title: Money

abstract: Money played a central role in the inner life and value system of the Jewish community as well as in its relations with the non-Jewish world. This was the case in part because Jewish status in Eastern Europe was predicated on Jews’ performance of commercial, managerial, and financial services, while Jewish autonomy required an elaborate system of internal taxation.

imgDesc: Bracteate (coin) with Hebrew inscription, twelfth or thirteenth century. (Muzeum Narodowe, Kraków)

text: Sabbath

text: kahal

text: marriage

text: charity

text: piety

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Luts’k

text: Abramovitsh

text: beggars

text: Purim

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionist movement

text: life-cycle

text: death

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: wedding

text: Kol mevaser

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: circumcision

text: Hasidic

text: talismanic

text: Ruzhin

text: piety

text: Avraham Horowitz

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Efrayim of Luntshits

glossary:
Diaspora
Torah
kahal
rebbe
ethical will


title: Brivnshtelers

abstract: A brivnshteler (letter-writing manual; Heb., igron) is a collection of formulas for composing letters on topics ranging from business to courtship to family life. In addition to providing templates for composition, the collections were widely used for teaching handwriting skills. Because many of the manuals were bi- or even trilingual, they served as textbooks for learning Hebrew, German, Russian, Polish, and respectable, educated Yiddish.

text: letters

text: Hebrew

text: Yiddish

text: publishing

text: blessings

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: social relations

text: heder

text: “purer” Yiddish

text: Shomer

text: shtetl

text: romance

text: marriage


title: Shapira Family

abstract: Hasidic leaders active in the field of publishing. Pinḥas ben Avraham Abba Shapira of Korets (Korzec; 1726/28–1790) was a charismatic Hasidic leader and a member of the Ba‘al Shem Tov’s (Besht’s) circle. Mosheh Shapira (1762–1838) established a publishing house, an enterprise that he shared with his sons Shemu’el Avraham Abba (1784–1863) and Pinḥas (1792–1872).

imgDesc: An example of the Shapira family imprint from Slavuta, from the title page of Masekhet Zevaḥim, a tractate of the Talmud (1812). (Gross Family Collection)

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Lithuania

text: Shklov

text: Hasidism

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Dov Ber

text: Ostróg

text: Land of Israel

text: Russia

text: Romm

text: Vilna

text: Misnagdim

text: Misnagdim

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Zhitomir

text: Warsaw

text: Ḥavah

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Terezín

glossary:
Magid
Torah
tsadik
halakhah
Kabbalah
Talmud
Misnagdim
Pale of Settlement


title: Russian Literature

abstract: Like secular Jewish literature, Russian literature invented itself relatively late. The eighteenth-century aristocrats who sought to create a national literature in Russian faced language problems (they spoke, by preference, French) and the necessity of imitating European models. The Russian apprenticeship, like the Jewish one a century later, ended quickly and permanently. By the early nineteenth century, Russian pupils had turned into masters whose works, no longer derivative, resonated across Europe.

imgDesc: LEF, the journal of Levyi Front Iskusstv (Left Front of Art), Moscow and Leningrad, 1924. Cover designed by Liubov Popova. Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation. 00309.01E1-6. © The Museum of Modern Art; licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

text: Haskalah

text: Osip Mandel’shtam

text: Isaac Babel

text: samizdat

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Russia

text: Boris Slutskii

text: Holocaust

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Leonid Tsypkin

text: converts

text: Pale

text: pogroms

text: Razsvet

text: Osip Rabinovich

text: Odessa

text: Hasidism

text: cantonist

text: Lev Levanda

text: Grigorii Bogrov

text: assimilation

text: Nikolai Minskii

text: Sasha Chernyi

text: David Aizman

text: Zionism

text: Shimen Frug

text: Semen Iushkevich

text: Boris Pasternak

text: Bolshevik Revolution

text: Marc Chagall

text: Iakov Brafman

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Wengeroff

text: Lev Shestov

text: Mikhail Gershenzon

text: critics

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Iurii Tynianov

text: Osip Brik

text: Viktor Shklovskii

text: Roman Jakobson

text: Prague

text: Nadezhda Mandel’shtam

text: Liliia Brik

text: El Lissitzky

text: Leonid

text: S. An-ski

text: Doyvber Levin

text: Eduard Bagritskii

text: shtetl

text: Il’ia Il’f

text: Isaac Babel

text: Odessa

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Samuil Marshak

text: Aleksandra Brushtein

text: Evgeniia Ginzburg

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Black Book

text: Kiev

text: Babi Yar

text: Ukraine

text: Holocaust

text: cosmopolitans

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Aleksandr Galich

text: Genrikh Sapgir

text: Aleksandr Ginzburg

text: samizdat

text: Joseph Brodsky

text: Iulii Daniel’

text: Evgeniia Ginzburg

text: Fridrikh Gorenshtein

text: Perets Markish

text: Shimon Markish

text: Anatolii Rybakov

text: shtetl

text: Boris Iampol’skii

text: Semen Lipkin

text: memory

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: Estonia

text: Lev Zil’ber

glossary: Haskalah get

subconcepts: Attitudes toward Jews in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

subconcepts: Russian Jewish Writing from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century

subconcepts: Writers with Roots in the Early Twentieth Century

subconcepts: Dissidence, Renewal, and Emigration in Late Soviet Jewish Writing


title: Pauker, Ana

abstract: (1893–1960), prominent official of the Communist International (Comintern), Romanian Communist leader, and foreign minister of Romania. Born Ana Rabinsohn to impoverished Orthodox Jewish parents, Ana Pauker grew up in Bucharest and began teaching Hebrew and Judaica at a Jewish community school when she was 17 or 18. In 1915 she joined the fledgling Romanian Workers Social Democratic Party and supported its pro-Bolshevik wing after the 1917 Russian Revolution; four years later, she and her husband, the Romanian Jewish socialist Marcel Pauker, emerged within the leading ranks of the newly formed Romanian Communist Party (RCP).

imgDesc: “Communist Ana Pauker.” Ana Pauker featured on the cover of Time Magazine, 20 September 1948. (TIME Magazine © 2008, Time Inc. Reprinted by permission)

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union

text: Bucharest

text: Slánský trial

text: Prague


title: Bucovina

abstract: (Ger., Bukowina), a historic region in Eastern Europe, roughly encompassing the current region of Cernăuți in Ukraine and the area of Suceava county in Romania. In the Middle Ages, Bucovina formed part of the Halicz Kingdom and eventually was included in the principality of Moldova. The frontiers of the province were established in 1774 when, for strategic reasons related to the first division of Poland, the Habsburg army occupied more than 10,000 square kilometers of northwestern Moldova and, with the consent of the Ottoman Empire—the suzerain power at the time—annexed it in 1775 as the district of Bukowina.

imgDesc: Habsburg Bukowina. Boundaries shown are ca. 1914.

text: Ukraine

text: Romania

text: Poland

text: Suceava

text: Chernivtsi

text: Siret

text: Galicia

text: Moldova

text: Haskalah

text: assimilationist

text: Hasidism

text: Sadagora

text: Vizhnits

text: Prague

text: Zionist

text: Mayer Ebner

text: Bund

text: Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna

text: Romania

text: Suceava

text: Câmpulung

text: Rădăuți

text: Dorohoi

text: Mayer Ebner

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: Paul Celan

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

text: Itsik Manger

text: Bessarabia

text: USSR

text: communism

text: Transnistria


title: Sofer, Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin

abstract: (1815–1871), rabbi, halakhist, exegete, and Orthodox leader. Known as Ketav Sofer, Avraham Sofer (Schreiber) was the eldest son of the chief rabbi of Pressburg (Bratislava), Mosheh Sofer (known as Ḥatam Sofer), and the grandson of Akiva Eger of Posen. Upon the death of Ḥatam Sofer in 1839, his supporters overcame considerable opposition and fulfilled their master’s deathbed wish that his son succeed him. Thus, the 24-year-old scholar was catapulted into the coveted role of Pressburg rabbi and head of its famed yeshiva.

text: Bratislava

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Akiva Eger

text: Posen

text: yeshiva

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Eisenstadt

text: Seminary

text: Cluj

text: Orthodoxy

text: Hungary

text: Jewish congress

text: Budapest

glossary: yeshiva responsa


title: Bratslav Hasidism

abstract: A controversial Hasidic school, focused on the personality and teachings of Naḥman ben Simḥah (1772–1810), and named after the Podolian town of Bratslav, where he resided from 1802 until the last few months of his life.

imgDesc: Major Hasidic courts, 1815–1929. (Based on a map prepared for the exhibition "Time of the Hasidism." by Elżbieta Długosz, The Historical Museum of Kraków—Old Synagogue)

text: Naḥman ben Simḥah

text: Kiev

text: pilgrimage

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

text: Uman

text: Savran

text: Chernobil dynasty

text: Yosef Perl

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Poland

text: Lublin

text: Hasidism

glossary: rebbe tsadik


title: Biegeleisen, Henryk

abstract: (1855–1934), literary historian, ethnographer, critic, publisher, journalist, and educator. Henryk Biegeleisen was born in Touste (in the Skłatat region in eastern Galicia; a town with a population of 2,139 in 1880, of whom 40% percent were Jews). His father Wilhelm, a physician, had been a member of the National Guard in Lemberg (Lwów) during the Revolution of 1848 and belonged to a small circle of acculturated Jews in Galicia. On his mother’s side, Biegeleisen was a grandson of Naḥman Krochmal.

text: Galicia

text: Lemberg

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Tarnopol

text: Berezhany


title: Sumptuary Legislation

abstract: Although the earliest known sumptuary regulations from the world of East European Jewry date from the late sixteenth century, such regulations were promulgated, albeit in limited form, among medieval Ashkenazic Jews as early as the twelfth century. “Beginning in the fifteenth century,” as Salo Baron has written, “more and more communal organs, regional as well as local” issued detailed ordinances stipulating “articles of clothing that might be worn by various individuals on certain occasions, the number of guests and musicians who might be invited to certain functions, and the amount and type of food that might be served at such celebrations” (Baron, 1942, vol. 2, pp. 301–302). The fifteenth century was also the turning point for sumptuary legislation in Renaissance Italy, where in that century alone, 83 different sets of sumptuary laws were enacted.

imgDesc: Illustration depicting Jews and Ottomans defending the city of Buda together against Christian attackers shortly after the Ottomans’ recapture of the city in 1541. One of the banners held by the Jews bears the Judenhut, the conical hat imposed on them by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. (Beth Hatefutsoth, Photo Archive, Tel Aviv)

text: Kraków

text: dress

text: Passover

text: Sabbath

text: circumcision

text: charity

text: Poznań

text: Tykocin

text: wedding

text: Prague


title: Kolin, Shemu’el ben Natan ha-Levi

abstract: (ca. 1720–1806), rabbi and posek (decisor; one who is recognized as having sufficient authority to rule on questions of Jewish law). Shemu’el Kolin’s name (sometimes rendered as Kelin, Keln, or Kell) is derived from his birthplace in Bohemia. His father, Natan ha-Levi, was a wealthy merchant and grandson of Natan Note ben Shelomoh Spira (1585–1633), the kabbalist and rabbi in Kraków and author of the classic Megaleh ‘amukot.

