater

text: cinema

text: Moscow

text: anticosmopolitan campaign


title: Family

abstract: East European Jewry commonly adhered to Ashkenazic legal traditions and customs in family matters even as people were exposed to new Sephardic traditions through close ties to Jews in the Ottoman Empire and Italy. Even as emerging political states strove for standardization, family practices and arrangements remained diverse, reflecting a wide range of collective strategies and individual interests.

imgDesc: Three generations of one family, Khotin, Russia (Rom. Hotin; now Khotyn, Ukr.), ca. 1912. (YIVO)

text: marriage

text: Ya`akov Reischer

text: servants

text: Poznań

text: weddings

text: Prague

text: Poland

text: gender

text: demons

text: heder

text: Salomon Maimon

text: yeshiva

text: trade

text: tkhines

text: Familiants laws

text: Czech lands

text: Silesia

text: Herz Homberg

text: agriculture

text: Hungary

text: assimilation

text: Hugo Herrmann

text: Sabbath

text: František Langer

text: Budapest

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Galicia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Bucovina

text: Slovakia

text: Romania

text: Kraków

text: Lemberg

text: Russian Empire

text: rabbinate

text: crown rabbis

text: Haskalah

text: love

text: Haskalah

text: Misnagdim

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: pogroms

text: Karaites

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Conversion

text: sexuality

text: Warsaw

text: assimilation

text: youth groups

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Betar

text: Orthodox Jewry

text: heder

text: Beys Yankev

text: ghettos

text: Holocaust

text: Soviet Union

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Vilna

text: Einsatzgruppen

text: TOZ

text: Khayim Mordkhe Rumkowski

text: Terezín

text: labor camps

text: labor camps

text: Poland

glossary: responsa Torah heder melamed yeshiva Haskalah Misnagdim ‘agunah Karaites Żegota

subconcepts: Interwar Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union


title: Heller, Isidor

abstract: (1816–1879), journalist, prose writer, and poet. Born in Mladá Boleslav (Ger., Jungbunzlau), Bohemia, Isidor Heller attended both a yeshiva and a secondary school; he hoped to become a rabbi. In 1832 he left for Prague, where he attended the New Town Gymnasium and, briefly, Prague University. In 1837 he went to Nancy, France, where he tried unsuccessfully to join the French Foreign Legion and to support the liberal party in the Spanish civil war (1833–1840). He hoped that he could obtain French citizenship in reward for the five-year military service.

text: Mladá Boleslav

text: yeshiva

text: Prague

text: Prague

text: Moritz Hartmann

text: Siegfried Kapper

text: Hungary


title: Kovner, Avraham Uri

abstract: (Arkadii Grigor’evich Kovner; 1841/42–1909), Lithuanian maskil and pioneer of modern Hebrew literary criticism. A native of Vilna, Avraham Kovner studied at several yeshivas in the Minsk region, and after reaching adulthood discovered Hebrew maskilic literature. After a personal and intellectual crisis, he abandoned his wife and daughter and resettled in Kiev. There he was exposed to the radical strains of Russian and West European culture and began to write in Hebrew, taking the name Albert Kovner. From 1862 to 1868, his essays on social and literary topics were published primarily in Ha-Melits, but also in Ha-Magid and Ha-Karmel. Some of these essays were later reprinted in Ḥeker davar (An Inquiry; 1865) and Tseror peraḥim (A Bouquet of Flowers; 1868).

text: Hebrew literary criticism

text: Vilna

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Prose

text: poetry

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Odessa

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Avraam Zak

text: Moscow

text: censorship

text: conversion

text: Russia

text: Łomża

text: Re’uven Brainin


title: Ternopil’

abstract: (Pol. and Rus., Tarnopol), city in western Ukraine (previously in eastern Galicia). Tarnopol was founded in 1540 by the Polish governor, Grand Crown Hetman Jan Tarnowski. Jews settled there soon after its founding.

imgDesc: A commercial street with shops, including the hat store of W. Weisshar (left), Tarnopol (now Ternopil’, Ukr.), ca. 1910. (Jewish Museum Vienna)

text: Ukraine

text: Galicia

text: trade

text: pogroms

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Babad

text: Haskalah

text: Herz Homberg

text: Yosef Perl

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: calendars

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Prague

text: Yosef Babad

text: Poland

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Bund

text: ghetto


title: Avraham Yehoshu‘a ben Ya‘akov Heshel

abstract: (1596–1663), rabbi and halakhic authority in Poland–Lithuania. Born in Brest Litovsk, Avraham Yehoshu‘a Heshel moved with his father to Lublin when the latter was appointed rabbi of the community and head of the yeshiva. With the death in 1650 of Naftali ben Yitsḥak Kats, his father’s heir from 1644, Avraham Yehoshu‘a was appointed head of the Lublin yeshiva. In 1654, he became rabbi and head of the yeshiva of Kraków, succeeding Yom Tov Lipmann Heller.

text: Brest Litovsk

text: Lublin

text: yeshiva

text: Kraków

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
yeshiva
gzeyres takh vetat
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Rashi
Tosafot
Talmud
Torah
responsa


title: Zil’ber, Lev Aleksandrovich

abstract: (1894–1966), immunologist, virologist, and cancer researcher. Lev Aleksandrovich (Abelevich) Zil’ber was born in Novgorod province to the family of a military musician. He spent his childhood and youth in Pskov (northwest Russia). In 1912, he entered the natural science department of Saint Petersburg University, transferring three years later to the medical faculty of Moscow University, from which he graduated in 1919.

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: USSR

text: Czechoslovakia


title: Focşani

abstract: City in Romania, near the Milcov River, the old border between Moldavia and Walachia. The Jewish community of Focşani dates back at least to the second half of the seventeenth century, when Natan Note Hannover, author of Yeven metsulah and Sha‘are tsiyon, was the town’s rabbi for a decade. The first Jewish cemetery reached its capacity and was closed in 1683, the second in 1874. A choral synagogue was built in 1896 on the location of a synagogue that had been destroyed in an earthquake two years earlier.

text: Romania

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Land of Israel

text: Galați

text: Moineşti

text: Bacău

text: crafts

text: Iaşi

text: Zionist

text: youth movements

text: Gordonia

text: Betar

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Maccabi

text: Cilibi Moise

text: proverbs

glossary: Yishuv mikveh