text: Bohemia

text: Natan Note ben Shelomoh Spira

text: Kraków

text: Boskovice

text: Boskovice

text: Menaḥem Mendel Krochmal

text: yeshiva

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Prague

glossary:
yeshiva
Torah
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Korczak, Janusz

abstract: (1878/79–1942), physician, educator, and writer. Janusz Korczak (originally Henryk Goldszmit) was born in Warsaw to a secular family strongly acculturated into Polish culture and imbued with a tradition of social activism. He was trained as a physician in Poland from 1898 to 1905, continuing his medical training until 1912 in Germany, France, and England.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: childhood

text: Zionist

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Yitsḥak Zuckerman

text: Holocaust


title: Semyatitski, Khayim

abstract: (1908–1943), Yiddish poet. Born in Tykocin, Khayim Semyatitski was raised in a rabbinic family, and was educated at a heder and several yeshivas, among them the Yeshiva of Mir. He was ordained as a rabbi but chose not to assume an official position. In 1929, he settled in Warsaw and worked at intermittent jobs. He apparently began to write poetry a number of years before his first pieces were published in the daily Haynt in 1932. Thereafter and until the outbreak of World War II, he published poems, stories, and critical reviews in daily newspapers and literary journals in Warsaw, Vilna, Białystok, and New York.

imgDesc: Untitled poem by Khayim Semyatitski. Untitled poem by Khayim Semyatitski. "Every evening / Death enters my house. . . ." Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F58.12.3. (YIVO)

text: Tykocin

text: heder

text: Yeshiva of Mir

text: Warsaw

text: poetry

text: Haynt

text: newspapers

text: literary journals

text: Vilna

text: Białystok

text: Poland

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Białystok


title: Tugendhold, Jakob

abstract: (1794–1871), maskil and author; Jewish liaison to Polish government. Jakob Tugendhold was born in Działoszyce, the son of a Prussian maskil. He received a traditional heder education and from 1811 or 1812 pursued secular studies in Breslau. From 1814 to 1819, Tugendhold worked as a private tutor in Kraków, Lwów, and Warsaw, and in 1819 was commissioned to create Poland’s first state-run Jewish elementary schools.

text: heder

text: Breslau

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: seminary

text: Jakub Epstein

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Herz Homberg

text: censor

text: Vilna

glossary: maskil heder Haskalah


title: Kaliningrad

abstract: (Ger., Königsberg, Rus., Kenigsberg, Pol., Królewiec, Yid., Kenigsberg), former capital of the Prussian province of East Prussia, and today capital of the Russian-administered Kaliningrad District (Kaliningradskaia Oblast’). Its geographic proximity to Poland and Russia made Kaliningrad an important hub of trade between eastern and western parts of Europe and so it was home to a large number of East European Jewish merchants. It also served as an important conduit for connections between Central and East European Jewish society and culture.

imgDesc: Main synagogue on Lindenstrasse, Königsberg, East Prussia (today Kaliningrad, Russia), ca. 1910. Photograph by Deutsche Fototek, Dresden. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: East Prussia

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: trade

text: Grodno

text: Haskalah

text: USSR


title: Odessa

abstract: Founded in 1794 on land conquered from the Turks on the site of the Black Sea fortress town of Khadzhibei, Odessa received its name the following year. Within a few decades it was already a sizable city and soon commanded an international reputation as the preeminent Russian grain-exporting center. However, it would retain the aura of a new place: transitory, irreverent, neither cosmopolitan nor urbane.

imgDesc: Odessa. Prerevolutionary Jewish sites and institutions.

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: trade

text: Haskalah

text: Society for the Promotion of Culture

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Razsvet

text: Ha-Melits

text: Kol mevaser

text: Simḥah Pinsker

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Osip Rabinovich

text: Il’ia Orshanskii

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: theater

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Romania

text: Yankl Adler

text: klezmer music

text: cantors

text: Warsaw

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky

text: Yehoshu‘a Ravnitski

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Leon (Lev) Pinsker

text: Zionism

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: assimilationist

text: Isaac Babel

text: censorship

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Evsektsiia

text: circumcision

text: Yiddish-language schools

text: Rosa Luxemburg

text: Isaac Babel

text: Leonid Utesov

text: Il’ia Il’f

text: humor

text: Transnistria

text: ghettos

text: Passover

text: Joint Distribution Committee

glossary:
Talmud
Torah
kehilah
Haskalah
Pale of Settlement
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Wodianer Family

abstract: Economic and political figures, active in nineteenth-century Hungary. Shemu’el (Sámuel) Wodianer, the first member of the family known to us, migrated from Bohemia to southern Hungary where his son Philip (Shraga Feivish, Feivish Ehprevitz, Oporovec; d. 1820) was born in Veprovác, Bács county (now Kruščić, Serbia) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Feivish Ehprevitz moved to Szeged with several siblings once the city opened its gates to Jews in 1783. In a short time, he was the wealthiest Jewish resident, trading in agricultural produce and also maintaining an apartment and a warehouse in Pest. Active in the Szeged Jewish community, he served as its head in 1808, 1813, and 1815. He donated the land for its synagogue in 1792 and later bequeathed silver ceremonial objects to the burial society. He may have had an advanced traditional education since he was addressed by the honorific ḥaver.

text: Hungary

text: Bohemia

text: yeshiva

text: Ḥatam Sofer

text: Vilmos Bacher

text: Haskalah

text: banking

text: trade

text: Moritz Ullmann

text: transportation

text: Budapest

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah


title: Aharon ben Mosheh ha-Levi Horowitz

abstract: (1766–1828), Talmudist, kabbalist, and Hasidic master in Staroselye (Starosselje) in the province of Mohilev. In his youth, Aharon ha-Levi became a follower of Shneur Zalman of Liady, founder of Ḥabad (Lubavitch) Hasidism. Horowitz studied under the guidance of Shneur Zalman with Dov Ber, who was Shneur Zalman’s son and successor. The two were close companions until they had a serious quarrel; although this rift was of a personal nature, it was also over matters of Ḥabad philosophy: Dov Ber frowned on all but completely authentic ecstasy in prayer but Aharon was tolerant of even sham ecstasy.

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Lubavitch

text: Hasidism

glossary: Ḥabad rebbe


title: Drogobych

abstract: (Pol., Drohobycz), medium-sized city in the district of L’viv in western Ukraine. In early modern times, Drogobych belonged to the Polish Commonwealth, but in 1772, as a result of the first partition of Poland, it was awarded to Austria (later Austria-Hungary) and became part of the province of Galicia. In 1919, after an unsuccessful effort by Ukrainians to establish an independent state, Drogobych was incorporated into the newly independent Polish state. From 1939 to 1941 it was annexed to the Soviet Union, to which it was returned after World War II (as part of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic). In 1991 it became part of the now wholly independent state of Ukraine.

imgDesc: Portraits of students and staff of the King Jagiełło school, including writer Bruno Schulz (to the left of the photograph of the school building), Drogobych, 1930. (YIVO)

text: L’viv

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Soviet Union

text: Ukraine

text: Orthodox

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Bruno Schulz


title: Tsinberg, Yisroel

abstract: (1873–1939), historian of Jewish literature; chemist. Yisroel Tsinberg, also known as Sergei Lazarevich Tsinberg (often spelled Zinberg in English sources), received a traditional and a secular education, first from private teachers in his father’s home in Volhynia and then at a secondary school in Rovno (Ukr., Rivne). He studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic Institute from 1891 to 1895, received a doctorate in philosophy from Basel University, and settled in Saint Petersburg in 1898.

imgDesc: Letter from Yisroel Tsinberg, n.d. From Yisroel Tsinberg in Saint Petersburg, to (?), n.d., asking for help in obtaining two early Jewish socialist newspapers that he cannot find in Russia for research for his Russian-language Geshikhte der nay hebreyishn un yidishn (zhargon) literatur (History of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish [Zhargon] Literature). Yiddish. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Rivne

text: Saint Petersburg

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

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Voskhod

text: Yiddish literature

text: Zionism

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Folkspartey

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Perets Hirshbeyn

text: A. Vayter

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Semen Iushkevich

text: Perets Markish

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Yiddish theater

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Yiddish literature

text: historiography

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yankev Shatzky

glossary: maskil Haskalah


title: Karlinski, Ber

abstract: (1886–1935), journalist. Ber Karlinski was born in the provincial town of Kolno, in the Białystok district. He also used the first name Boaz, as well as the aliases B. Karlinius, B. K-I, and B. Karliner. The son of a wealthy and learned family, Karlinski received a traditional Jewish education. Subsequently, he acquired a general education independently, in Warsaw as of 1904.

text: Białystok

text: Warsaw

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Yehudah Steinberg

text: Der moment

text: Poland

text: Froyim Kaganovski

text: Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw

text: Yiddish literature


title: Honor Courts

abstract: After World War II, Holocaust survivors found consolation in the claim that Jews had heroically resisted the Nazis on a large scale, and that even if not every Jew had engaged the enemy in armed combat, all Jews had exhibited high moral standards. Survivors from Eastern Europe demonstrated their solidarity and identification with the myth of Jewish valor by censuring the questionable conduct of a small fraction of Jews suspected of collaboration with the Nazi regime. During the war, the Jewish underground in Eastern Europe had assassinated several Judenrat functionaries, ghetto policemen, and informers, while concentration camp inmates had occasionally killed brutal former kapos stripped by the Germans of their authority. After liberation there were survivors who wanted to settle scores with Jewish collaborators still alive. This wish for revenge led to prosecutions of putative collaborators in Jewish honor courts, administrative tribunals mandated by local Jewish communities to investigate individuals whose behavior under Nazi occupation was called into question, and to condemn and sanction those whose actions were deemed reproachable.

imgDesc: Jewish police detaining a former kapo who was recognized by former concentration camp inmates in the Zeilsheim Displaced Persons camp, Germany, ca. 1945. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Alice Lev)

text: Holocaust

text: Judenrat

text: informers

text: Poland

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Rezső Kasztner

text: Hungary

text: Stanisław (Shepsel) Rotholc

text: Michał Weichert


title: Ashkenazi, Gershon

abstract: (1618–1693), rabbinical scholar and religious authority. Rabbi Gershon (Ulif) Ashkenazi was one of the greatest poskim (religious authorities or legal deciders) of his age. He was born in Ulf, Germany, studied under Rabbi Me’ir Schiff (Maharam Schiff) and subsequently moved to Poland to study with the leading religious scholars of Kraków: Yo’el Sirkes (known as Baḥ), Yehoshu‘a ben Yosef, and probably Yehoshu‘a Heshel as well. He was called “Ashkenazi” (Ashkenaz meaning, in its narrower sense, Germany) because of his place of origin.

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Yo’el Sirkes

text: Ashkenaz

text: Mikulov

text: Menaḥem Mendel ben Avraham Krochmal

text: Prostějov

text: yeshiva

text: Sabbatian

text: mysticism

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Kabbalah
yeshiva
responsa
Torah
pilpul
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Bălţi

abstract: Second-largest city of the Republic of Moldova. Bălți (Yid., Belts; Rus., Beltsy) was within Romania’s borders from 1918 until 1944; after World War II, the region in which it is located became part of the Moldavian SSR. Famous personalities from Bălți have included the artist Boris Anisfeld; the Hebrew writer Ya‘akov Fichmann; Yiddish authors Zelik Berdichever, Boris Sandler, and Michael Felsenbaum; and Lia van Leer, founder of the Jerusalem Cinematheque.

text: Moldova

text: Romania

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: agriculture

text: pogroms

text: Transnistria


title: Beregi, Ármin

abstract: (1879–1953), engineer and Zionist leader. Growing up in the house on Dob Street in Budapest where Theodore Herzl’s uncle lived, Ármin Beregi knew Herzl personally. Beregi studied at the Technical University of Budapest and went on to work at the Ganz-Danubius factory as an engineer. While a student, he met Mózes Bisselisches, who later became a well-known Zionist leader. The two of them—with the help of several others—founded a group of Zionist organizations: Makkabea for university students (Beregi was its vice president in 1905), Ivria for high school students, Júdea for clerks, and Debóra for women.

text: Zionist

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Mizraḥi

text: Múlt és Jövő


title: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

abstract: (1717–1786/87), Hasidic leader; founder of Hasidism in Galicia and Poland. The son of a wealthy village Jew in the district of Tykocin, Elimelekh was first drawn to Hasidism by his brother Meshulam Zusya (d. 1800), later of Hanipoli. The two were among the best known disciples of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh. During their early years they were said to wander together in self-imposed poverty, in order to partake in the exile of the shekhinah. Elimelekh was known for other extremes of ascetic practice as well, in contrast to some others of the Magid’s followers.

text: Hasidism

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Tykocin

text: Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Leżajsk

text: Galicia

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Yisra’el the Magid of Kozhenits

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov

text: Apt

text: Ropshits

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov

text: Zhidachov

text: Pshiskhe

text: pilgrimage

glossary: Magid tsadik


title: Voskhod

abstract: Russian Jewish journal founded by Adolph Landau and published in Saint Petersburg between 1881 and 1906. Voskhod (Dawn) began as a monthly. After its first year of publication, a weekly entitled Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda (Weekly Chronicle of Voskhod) was added. In practice the journal was edited inter alia by Shmuel Grusenberg, Simon Dubnow, and Yehudah Leib Gordon. In April 1899, Landau sold Voskhod to a “young men’s” group, which included Leon Bramson, the historian Saul Ginsburg, Matthew (Matityahu) Posner, Iulii (Julius) Brutskus, and others. In November 1899, both the weekly Voskhod and its monthly version changed their names to Knizhki Voskhoda (Voskhod Booklets). In 1901, the editorial board co-opted Maksim Vinaver and Leopold Sev (who from 1903 was for all practical purposes its editor in chief). The monthly journal ceased publication in March 1906, and its weekly supplement followed suit at the end of June of that year.

text: Adolph Landau

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Saul Ginsburg

text: Iulii (Julius) Brutskus

text: Maksim Vinaver

text: pogroms

text: heder


title: Perle, Yoshue

abstract: (1888–1943), novelist. Yoshue Perle was born in Radom (central Poland); his father was a merchant. After several years of traditional Jewish education, Perle was sent to a Russian school and became a bookkeeper. At age 17, he made his way to Warsaw, where he worked in a bank. His free time was spent in reading literature, visiting the theater, and meeting with other young Jewish writers. His first work in Yiddish, an article titled “Shabes,” was published in 1908.

text: Radom

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Der moment

text: Bund

text: Lwów

text: Soviet Union


title: Tunkel, Yoysef

abstract: (1881–1949), Yiddish humorist. The son of a melamed, Yoysef Tunkel (also known by his pseudonym Der Tunkeler, the Dark One), was born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, and died in New York. Between 1896 and 1899, he studied drawing in Vilna, and then moved to Odessa where he worked as an artist and caricaturist. However, he was quickly forced to limit his art production due to poor eyesight. He then turned to writing “serious” literary works in Yiddish.

imgDesc: “Long live laughter! Long laugh life!” Polish/Yiddish poster. An appearance by Yoysef Tunkel (Der Tunkeler), along with singer Anna Wysok, “the sweetheart of Warsaw,” in Kutno, Poland, 1925. Printed by J. Keltera, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Bobruisk

text: Vilna

text: Odessa

text: Kraków

text: Der yud

text: Der moment

text: Warsaw

text: humor

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Łódź

text: Minsk

text: theater

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Bund

text: Yiddish literature

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk

text: Literarishe bleter


title: Rădăuţi

abstract: Town in northeastern Romania, in the region of southern Bucovina and the present county of Suceava. Jews first settled in Rădăuți (Ger., Radautz), at the end of the eighteenth century, along with German colonists from Bohemia who had been invited to Bucovina by the Austrian regime established after 1774. Whereas in 1807 there had been only three Jewish tax-paying families, in 1880 there were 3,452 Jews living in Rădăuți out of a total of 11,162 inhabitants. The Jewish population swelled to almost 7,000 people by 1914, mainly as a result of emigration from Galicia and Ukraine.

text: Romania

text: Bucovina

text: Suceava

text: Bohemia

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: trade

text: banking

text: industrial

text: Cernăuți

text: Siret

text: Hasidim

text: Zionist

text: Transnistria

text: ghettos


title: Włocławek

abstract: Town in Kujawy-Pomorze province in northern Poland. Jews were not allowed to live in Włocławek, a bishop-owned town, until the early nineteenth century, though the town was never granted an official privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jewish traders occasionally appeared at the markets and customs office on the Vistula River. After the town lost its status of ecclesiastical settlement in 1793, the first four Jewish families settled there in 1803–1805; by 1812, there were 99 Jews. In 1824, a Jewish rewir (quarter) was established, and in 1825–1826, officials forcibly moved all but three families to that district. In 1841, however, 32 families were nevertheless still living outside the rewir.

imgDesc: Unidentified young couple, Włocławek, ca. 1870s. Photograph by C. Menzel. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Zionist

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Mizraḥi

text: Tarnów

text: Poznań

text: Łódź

text: Wrocław


title: Rivke bas Me’ir of Tikotin

abstract: (Tiktin; also Rebecca of Tykocin; d. 1605), the first female author of a Yiddish book; preacher and teacher of women. Rivke bas Me’ir was descended from a family whose roots lay in the town of Tiktin (Pol., Tykocin, near Białystok), as indicated by her father’s name, Me’ir Tikotin or Tiktiner. She may have been born and raised in Poland and her date of birth is also unknown, but she spent at least the last years of her life in Prague, where she died. Her headstone in the old Jewish cemetery of that city asserts that she “had preached day and night to women in every pious community.” Her epitaph also refers to her father as “morenu ha-rav rabi [our teacher and master, rabbi] Me’ir,” suggesting that she was the daughter of a scholar and had probably acquired her knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinical literature at her parents’ home. Presumably her husband was not a rabbi and therefore it can be assumed that the titles rabanit (teacher) and darshanit ve-rabanit (preacher and teacher) were honorifics bestowed on her out of respect for her activities in Prague and its surrounding communities.

text: Tykocin

text: Białystok

text: Poland

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: servants


title: Bettelheim, Sámuel

abstract: (1872–1942), Orthodox journalist; Zionist; and Agudas Yisroel politician. Born in Pressburg (Hun., Pozsony; mod. Bratislava), Sámuel (Samu) Bettelheim studied at the renowned yeshiva in his city. In 1897, he was among the founders and the president of the first legally recognized Zionist society in Hungary, the Yagdil Torah Society, renamed Ahavat Tsiyon in 1899. Although its members were hesitant to call themselves Zionists, Rabbi Simḥah Bunem Sofer permitted students from the yeshiva to join and thus eased their way.

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Bratislava

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Sofer

text: János Rónai

text: Budapest

text: Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines

text: Mizraḥi

text: Bratislava

glossary: yeshiva Torah


title: Bergmann, Hugo

abstract: (1883–1975), philosopher and early Zionist. Hugo Bergmann (also Shemu’el Hugo Bergman) was a member of the German-speaking Jewish minority of Prague in the generation most closely associated with his classmate and friend Franz Kafka. As a young student of philosophy and natural science, Bergmann was an active participant in the Prague philosophical salon of Berta Fanta, along with other Prague Jewish intellectuals of his generation including Felix Weltsch, Emil Utitz, Max Brod, and, more occasionally, Kafka.

imgDesc: Hugo Bergmann (center right) with Czechoslovakian President Tomáš Masaryk (left), in a photograph possibly taken at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. From Masaryk und das Judentum (Masaryk and the Jews), edited by Ernst Rychnovsky (Prague, 1931). (Leo Baeck Institute, New York).

text: Zionist

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka

text: Berta Fanta

text: Felix Weltsch

text: Emil Utitz

text: Max Brod

text: Maccabi

text: Bar Kochba

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Hit’aḥadut

glossary: Diaspora Yishuv


title: Romanian Literature

abstract: The first Jewish intellectuals, writers, and journalists writing in Romanian, in the second half of the nineteenth century, came predominantly from Bucovina and Galicia. As they settled in Moldavia or Walachia, they brought along a heritage acquired in Hasidic families; and they knew Hebrew and Yiddish. Many of their earliest literary efforts were in those languages, but most integrated quickly, adopting Romanian for their journalistic and literary work even as they treated exclusively Jewish topics. This generation and the one immediately following included the first journalists and editors of Jewish newspapers, among them the scholar and publisher Iuliu (Julius) Yehudah Barasch (1815–1863) as well as the Schwarzfeld brothers. Many had a thorough knowledge of German culture and were among the first to translate German classics, particularly the writings of Heinrich Heine, into Romanian.

imgDesc: unu, no. 26 (June 1930). A journal of the Dada movement edited by Saşa Pană. (Ars Libri, Ltd.)

text: Bucovina

text: Galicia

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: Hasidic

text: Iuliu (Julius) Yehudah Barasch

text: Schwarzfeld brothers

text: Cilibi Moise

text: humor

text: Moses Gaster

text: Moise Ronetti-Roman

text: assimilation

text: Yiddish literature

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Iacob Groper

text: Itsik Manger

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

text: Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea

text: A. L. (Abraham Leib) Zissu

text: Isac Ludo

text: Mântuirea

text: Felix Aderca

text: Beniamin Fundoianu

text: Marcel Iancu

text: Victor Brauner

text: Ilarie Voronca

text: Sesto Pals

text: shtetl

text: Sesto Pals

text: M. Blecher

text: Ion Călugăru

text: Ury Benador

text: Isac Peltz

text: Mihail Sebastian

text: Horia Carp

text: Iaşi

text: Emil Dorian

text: Veronica Porumbacu

text: Holocaust

text: pogroms

text: Transnistrian

text: Transylvania

text: Paul Celan

text: Bucharest

text: Florin Mugur

text: Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu

text: Zigu Ornea

text: Henri Wald

text: Revista cultului mozaic

text: Mircea Săucan

text: communism

text: Franz Werfel

text: Israil Bercovici

text: Itsik Manger

text: Moscow

text: Kishinev

text: Iacob Groper

text: Adam

text: Renaşterea noastră

subconcepts: The Image of Jews in Romanian Literature

subconcepts: Jewish Romanian Writing after World War I


title: Zylbercweig, Zalmen

abstract: (1894–1972), Yiddish theater historian and lexicographer. Zalmen Zylbercweig (Zilbertsvayg) was born in Ozorków, a small town near Łódź, to a religiously observant but reform-minded father who was a Yiddish and Hebrew writer. Zylbercweig was educated in both a progressive yeshiva and a commercial school. Attracted to the theater at an early age, he first performed with amateur Yiddish and Hebrew groups, then acted in professional companies, directed a troupe that performed in and around Łódź, produced Yiddish translations of European plays, and edited and contributed to numerous Yiddish publications.

text: theater

text: Łódź

text: yeshiva

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ester-Rokhl Kaminska


title: Polish State Yiddish Theater

abstract: State-funded theater established in November 1949 as a result of the merger and nationalization of two Yiddish theater companies based in Wrocław and Łódź. Headed by celebrated actress and stage director Ida Kamińska (Kaminski; 1899–1980), the theater toured between both cities. In 1955 it moved to Warsaw, where it has performed since 1970 in its own building on Plac Grzybowski. It is currently called Teatr Żydowski im. E. R. Kaminskiej (Ester-Rokhl Kaminski Yiddish Theater).

imgDesc: Letter from Ida Kaminska to Rachel Holzer and Jacob Weislitz, 1960. From Ida Kaminska in Warsaw to actress Rachel Holzer and Jacob Weislitz in Australia, 9 October 1960. Kaminska has enjoyed her recent trip to Istanbul and Israel and now is back in Warsaw, busy with performances, auditions, reading, meetings, and administrative work. She is sending two plays, which they are free to use or not, as they will. Seeking no remuneration, she hopes, however that they might send something to "Marysia" for copying the notes. In a few days the State Yiddish Theater will be leaving on a tour of the provinces. She asks Holzer and Weislitz to give her warm regards to old comrades from the theater. Kaminska's husband, Meir Melman, adds his greetings in a postscript. Yiddish. RG 535 Rachel Holzer Papers, F Kaminska. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Wrocław

text: Łódź

text: Kaminsk

text: Warsaw

text: Avrom Morevski

text: Jakub Rotbaum

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: The Dybbuk

text: Poland

text: Isaac Babel


title: Margoliot, Efrayim Zalman ben Menaḥem Manes

abstract: (1760–1828), merchant, halakhic authority, and rabbinic author. Efrayim Zalman ben Menaḥem Manes Margoliot (last name also rendered Margalioth) was born into a distinguished family and was counted among the most successful merchants of Brody. In 1817, he was granted a permit to establish a wholesale commercial establishment in Vienna together with several partners. The business remained in operation until 1837, about 10 years after Margoliot’s death.

text: Brody

text: bet midrash

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: approbation

text: Hasidism

text: Sabbatian

text: Heshel Tsoref


title: Jaszuński, Józef

abstract: (1881–1943), engineer, researcher, translator, and educator. Józef Jaszuński was born in Grodno to a wealthy family that provided him with both a traditional Jewish and a general education. Jaszuński studied physics and mathematics at Saint Petersburg University and at the Berlin Polytechnikum. Politically, he sympathized early on with the Zionist movement, but later identified with the Bund.

imgDesc: “Der europeyisher arbeter un di psikhotekhnik,” by Józef Jaszuński, n.d. Józef Jaszuński, “Der Europeyisher arbeter un di psikhotekhnik” (The European Worker and Psychotechnics), n.d. Yiddish. With the author's stamp on the last page: J. Jaszuński, Elektoralna 30, m. 33. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F35.12. (YIVO)

text: Grodno

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Bund

text: Russian Empire

text: Der fraynd

text: Vilna

text: ORT

text: Poland

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Kultur-lige

text: Warsaw

text: YIVO

text: Judenrat

text: Michał Weichert


title: Eilburg, Eli‘ezer

abstract: (ca. 1530–ca. 1580), physician and skeptic. Born in Braunschweig, Germany, Eilburg moved to Poznań in 1546. After a brief stay there, he moved to Ancona, Italy, where he studied medicine. Around 1552, he moved to Oleśnica in Silesia, and subsequently appears to have lived in various places in that region, and perhaps Moravia or Poland. He was imprisoned twice and was perhaps excommunicated, though it is not clear if this was a result of his unorthodox views.

text: Poznań

text: Silesia

text: Moravia

text: Poland

glossary: Maimonides Kabbalah


title: Messerer Family

abstract: Russian family of dancers and actors. Asaf Messerer (1903–1992) studied privately with Mikhail Mordkin in 1919 in Moscow and was later singled out by Aleksandr Gorsky, who placed him in an experimental class at the Bolshoi Ballet School (from which Messerer graduated in 1921). He then joined the ballet as a principal dancer.

imgDesc: Asaf Messerer in the role of Basil in the 1928 Bolshoi production of Don Quixote. (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: Moscow

text: Latvia


title: Rabbinowitz, Sha’ul Pinḥas

abstract: (1845–1910), scholar, translator, and Zionist activist. Sha’ul (Saul) Pinḥas Rabbinowitz, known also by the acronym Shefer (after his initials), was born in Taurage, in the Kaunas (Kovno) district of Lithuania. He spent his childhood in Shnipishok (Lith., Šnipiškės), a suburb of Vilna, and in 1868 was ordained as a rabbi at Yisra’el Salanter’s yeshiva in Kovno. Rabbinowitz subsequently worked as a tutor in the homes of wealthy Jewish families.

text: Zionist

text: Kaunas

text: Lithuania

text: Vilna

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: yeshiva

text: Ha-Magid

text: heders

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: pogroms

text: Russia

text: antisemitism

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Katowice

text: Land of Israel

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn


title: Ianovskaia, Sof'ia Aleksandrovna

abstract: (1896–1966), Soviet mathematician who specialized in logic and the history of mathematics. Ianovskaia was born Sof’ia Neimark in Pruzhany, now Belarus, the daughter of an accountant. She grew up in Odessa and attended a classical gymnasium. During the revolution, she was a student at the Odessa Higher Women’s Courses. Ianovskaia joined the Bolsheviks and served as a political commissar during the Civil War. Captured by the Whites, she faced a firing squad but survived.

text: Belarus

text: Odessa

text: Civil War

text: Communist Party

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union


title: Stein, Edmund

abstract: (ca. 1893–1943), Hebrew translator, writer, and Judaic studies scholar. Edmund (Menaḥem Mendel) Stein was born either in Dobromyl or Borynia, shtetls in eastern Galicia. He received a traditional education, continued his studies at a high school in Borysław, and later studied classical linguistics and ancient history in Kraków and Berlin, earning a doctoral degree. In 1929, he completed his studies at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, as a student of Leo Baeck and Julius Guttman.

text: Galicia

text: Kraków

text: Zionist

text: Tarbut

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Warsaw

text: Judenrat

text: Lublin


title: Minskii, Nikolai Maksimovich

abstract: (Pseudonym of N. M. Vilenkin; 1855–1937), poet and essay writer. Born in a village in the Vitebsk region of Belorussia, Nikolai Minskii graduated from a Russian gymnasium with high honors and received a degree in law from Saint Petersburg University. In 1882, he converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity in order to marry.

text: Vitebsk

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Razsvet

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres

text: pogroms

text: Akim Volynskii


title: Shapira, Ḥavah

abstract: (1879–1943) Hebrew writer. Ḥavah Shapira was born in Slavuta, Ukraine, to a scholarly and affluent family of Hasidic ancestry. Despite being raised in a traditional environment, she received a rich Jewish and secular education and even enjoyed the support of her family while pursuing her literary goals. From 1899, she received the encouragement and patronage of the writer Re’uven Brainin. Though their relationship intensified after she separated from her husband in 1903, it ended painfully. In 1900, Shapira had moved to Warsaw to begin her literary career, and in December 1901 her first story, “Ha-Shoshanah” (The Rose), was published in David Frishman’s weekly Ha-Dor. From 1903 she studied in Vienna and in 1906 moved to Bern, where four years later she received her Ph.D.

text: Ukraine

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Warsaw

text: David Frishman

text: Ha-Dor

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Prague

text: Zionist movement

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Terezín


title: Blessings, Curses, and Other Expressions (Talk)

abstract: As psycho-ostensive expressions that are highly characteristic formulaic utterances in Yiddish, blessings and curses are typically inserted parenthetically into longer statements and purport to reflect the speaker’s emotional attitude to the topic of conversation. Yiddish psycho-ostensives, like those in other languages (e.g., Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Irish) fall into several categories according to the psychic stance of the speaker toward the good or evil that may befall either the person talking or others. The passive acceptance of good or evil may be called recognitive; the active attitude of seeking or desiring is petitive; while that of shunning or fearing is fugitive. This terminology, along with the Greek roots for “self” and “others” (auto- and allo-), and the Latin roots for “good” and “evil” (bono- and malo-), allows us to classify all the speech acts expressed by Yiddish psycho-ostensives.

text: magic

text: demons

text: haynt

text: dead


title: Pasternak, Leonid

abstract: (1862–1945), painter. Born in Odessa to a poor innkeeper’s family of nine, Leonid Pasternak completed his gymnasium education in 1879. He then studied first at the Odessa Drawing School and between 1882 and 1886 at the Munich Art Academy. Upon his return to Odessa, he painted a series of impressionistic genre works depicting impoverished Jews. Pasternak was first acclaimed in Russia for his Chtenie pis’ma s rodiny (Letter from Home; 1889), a traditional genre scene that portrayed Russian army life in a realist style. In 1889, he married and settled in Moscow, becoming the father of the well-known writer Boris Pasternak. From 1894 to 1918 he taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture where he introduced moderate impressionism (a Russian version of French impressionism, with more muted colors) and followed new teaching methods.

imgDesc: Chtenie pis’ma s rodiny (A Letter from Home). Leonid Pasternak, 1889. Oil on canvas. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. (© The State Tretyakov Gallery)

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Boris Pasternak

text: Yoyel Engel

text: October Revolution of 1917

text: art education

text: S. An-Ski

text: Avraham Stybel

text: David Frishman

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Stybel


title: Debrecen

abstract: Town in Hungary, home to one of Hungary’s largest Jewish communities. Jews began settling legally in Debrecen, “the Calvinist Rome of Hungary,” after the Diet adopted Act Thirty-Nine of 1840, permitting Jews to settle in cities under royal authority. While only 118 Jews were living in Debrecen in 1848, in 1869 this number had grown to 1,920 and in 1900 it had reached 6,192.

text: Hungary

text: Miskolc

text: Jewish Congress

text: Budapest

text: trade

text: banking

text: agriculture

text: labor camps

text: Rezső Kasztner

glossary:
Neolog
Status Quo


title: Hebrew Literary Journals (Literary Journals)

abstract: The first Hebrew literary journals appeared in Galicia just when a literary center in that language began to flourish there in the early nineteenth century. The earliest examples were annuals or single publications of limited scope, such as Yosef Perl’s Tsir ne’eman (Tarnopol; 1813–1815) or Me’ir Letteris’s Ha-Tsefirah (Żółkiew; 1823). At the same time, maskilim in Galicia read periodicals that were issued in Vienna or Prague; among these were Shalom ben Ya‘akov ha-Kohen’s Bikure ha-‘itim (1820–1831), and Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport and Shneur Sachs’s Kerem ḥemed (1833–1843, 1854, 1856). As forums for the expression of ideas and scholarship, polemics and exegesis, the journals devoted limited space to belles lettres; that which was printed was mainly satiric, either translated (from ancient writers such as Lucian) or original (Yitsḥak Erter, Yosef Perl). Maskilim of Galicia also produced the yearbook He-Ḥaluts (Lwów, 1852–1865; then in Frankfurt, Prague, and Vienna until 1889), published by Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr, which expressed a radical maskilic line in the battle against rabbinical Judaism. It also influenced the antirabbinic and anti-Talmudic ideas that developed in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s.

imgDesc: Title page of Ha-Boker or (The Morning Light), Warsaw, 1880. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Yosef Perl

text: Me’ir Letteris

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Prague

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-‘Ivri

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: Otsar ha-sifrut

text: Gershom Bader

text: Lithuania

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ha-Asif

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ha-Yom

text: Yehudah Leib Kantor

text: David Frishman

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Sha’ul Pinḥas Rabbinowitz

text: Luaḥ aḥi’asaf

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: David Frishman

text: Ha-Dor

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: Shemu’el Leib Gordon

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Yeruḥam Fishel Lachower

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Eli‘ezer Steinman

text: Moscow

text: Avraham Yosef Stybel

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: S. Y. Agnon

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Ḥayim Hazaz

text: Soviet

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Lwów

text: Vilna

text: Kovno

text: Kolot

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Leah Goldberg

text: Malki’el Lusternik

text: prose

text: poetry

text: Holocaust

glossary: Haskalah Magid


title: Gildin, Khayim

abstract: (1884–1944), Yiddish writer. Born in Nikopol’, Ukraine, into a worker’s family, Khayim Gildin was 12 years old when he began working in a factory. He was then twice arrested for revolutionary activity. From 1908 to 1914, he lived and worked in Warsaw, where he published articles on labor issues and belonged to the circle of literati directly influenced by Y. L. Peretz. Gildin returned to Ukraine in 1915 and lived in Odessa. After the 1917 Revolution he was a member of the Fareynikte, the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party.

text: Ukraine

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Odessa

text: 1917 Revolution

text: Fareynikte

text: Moscow

text: Moyshe Taytsh

text: Shmuel Persov

text: Yoysef Rabin

text: Perets Markish


title: Galich, Aleksandr

abstract: (Pseudonym of Aleksandr Arkad’evich Ginzburg; 1918–1977), poet, songwriter, playwright, screenwriter, and prose writer. Born in Moscow and raised in Sebastopol, Galich was celebrated in the 1940s and 1950s for his dramatic works (including Vas vyzyvaet Taimyr [The Taimyr Is Calling You]) and screenplays (Vernye druz’ia [Eternal Friends]; Na semi vetrakh [To Seven Winds]). His lasting fame, however, rested on the songs—widely understood as countercultural and satirical—that he wrote and performed beginning in the early 1960s. Accompanying himself on guitar, Galich staged shows throughout the Soviet Union at universities, clubs, and private apartments.

text: Moscow

text: samizdat


title: Marshak, Samuil Iakovlevich

abstract: (1887–1964), poet and writer. Samuil Marshak’s father, a soapmaker, descended from a family of rabbis. His mother was the daughter of the Vitebsk government rabbi, in whose house Marshak began to study Hebrew at the age of six. Marshak’s talents later drew the attention of the art historian Vladimir Stasov and the writer Maksim Gorky.

imgDesc: Vot kakoi rasseiannyi (That’s How Absentminded!), by Samuil Marshak (Moscow and Leningrad: Detskaia Literatura, 1937). Illustrations by B. Konashevitsa. (YIVO)

text: Vitebsk

text: Zionists

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Razsvet

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Shimen Frug

text: children’s literature

text: Mikhoels

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Lithuania

text: Babi Yar


title: Il’f, Il’ia Arnol’dovich

abstract: (1897–1937), Russian writer. With Evgenii Petrov, Il’ia Il’f (originally surnamed Fainzil’berg) wrote some of Soviet Russia’s most exuberant satires. Their two novels, Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (The Twelve Chairs; 1928) and Zolotoi telenok (The Little Golden Calf; 1931), slipped past censorship to become the texts through which generations of knowing readers mocked Soviet reality. Innocent enough to be reading material for adolescents, the novels were actually cynical works that adults memorized in part or in full. Quotations from the books, as comments on post-Soviet society, continue to turn up in the Russian-language press on three continents.

imgDesc: Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov during their trip to America on behalf of Pravda, with Florence Tron, their American translator and driver, 1935. (Aleksandra Il’f)

text: Russia

text: censorship

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union


title: Levin, Doyvber

abstract: (1904–1941), Russian writer. Doyvber (Boris Mikhailovich) Levin was born in the shtetl of Liady, Mogilev province. In 1921 he entered Petrograd University, transferring the next year to the theater department of the State Institute for the History of the Arts, from which he graduated in 1928. In the 1930s he lived in Leningrad, where he published eight books, most of them for young people, and wrote the scenario for the children’s film Fed’ka. Levin fought in the Soviet–Finnish War of 1939–1940. He was killed on 17 December 1941, on the Leningrad front.

text: shtetl

text: Russian literature

text: Russia

text: Samuil Marshak

text: civil war

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Belarus

text: Solomon Iudovin


title: Chernyi, Sasha

abstract: (Pseudonym of Aleksandr Mikhailovich Glikberg; 1880–1932), Russian poet. Born to a pharmacist’s family in Odessa, Sasha Chernyi was baptized at the age of 10 in order to bypass the numerus clausus. In 1895 he ran away from home to Saint Petersburg. In 1904 Chernyi debuted as a feuilletonist in the Zhitomir newspaper Volynskii vestnik (Volhynian Messenger). In 1905, his poem “Chepukha” (Gibberish) appeared in the satirical magazine Zritel’ (The Spectator), signed Sasha Chernyi. Although his first poetry collection, Pestrye motivy (Sundry Themes [or Sundry Tunes]), came out in 1906, Chernyi considered the next collection, Satiry (Satires; 1910), his true entrance into literature.

text: Odessa

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Zhitomir

text: shtetl


title: Levin, Lipman

abstract: (1877–1946), Yiddish and Hebrew prose writer. Lipman Levin was born in Mogilev (mod. Mahilyow), Belorussia, to a prosperous family. A precocious boy, he studied religious and secular subjects and later worked as a teacher. In 1900, he arrived in Warsaw, where, following his successful debut as a story writer in the newspaper Der yud (The Jew), he contributed to other Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals, including Di yudishe folks-tsaytung (The Jewish People’s Paper), coedited by his brother-in-law Khayim Dovid Hurvits, a prominent journalist and editor.

imgDesc: “Obegeben dos gelt!” by Lipman Levin, 1895. Skit by Lipman Levin, “Obegeben dos gelt!” (Hand over the Money!), 1895. Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F43.3. (YIVO)

text: prose

text: Belorussia

text: Warsaw

text: Der yud

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Fraynd

text: Vilna

text: Moscow

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Perets Markish

text: Zionists

text: Bundists

text: Eynikayt

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Perl, Yosef

abstract: (1773–1839), educator, writer, and a central figure in the Haskalah. Yosef Perl was born in Tarnopol to a wealthy family. His father, Todros, was a wine merchant and for some time also leased the communal concession for the tax on meat. In his youth, much to the displeasure of his father, Yosef was attracted to Hasidism. He became a partner in his father’s business and later an independent tax farmer. On business trips to Vienna, Hungary, and Galicia he met many maskilim and was influenced in particular by those in Brody, especially Dov Ber Gintsburg. Perl was also inspired by Menaḥem Mendel Lefin, who for a time lived nearby.

imgDesc: Yosef Perl. Engraving, artist unknown. The medals were awarded to Perl for his educational activities by Tsar Alexander I in 1816, when Tarnopol was under Russian rule, and by Austrian Emperor Francis I in 1820. (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: Tarnopol

text: Hasidism

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Haskalah

text: crafts

text: industry

text: seminary

text: Vilna Gaon

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Peter Beer

text: parody

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

text: Hebrew literature

text: satire

text: Zhidachov

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Land of Israel

text: Prague

text: rabbinate

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Ber (Birkental) of Bolechów

glossary: Haskalah Gaon tsadik Talmud


title: Wise Men of Chelm

abstract: In East European Jewish folklore, the city of Chelm (Pol., Chełm; Yid., Khelem) functions as an imaginary city of fools, similar to that of the Greek Abdera, the English Gotham, and the German Schilda, among numerous others. The legendary “town of fools,” often presented ironically as “The Wise Men of . . . ,” is a feature common to most European folklores. Chelm, as was the case with its counterparts in other cultures, spawned hundreds of tales describing outlandish naiveté and stupidity that have been printed in dozens of editions in a variety of languages. Many of these are titled The Wise Men of Chelm. Chelm, located approximately 65 kilometers southeast of Lublin, had a Jewish population from at least the fourteenth century, and was a real town whose residents bore no connection to the stories. If anything, the town was known for Torah scholarship.

text: folklore

text: Chełm

text: Lublin

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Industry

abstract: Imperial Russia and other areas of Eastern Europe did not become fully industrialized until the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, even in its earliest stages, Jews played prominent roles in industry. The two main reasons for this were first, the emergence of a Jewish bourgeoisie, some of whose members had accumulated vast wealth that to a certain extent was invested in industrial development; and second, the Russian government’s policy of seeking to transform the empire’s Jewish residents into contributors who would play a beneficial role in the Russian society and economy. During the first half of the nineteenth century, industrialization in the Russian Empire (which at that time included much of Poland) had begun at a sluggish rate. After the Crimean War (1855), however, production was financed by private wealth, under tight governmental supervision. Gathering speed under new conditions, by the 1880s and 1890s industrialization had advanced rapidly.

imgDesc: Workers in the Worzel and Daar raincoat factory, Tarnów, 1925. (YIVO)

text: Russian Empire

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Brody

text: Kiev

text: Brodskii family

text: philanthropy

text: Belorussia

text: Vitebsk

text: Grodno

text: Suvalki

text: Czechoslovakia

text: trade

text: Silesia

text: Łódź

text: Białystok

text: Warsaw

text: Epstein

text: Natanson

text: Kronenberg

text: Czech lands

text: Brno

text: USSR

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary

text: Sabbath

text: Białystok

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Bund

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
Congress Poland


title: Rosenthal, Leon

abstract: (Yehudah Leib; 1817–1887), business entrepreneur, public figure, and philanthropist. Leon Rosenthal received both a religious and a secular education, and he was particularly drawn to Hebrew literature. His father Mosheh’s house in Vilna was a popular place for maskilim to gather.

text: Hebrew literature

text: Vilna

text: Brest

text: Haskalah

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Gintsburg

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Riga


title: Turda

abstract: An ancient town in the central northern region of Romania, on the Arieş River, 30 km southeast of Cluj. Known in German as Thorenburg and in Hungarian as Torda, Turda was an important center for salt mining and trading. Jews were not allowed to live in Turda until the middle of the nineteenth century, as Austrian imperial authorities imposed a ban (introduced between 1693 and 1700) to prevent them from settling in mining areas. It was only after 1850 that restrictions were gradually lifted; they were formally repealed in January 1860.

text: Romania

text: Cluj

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Orthodox

text: Budapest

text: Bucharest

text: Constanța

text: Poland

text: Slovakia


title: Minorities Treaties

abstract: Informal designation for a series of international agreements concluded following World War I. The Minorities Treaties were drawn up between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan), on the one hand, and 14 newly created or expanded states in Europe and the Middle East (Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia), on the other hand, governing eligibility for citizenship in the latter states and granting citizens belonging to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities certain collective rights. Among the provisions granted by the treaties were the right to equal treatment and protection by the state for their members; to use minority languages for specified public purposes, including in courts and elementary schools; to establish and control educational, religious, and social welfare institutions for their groups; and to receive a proportional share of state expenditures for educational, religious, and welfare services.

text: World War I

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Estonia

text: Hungary

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Ukraine

text: Galician

text: Silesia


title: Českožidovské Listy

abstract: Organ of the Czech Jewish movement. The first issue of Českožidovské listy (Czech Jewish Press) was published in 1894 under the editorship of Moric Schönbaum, who was succeeded by Jakub Scharf in 1896. The impulse for creating the journal came from the Národní Jednota Českožidovská (National Czech Jewish Union), which was founded in 1893.

text: Viktor Vohryzek

text: Prague


title: Banet, Mordekhai ben Avraham

abstract: (1753–1829), chief rabbi of Moravia. Mordekhai ben Avraham Banet (Markus Benedikt) achieved great fame during his 40-year tenure (1789–1829) as rabbi of Nikolsburg (Mikulov), head of its large yeshiva, and chief rabbi of Moravia. Throughout his career, he dealt extensively with the revolutionary political, social, and cultural changes that were transforming the lives of his Central European Jewish constituency. Yet unlike the confrontational Orthodoxy initiated by his younger colleague, Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer) of Pressburg (Bratislava), Banet’s religious philosophy reflected a more pragmatic traditionalism that rejected certain manifestations of modernity while acquiescing to others.

text: Mikulov

text: yeshiva

text: Orthodoxy

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Bratislava

text: Hungary

text: yeshiva

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Arad

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Haskalah

text: approbation

text: Herz Homberg

text: approbation

text: Sabbath


title: Gurshteyn, Aron

abstract: (1895–1941), Soviet Russian and Yiddish literary critic and scholar. Aron Gurshteyn was born in Chernigov guberniia, Ukraine, to the family of a transport official. Because his father frequently relocated, Gurshteyn studied in various religious and secular schools and with private tutors. He graduated from a Jewish secondary school in Vilna in 1913, and in 1916 began studying Hebrew literature at Petrograd University. During the civil war, Gurshteyn served in the Red Army, and in 1921 he settled in Moscow, working as a journalist and educator.

text: Ukraine

text: Vilna

text: Hebrew literature

text: Moscow

text: theater

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Mendele Moykher-Sfori

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Yashe Bronshteyn

text: Der Nister

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Soviet Union


title: Planning and Standardization of Yiddish (Language)

abstract: The planning of Yiddish, insofar as both formulation and implementation are concerned, has primarily come from nongovernmental sources (as is also the case with English, German, Italian, and many other languages), except as will be briefly noted in this article with respect to the Soviet Union. Thus, any discussion of language planning for Yiddish is necessarily restricted to corpus planning (i.e., to changes within the language per se, for example, in reviews of older terms, selections among alternatives and synonyms, development of neologisms, and revisions of orthography), rather than extended to status-planning efforts that deal with societal forces (schools, publishers, theaters, government agencies, etc.) outside of language per se.

imgDesc: Participants and instructors in a refresher course for Yiddish teachers at YIVO, Vilna, 1938. (Front row, left to right) Khayim Shloyme Kazdan, J. Shapiro, Max Weinreich, and Zelig Kalmanovitch. (YIVO)

text: YIVO

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Ya‘akov Shemu’el Bick

text: Czernowitz

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: YIVO

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Birobidzhaner shtern

text: Russia

text: Max Weinreich

text: Nathan Birnbaum

text: Poland

text: Holocaust

text: Beys Yankev


title: Târgu Neamţ

abstract: Town in the Moldavian region of Romania, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. Jewish settlement in Târgu Neamț (also Tîrgu Neamț) dates from the second half of the seventeenth century: Jews were first mentioned in a document from 1685, and the oldest tombstones in the Jewish cemetery are dated 1677 and 1689. A synagogue was built in 1737.

imgDesc: Members of the Torah mi-Tsiyon (Torah from Zion) Literary Circle, Târgu Neamt, 1904. Two men hold up placards with the organization’s bylaws. (YIVO)

text: Moldavian

text: Romania

text: Buhuşi

text: ritual murder

text: Passover

text: Piatra Neamț

text: Transnistria

glossary: Talmud Torah responsa Kabbalah


title: Fanta, Berta

abstract: (1866–1918), literary and intellectual figure. Berta Fanta (née Sohr) came from an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family living in the small town of Libochovice (Libochowitz), near Prague. She was an intellectual who hosted a famous philosophical salon. The gatherings that took place in the Fanta family’s home over the two-decade period before World War I were attended by professors at the German university in Prague, including Albert Einstein and Christian von Ehrenfels; intellectuals of the younger generation, such as Franz Kafka and Max Brod; and occasional visitors, such as the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner.

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Hugo Bergmann


title: Kronenberg Family

abstract: Polish bankers and industrialists, active in Warsaw in the nineteenth century. Samuel Eleazar Kronenberg (Lejzor Hirszowicz Kronenberg; 1773–1826), the patriarch of the family, had 13 children and founded the S. L. Kronenberg Bank. Originally from Wyszogród, Kronenberg was influenced by the Haskalah and attended the “German” synagogue on Warsaw’s Daniłowiczowska Street. In 1808, however, he broke with Jewish tradition, shaved his beard, and began to wear European-style clothing. On friendly terms with Poles from aristocratic families, he was allowed to live outside the Jewish district and belonged to the Masonic lodge, Bouclier du Nord. Eight of Kronenberg’s children survived, including five sons, but only the eldest, Ludwik (1783–1882), remained Jewish and was committed to his father’s synagogue. Ludwik Kronenberg worked as a banker and agent for the stock exchange.

text: bankers

text: industrialists

text: Warsaw

text: Haskalah

text: Poland

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Epstein family

text: Jan Bloch

text: assimilation

text: Jutrzenka

text: economic life


title: Bass, Shabetai ben Yosef

abstract: (1641–1718), biblical exegete, bibliographer, printer, and cantor. Shabetai ben Yosef Bass was born in Kalisz, Poland. His parents were murdered in wartime violence in 1655; Bass and his older brother, Ya‘akov Strimmers (d. 1686), a renowned kabbalist, survived and fled to Prague. In Prague, Bass received a traditional education; studied secular subjects, including Latin; and, because of his pleasant voice, was taught liturgical singing. He subsequently accepted a position as a basso (bassista) singer in the Altneuschul in Prague, from which the surname Bass (Heb., Meshorer) is derived.

text: cantor

text: Kalisz

text: Poland

text: Prague

text: Altneuschul

text: printing

text: Breslau

text: Silesia


title: Stern, Abraham

abstract: (1762/69–1842), mathematician, inventor, translator, and censor. As an inventor, a committed adherent of Orthodox religious education, and a holder of various official posts, Abraham Stern was highly regarded in administrative circles as well as by broad sections of the Jewish public. By virtue of his talents, the Hrubieszów-born watchmaker was invited to Warsaw on the initiative of the leading reformer Stanisław Staszic. There Stern developed numerous complicated apparatuses, including an agricultural machine and, in 1813, a calculator. The latter device was presented to Tsar Alexander I, who, in acknowledgment, awarded Stern a state pension. On the basis of these and other inventions, Stern was welcomed into the Polish Academy of Sciences.

text: Warsaw

text: censorship

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: heder

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Tsefirah


title: Hickl, Max

abstract: (1874–1924), publisher and Zionist leader active mainly in Brno (Brünn), Moravia. Born in Slavkov u Brna (Austerlitz), Moravia, Max Hickl came from a poor family and was self-taught. As a friend of Theodor Herzl, he helped to found the organization that eventually became Labor Zionism.

text: Zionist

text: Brno

text: Jüdische Volksstimme

text: Prague

text: Galicia

text: assimilation

text: Makhzikey ha-Das


title: Bródy, Sándor

abstract: (1863–1924), novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer. Born into a provincial Hungarian Jewish merchant family, Sándor Bródy grew up in the town of Eger. His father was typical of his generation in that he was imbued with Hungarian patriotism while remaining faithful to traditional Judaism. In the 1870s, the elder Bródy’s various business ventures failed, and he moved his family to Budapest. After a rather carefree childhood, Sándor Bródy got to know the seamier side of city life. As a young writer he was among the first in Hungarian literature to focus attention on the urban proletariat, and the first to introduce the coarse and pungent vernacular of the big city into literary works.

text: Budapest

text: Hungarian literature

text: Hungary

text: assimilationist


title: Weissmandel, Mikha’el Dov Ber

abstract: (1903–1958), a leading figure in rescue efforts in Slovakia during the Holocaust and a staunch opponent of Zionism after the war. An acclaimed student in the Slovak yeshivas of Sered, Tirnoy, and Nitra, Mikha’el Dov Ber Weissmandel also examined Hebrew rabbinical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In 1935 he participated in a delegation headed by his father-in-law, Rabbi Shemu’el David ha-Levi Ungar, leader of Slovak Orthodox Jews, to the Agudas Yisroel gathering in Palestine.

text: Slovakia

text: Holocaust

text: Zionism

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Gisi Fleischmann

text: Bratislava

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: ghettos

text: Auschwitz Protocols

text: Rezső Kasztner

text: Joint Distribution Committee

text: Orthodox

text: historiography


title: Rakovsky, Puah

abstract: (1865–1955), educator, Zionist, and feminist. Puah Rakovsky was born in Białystok, the oldest of 15 children, into a traditional Jewish family. Although most Jewish girls of her time received little Jewish education, her prosperous parents enrolled her in a heder and subsequently hired a tutor for her in Hebrew and Yiddish texts, as well as for secular subjects. Her studying came to an end when she was married off, much against her will, at the age of 16 to a yeshiva student, even though she had lost her faith. By the time she was 20, she had a son and a daughter. Persuading her parents and husband to allow her to study as an extern for a teaching license with the claim that she could then support the family, she finally succeeded in becoming a teacher. She then secured a divorce from her first husband. She subsequently married twice more for love and gave birth to another daughter in 1903.

text: Zionist

text: Białystok

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Łomża

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Leon Trotsky

glossary: heder yeshiva


title: Rosin, Shmuel

abstract: (1890–1941), Yiddish poet and short-story writer. Born in Shumiachi, Belorussia, into the family of a village trader and coachman, Shmuel Rosin received a traditional Talmudic education, but around 1905 was influenced by socialist ideas and became involved in the Bundist movement. He settled in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Dnipropetrovs’k) and worked as a painter and tinsmith. Subsequently, in the second decade of the 1900s, he spent time in Odessa, Kharkov, Penza, and Jewish agricultural colonies in southern Russia.

text: Belorussia

text: Bundist

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Odessa

text: Kharkov

text: Russia

text: Minsk

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Moscow

text: Di royte velt

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Yoysef Rabin

text: Shmuel Halkin


title: Frenk, Azriel Natan

abstract: (1863–1924), writer, journalist, and historian. Azriel Natan (Nosn) Frenk was a seminal figure in early Hebrew- and Yiddish-language journalism and literature in Warsaw. Renowned for translating the Zohar, Hasidic legends, and Polish literature, he also wrote numerous popular works on the history of Polish Jews.

text: Warsaw

text: Kielce

text: Zionist movement

text: Russia

text: Sha’ul Pinḥas Rabbinowitz

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Melits

text: Yitskhok Leybush Peretz

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: Haynt

text: Hasidism

text: Opatów


title: Levin, Yehudah Leib (poet)

abstract: (1844–1925), Hebrew and Yiddish poet and essayist. Yehudah Leib Levin (also known by the literary acronym Yehalel) was born in Minsk; his grandfather was a Hasidic rabbi. In 1862, Levin married and moved to the town of Puchowitz, where he resumed his religious studies and was drawn to Lubavitch Hasidism. However, he soon rejected his traditional upbringing.

imgDesc: Yehudah Leib Levin with a handwritten inscription of a verse from his Hebrew poem, “El ha-korim” (To the Reader): “All my joy in life I have ruined with my pen / Its future I have slashed mercilessly. / Only my pen is left, my portion and my inheritance / And I give it to you with all my soul and all my senses.” (Asher Barash Gnazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

text: poet

text: Minsk

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-Melits

text: Kiev

text: Brodskii family

text: Zhitomir

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Aharon Shemu’el Lieberman

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: pogroms

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionism

text: censorship

text: Warsaw


title: Zitron, Shemu’el Leib

abstract: (1860–1930), Hebrew and Yiddish journalist, writer, and critic. Shemu’el Leib Zitron was born in Minsk and received most of his education from his father. After his father’s death in 1870, Zitron studied at various yeshivas, including Volozhin (1875–1876), where he was attracted to the Haskalah. In 1876 he went to Vienna, where he befriended the writer and editor Perets Smolenskin.

text: Minsk

text: Volozhin

text: Haskalah

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Breslau

text: Seminary

text: Ha-Magid

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Zionist

text: Warsaw

text: Sha’ul Pinḥas Rabbinowitz

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Hebrew literature

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Zeman

text: historiography

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Der yud

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moment

glossary:
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Mandelkern, Shelomoh

abstract: (1846–1902), Hebrew poet, author of a major biblical concordance. Born in Mlynów, Volhynia, Shelomoh Mandelkern received a broad traditional education. At the age of 16 he was sent to Dubno to continue his studies, and for some time he lived in Kock (Kotsk), Poland. There he studied Kabbalah and Hasidism with David, the son of Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk. Drawn to secular studies in the early 1860s, Mandelkern began to send articles to the Hebrew press. While attending rabbinical seminaries from 1865, first in Zhitomir and then in Vilna, he associated with the poet Adam ha-Kohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn). Under the latter’s patronage, Mandelkern published his first book of poetry, the biblical long poem Bat-Sheva‘ (1866). In that year he also published a collection of satirical verses called Ḥitsim shenunim (Sharp Arrows), as well as a Hebrew translation of the story “‘Ezra ha-sofer” (Ezra the Scribe) by Ludwig Philippson.

imgDesc: Postcard celebrating Hebrew authors Perets Smolenskin (center) and (clockwise from top left) Shelomoh Mandelkern, Mordekhai Tsevi Mane, Avraham Ber Gottlober, and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Publisher unknown, Russian Empire. (YIVO)

text: Dubno

text: Poland

text: Hasidism

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: Zhitomir

text: Vilna

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: poetry

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Odessa

text: Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia

text: Russia

text: Ha-Melits

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: pogroms


title: Dorian, Emil

abstract: (1891–1956), writer and translator. The son of a teacher of German, Emil Dorian (originally Lustig) received his early education at Jewish schools in Bucharest. After graduating from medical school in that city, he was sent to the front as a physician during World War I, even though, as a Jew, he was not yet a Romanian citizen. After a two-year medical specialization in France, he returned to Romania and worked as a physician until the end of his life, publishing numerous books on popular medicine. After World War II, he became involved in Jewish community life in Bucharest as a secretary general and afterward as director of the documentary library and archives of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania.

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Yiddish poetry

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

text: Romania


title: Silesia

abstract: (Pol., Śląsk; Ger., Schlesien; Cz., Slezsko), a region at the borders of Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland. Silesia was disputed territory from the tenth century. Around 990, it was separated from the Bohemian lands and became part of Poland. In the period of the regional fracturing of Poland, the majority of the Silesian princes accepted the sovereignty of the Czech king, which Kazimierz the Great eventually acknowledged, abdicating Silesia to Bohemia. The Habsburgs ruled it from 1526, and as a result of the Silesian Wars (1740–1763), the majority of its territory came under Prussian rule, with only the southeastern regions remaining in the realm of the Habsburgs. The latter region, Austrian Silesia—comprising the principalities of Teschen (Pol., Cieszyn; Cz., Těšín), Troppau (Pol., Opawa; Cz., Opava), and Jägerndorf (Pol., Karniów, Cz., Krnov)—remained under Habsburg rule from 1742 to 1918. After World War I, the Opava and Krnov areas of Austrian Silesia became part of Czechoslovakia, while the Cieszyn region was to be divided according to the results of a plebiscite, which never took place, however, due to the earlier annexation of the western part of this region by Czechoslovakia during the Polish–Soviet war in 1920. The remaining part of Cieszyn region, together with the eastern strip of Prussian Upper Silesia, became Polish and was made the Autonomous Silesian Voivodeship in 1922. This was enlarged with the annexation from Czechoslovakia of the western part of Cieszyn region in 1938. The majority of Upper Silesia and all of Lower Silesia remained part of Germany. After World War II, all of German Silesia was annexed to Poland.

imgDesc: Silesia before 1939.

text: Bohemia, Moravia

text: Poland

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Wrocław

text: tombstones

text: pogroms

text: Shabetai Bass

text: leasing

text: tavernkeeping

text: Haskalah

text: Seminary

text: trade

text: industry

text: Katowice

text: Russian Empire

text: Galicia

text: Orthodoxy

text: Hasidism

text: Holocaust

text: Kaunas

text: Terezín

text: ghettos

text: Będzin

text: Ostrava

text: Kielce

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Wrocław

text: Katowice

text: Bielsko

text: Biała


title: Monuments and Memorials

abstract: Jewish tradition marks milestones in the life cycle with domestic commemorative acts and artifacts, including yortsayt candles, tombstones, fast days, and even the pinch of a Sabbath challah as a burnt offering to commemorate the destruction of the ancient temple. Beyond the memorials of daily religious observance, there are also larger, communal, and even collective memorials and monuments such as the remains of ancient synagogues, cemeteries, and ghetto walls, as well as ruins, artifacts, museums, and historical markers of more recent catastrophes such as the Holocaust.

imgDesc: Richard Feder at a memorial ceremony at the former Terezín concentration camp, Czechoslovakia, 1969. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: life cycle

text: tombstones

text: Sabbath

text: Holocaust

text: Prague

text: Altneuschul

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Estonia

text: Belarus

text: Holocaust

text: Vilnius

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Mathias Strashun

text: Warsaw

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Mordekhai Anielewicz

text: Lublin

text: memory

text: Sandomierz

text: Łódź

text: Kraków

text: Soviet Union

text: Minsk

text: Latvia

text: Babi Yar

text: Kiev

text: Terezín

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Budapest

glossary: Torah Talmud Gaon


title: Chorin, Ferenc

abstract: Name of both a father and son who were Hungarian politicians and industrialists. Ferenc Chorin Sr. (1842–1925) was a leader in the mining industry; his son Ferenc Chorin Jr. (1879–1964) was a lawyer and industrial leader. Both served in the Hungarian parliament.

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Arad

text: religious reform

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Manfréd Weiss


title: Mosheh Me’ir ben El‘azar Perles of Prague

abstract: (1666–1739), communal scribe, preacher, author, and burial society official; a descendant of Yehudah Löw (Maharal of Prague) and an ancestor of El‘azar Fleckeles. A native of Prague, Me’ir Perles studied under Avraham Gombiner (the “Magen Avraham”) in Kalisz. He traveled through Germany and Holland, working for Samson Wertheimer (a court Jew and rabbi in Vienna) and remaining under his patronage after returning to Prague.

text: Yehudah Löw

text: El‘azar Fleckeles

text: Prague

text: Avraham Gombiner

text: Kalisz

text: Purim

text: Sabbath

text: Golem


title: Pshiskhe Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Line of Polish rabbinic leaders. The Pshiskhe Hasidic dynasty emerged from the town of Przysucha (Yid., Pshiskhe), which along with Kozienice (Kozhenits) and Lublin became a major center of Polish Hasidism. Pshiskhe was a school as well as a dynasty. Its founder, Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Rabinowitz (or Rabinowicz; 1766–1814; known as the Holy Jew), introduced an elitist, rationalistic Hasidism that centered on Talmudic study and formed a counterpoint to the miracle-centered Hasidism of Lublin.

imgDesc: Major Hasidic courts, 1815–1929. (Based on a map prepared for the exhibition "Time of the Hasidism." by Elżbieta Długosz, The Historical Museum of Kraków—Old Synagogue)

text: Lublin

text: Hasidism

text: David of Lelov

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Simḥah Bunem

text: Mikulov

text: Danzig

text: Sabbatian

text: Avraham Yehoshu‘a Heshel of Apt

text: Opatów

text: Ger

text: Vurk

text: Aleksander

text: Izhbits

text: Holocaust

text: Warsaw

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin


title: Ropshits-Dzikov Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Hasidic dynasty founded by Naftali Tsevi Horowitz of Ropshits (1760–1827), a leader of Hasidism in Galicia. Naftali Tsevi was a student of Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov (1745–1815) and, to a lesser extent, of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak, the Seer of Lublin (1745–1815), and Yisra’el of Kozhenits (1737–1814). After the death of his teachers, Horowitz became the leading figure of the Hasidic movement in much of Galicia, though he never served as a leader of Polish Hasidism as a whole. He was also well known for his sense of humor.

text: Hasidism

text: Galicia

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak

text: Lublin

text: Yisra’el of Kozhenits

text: Pshiskhe

text: Zhidachov

text: Tsevi Elimelekh of Dinov

text: Haskalah

text: religious reform

text: Sandz

text: Belz

glossary: tsadik Haskalah responsa


title: About this Article (Ghettos)

abstract: To treat the Nazi ghettoization of Jews during the Holocaust, this entry comprises three articles. Establishment of Ghettos surveys the types of ghettos created and reasons for their creation; Life in Ghettos treats the ways in which ghettoized Jews organized and conducted their daily lives; and Ghetto Police describes the role that Jews played in the enforcement of ghetto regulations. For further discussion, see Armed Resistance; Holocaust; Judenräte and Other Representative Bodies; Killing Centers; and Labor Camps.

imgDesc: Children digging for discarded bits of coal, Łódź ghetto, ca. 1941. Photograph by Mendel Grossman. (YIVO)

text: Holocaust

text: Armed Resistance

text: Holocaust

text: Killing Centers

text: Labor Camps


title: Calahora Family

abstract: A family of physicians, pharmacists, community leaders, and Jewish scholars in Poland from the second half of the sixteenth century until the twentieth century. Branches of the Calahora family were also known by the names Kalahora, Kolahari, Kalafri, Landsberg, and Pozen.

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: trade

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: banking

text: Poznań

text: Piotrków

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Responsa
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Iampol’skii, Boris Samoilovich

abstract: (1912–1972), Russian-language writer. Boris Iampol’skii was born and raised on the Jewish outskirts of the provincial Ukrainian town of Belaia Tserkov’, where his father worked at a mill and his mother owned a small dry goods store. Although Iampol’skii left home in 1927, the impressions of his Jewish childhood informed his work for the rest of his life.

text: shtetl

text: Doyvber Levin

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sholem Asch

text: Holocaust

text: Kiev

text: Soviet Union

text: shtetl

text: heder

text: shtetl

text: censorship

text: Magic

text: Vasilii Grossman

glossary: heder rebbe


title: Reich, Leon

abstract: (1879–1929), Zionist leader in Galicia and independent Poland. Leon Reich completed his law degree at the University of Lwów and then studied at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He became committed to the Zionist movement as a student and was one of the founders of the Union of Jewish Students (Ognisko) and of the Zionist student organization in Galicia (Emunah). He made a name for himself as an effective journalist and publicist and was editor of the Almanach żydowski in Lwów, to which he contributed many articles, and of the Polish-language Zionist weekly Wschód. He was also active in the struggle to democratize Jewish life in Galicia and campaigned unsuccessfully to be elected to the Austrian Reichsrat in 1911. During World War I, he served in the legal department of the Austrian Army.

imgDesc: Leon Reich (right) with J. Tennenblatt, Alexander Hausmann, and Michael Ringel, photographed while being held hostage by a Polish military patrol (uniformed men, standing, first and second from left), Przemyśl, 1918. These four Zionist leaders from Lwów were taken hostage in order to guarantee the “good conduct” of Jews in Lwów following a pogrom in which Polish troops killed 73 Jews suspected of collaborating with Ukrainian forces trying to take control of the city from the Poles. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Chwila

text: Kraków

text: Warsaw


title: Beys Yankev

abstract: The Agudas Yisroel network of schools for girls. The first Beys Yankev school was established in Kraków in 1917 by Sarah Schenirer, who sought to fight the spread of secularization and acculturation among Orthodox women—who until then had received no formal Jewish education. The institution, which achieved great success, was supported by Orthodox public figures and was adopted in 1919 by Agudas Yisroel. In 1922, Agudas Yisroel in Poland began to publish a Beys Yankev journal, which spread the idea of establishing girls’ schools to form a national network.

imgDesc: Pupils of a Beys Yankev school posing with glasses of milk probably provided by a benefactor, Zborów, Poland, 1930s. The Yiddish sign reads: “Beys Yankev. Let us walk in G-d’s light.” This photograph, as is the case with many from the era, was taken outside because the photographer did not have adequate light to take a picture indoors. (YIVO)

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Kraków

text: Sarah Schenirer

text: Orthodox

text: Poland

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Romania

text: Lithuania

text: Czernowitz

text: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

glossary: Torah halakhah


title: Gessen, Iulii Isidorovich

abstract: (1871–1939), historian and social activist. Iulii Gessen was born in Odessa and graduated from the commercial school in that city; he also studied history independently. In 1895 he was employed by the newspaper Odesskie novosti (Odessa News); a year later he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he worked in a bank until 1905. Apparently heavily influenced by social activists such as Ahad Ha-Am and Simon Dubnow, from 1905 Gessen was active in the work of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (OPE).

text: Odessa

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Osip Rabinovich

text: Russia

text: Russian Revolution of 1905

text: Bolshevik Revolution

text: Ukraine


title: Pals, Sesto

abstract: (1913–2002), poet. Sesto Pals (Simion Şestopali) was born in Odessa. His family fled to Galați, Romania, after the Russian Revolution. Having obtained the status of Italian subject, his father changed the family name from Sestopali and moved in 1920 to Bucharest, where Pals completed high school. During this period he became friends with Gherasim Luca, Geo Bogza, and Paul Păun, future prominent avant-garde poets. With Aurel Baranga and the painter Jules Perahim, Pals edited the avant-garde literary review Alge (1930; 1933). From that point on, he adopted Sesto Pals as his pen name.

text: Odessa

text: Galați

text: Romania

text: Russian Revolution

text: Bucharest


title: Rapoport, Yoshue

abstract: (1895–1971), Yiddish-language literary critic, journalist, and translator. Born in Białystok and educated by tutors, Yoshue Rapoport mastered several European languages and gained a broad knowledge of literature. His contributions to Yiddish literature include his translations—among them selections from the works of Maurice Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Rabindranath Tagore, Boris Pilnyak, and Upton Sinclair—as well as writings about art, philosophy, the history of Russian revolutions, and Simon Dubnow’s history of the Jews (1938–1940).

text: literary critic

text: Białystok

text: Yiddish literature

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Bund

text: Warsaw

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Poland

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Globus

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg


title: Oyslender, Nokhem

abstract: (1893–1962), Soviet Yiddish author, critic, and literary scholar. Born into a timber merchant’s family in Khodorkov, Volhynia, Nokhem Oyslender received his secondary education in Kiev and studied medicine at universities in Berlin and Kiev. He served as a doctor in the Red Army between 1919 and 1922 while also publishing articles and short stories in Russian in army newspapers. His revolutionary enthusiasm found its expression in three collections of Yiddish poetry (1917–1922) and a collection of his civil war stories, Af lodemirer veg (On the Way to Ludmir; 1930).

text: Kiev

text: Yiddish poetry

text: Moscow

text: Der shtrom

text: Yiddish literature

text: Minsk

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Kharkov

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Mendele

text: Warsaw

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yiddish theater

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Sovetish heymland

text: literary criticism


title: Wunderbar, Re’uven Yosef

abstract: (1812–1868), historian, teacher, translator, and government-appointed rabbi. Born in Mitau, Courland guberniia (now Jelgava, Lat.), and educated in a traditional heder, Re’uven Yosef Wunderbar adopted a Haskalah (Enlightenment) worldview in spiritual and cultural matters. Self-taught, he acquired a broad general education in addition to a knowledge of German and Russian. In 1835, he passed the official examinations to acquire a teaching certificate for government-sponsored schools, and in 1840 moved to Riga to teach at the Haskalah school under the direction of Max Lilienthal.

text: Courland

text: Jelgava

text: heder

text: Haskalah

text: Riga

text: Haskalah

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Avraham Mapu

glossary: heder Haskalah


title: Buhuşi

abstract: Town in the Moldavian region of Romania. Jewish settlement in Buhuşi (known in Yiddish as Bohush) dates from 1823; in 1831, the Jewish population was 32. The numbers continued to grow, totaling 537 in 1858 and 1,732 in 1899, representing 48 percent of the town’s population. Later, the numbers of Jews decreased (to 892 in 1910, due to emigration) but grew again: there were 1,419 in 1915; 1,972 in 1930; and 1,876 in 1941.

text: Moldavian

text: Romania

text: Zionist

text: Ruzhin-Sadagora

text: yeshiva

text: Bucharest

glossary: tsadik Kolel yeshiva rebbe responsa


title: Sibiu

abstract: City in central Romania, on the Cibin River. The records of a legal dispute in villages near Sibiu (Ger., Hermannstadt; Lat., Cibinium; Hun., Nagyszeben) in 1357 include the earliest reference to a Jew in Transylvania: Petrus Judaeus. In 1492, the king of Hungary, Vladislav II, ordered the judge of Sibiu to arbitrate legal disputes between Jews and Christians. In 1586, mention was also made of a Jewish organist by the name of Pantalone.

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: Yeḥezkel Paneth

text: Orthodox

text: Hasidic


title: Race Science

abstract: Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century term for physical anthropology, or the study of human difference, with scientists proceeding from the common assumption that Europeans were racially superior to non-European peoples. Jews played a central role in race science both as practitioners and objects of study. As many Jews were doctors, they were especially well placed to become race scientists and in a position to combat claims of inherent Jewish difference and/or degeneracy. The rise of antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth century provided further impetus for Jews to employ race science because antisemites used its “evidence” to justify anti-Jewish prejudice.

text: antisemitism

text: Sephardic

text: Ashkenazic

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Khazars

text: Zionist

text: assimilation


title: Ploieşti

abstract: (formerly Ploeşti), administrative and economic center in Romania, situated 60 kilometers north of Bucharest. The economic importance of Ploieşti resulted mainly from oil extraction and refining. Ploieşti experienced significant growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when oil began to be exploited in a systematic manner.

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Sephardic

text: Ashkenazic

text: Transnistria