title: Me’ir Leib ben Yeḥi’el Mikha’el

abstract: (Weisser; 1809–1879), rabbi and biblical commentator, known by the acronym Malbim. Born in Volochisk (in Volhynia), Me’ir Leib was a child when his father died, after which he studied under the local rabbi, Mosheh Leib Horowitz. Married at 14, Me’ir Leib divorced four years later, leaving a son (of whom little is known except that he attended Moscow University) and daughter (Freida, who married Eliyahu Heilpern of Vilna). After the trauma of divorce, Malbim immersed himself in rabbinic scholarship, and in 1834 traveled throughout Europe—visiting Pressburg, Trieste, Amsterdam, and Breslau—to publicize his first halakhic work, Artsot ha-ḥayim (1837; on , Oraḥ ḥayim), among the prominent rabbis of his day.

imgDesc: Image of Me’ir Leib ben Yeḥi’el Mikha’el (Malbim), with a stamp of Jewish scholar and librarian Khaykl Lunski on reverse. Lithograph by Moyshe Dantsigerkrohn, Vilna, 1885. Folk prints of revered scholars and rabbis were produced for sale to pious Jews, for display in homes and yeshivas. (YIVO)

text: Pressburg

text: Breslau

text: Warsaw

text: Talmud study

text: Haskalah

text: religious reform

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Iuliu Barasch

text: Orthodox

text: Sabbath

text: assimilation

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Belarus

text: Kaliningrad

text: Kiev

text: piety

glossary: Talmud Haskalah Torah Maimonides


title: Stybel, Avraham Yosef

abstract: (1885–1946), Hebrew publisher. Avraham Yosef Stybel was born in Zarki, southwestern Poland, to a Hasidic family with ties to the Kotsk and Radomsk dynasties. Despite his father’s attempts to provide him with a religious education that would qualify him to become a rabbi, he was attracted from childhood to secular Hebrew literature. At the same time, he was graced with a practical business sense, and studied bookkeeping through correspondence learning.

imgDesc: “Erfahrungen. Prakim fum zikhroynes,” by Avraham Yosef Stybel, n.d. Memoir by Avraham Yosef Stybel, n.d. “Erfahrungen. Prakim fum zikhroynes” (Experiences. Chapters from Memoirs). Typed. Yiddish. English letterhead: Abraham J. Stybel, Warsaw, Poland; Moscow, Russia; Copenhagen, Denmark. Agency: Fred Rueping Leather Co., Fond du Lac, Wis., USA. Established 1854. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F87.11.1. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Radomsk

text: Warsaw

text: Hebrew literature

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Yeruḥam Fishel Lachower

text: Moscow

text: David Frishman

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: Stybel Publishing Company

text: Russia

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner


title: Tykocin

abstract: Town in the Podlasie province of Poland; known in Yiddish as Tiktin. The first Jews settled in Tykocin in 1522 when the town’s owner, Olbracht Gasztołd, brought in 10 families from Grodno (Hrodna) and permitted them to build a synagogue, establish a cemetery, and practice their trades. In 1537, the original privilege was extended to grant juridical autonomy to the Jewish community. In 1542, ownership of Tykocin passed to the crown, with subsequent kings affirming and extending privileges for Jewish residents in 1576, 1601, 1639, and 1650. In 1661, Stefan Czarniecki assumed the post of starosta (district official), a title that after his death passed to the Branicki family and then to the Potocki and Rostworowski families.

imgDesc: Purim-shpil (Purim play) in Tykocin, where the non-Jewish residents reenact the celebration of the holiday of Purim to commemorate the former Jewish residents of the town, 2002. Photograph by Frederic Brenner. (© Frederic Brenner, courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New  York City)

text: Poland

text: Hrodna

text: Lublin

text: Zabłudów

text: Lithuania

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Shemu’el Eli‘ezer ben Yehudah ha-Levi Edels

text: Rivke bas Me’ir of Tikotin

text: Königsberg

text: Vilna

text: Poznań

text: Lublin

text: Białystok

text: Warsaw

text: Tarbut

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Beys Yankev


title: Saphir, Moritz Gottlieb

abstract: (1795–1858), humorist, poet, feature writer, and literary and theater critic. The son of a Jewish businessman from one of the most prominent Jewish families in Hungary, Moritz (Moses) Saphir received a traditional Jewish education and subsequently attended yeshivas in Pressburg (Bratislava) and Prague. In Prague he taught himself secular sciences, foreign languages, and world literature; he later studied the classics in Pest. Never having learned proper Hungarian, he consciously decided to adopt German culture at a time when Jews began to assimilate into Hungarian society. Saphir thus realized one of the alternative models of self-definition available to Hungarian Jewish intellectuals.

text: Hungary

text: Bratislava

text: Prague

text: Budapest


title: Bánóczi, József

abstract: (1849–1926), philosopher, literary scholar, linguist, educator, and editor. Born in Szentgál, Hungary, József Bánóczi studied at the Piarist Gymnasium in Veszprém and at the Royal Catholic Gymnasium in Pest, where he befriended Bernát Alexander. Abraham Hochmuth, the rabbi of Veszprém, tried to persuade Bánóczi to enter the rabbinate, but he chose a career in education instead. In 1868, he enrolled at the University of Pest, and having received a fellowship with Alexander, went on a six-year-long study trip abroad. They took courses at universities in Vienna, Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig, and Paris, mostly in philosophy and philology. In 1875, Bánóczi defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Leipzig, on Kant’s theory of space and time.

text: Hungary

text: Bernát Alexander

text: rabbinate

text: Budapest

text: Seminary

text: Vilmos Bacher

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle


title: Horovitz, Leah

abstract: (fl. 18th century), scholar and liturgical poet. Leah Horovitz (her entire first name was Sarah Rivkah Raḥel Leah) was a descendant of a family that had had distinguished rabbis and scholars in its ranks for centuries. Her father, Ya‘akov ben Me’ir Horovitz (1680–1755), was the rabbi of Bolechów and later of Brody, where he was also a member of the elite kloyz (circle) of scholar-mystics. Three of Leah’s five brothers also functioned as rabbis. Leah was married twice, first to Aryeh Leib, son of the rabbi of Dobromil, and then to Shabetai ben Binyamin Rapoport, the rabbi of Krasny. It is not known if she had children.

text: Brody

text: kloyz

text: Ber of Bolechów

text: Sabbath

text: tkhine

text: rabbinic literature


title: Ḥazakah

abstract: A halakhic (legal) term, ḥazakah has multiple connotations, though common to them all is the idea of preserving an existing condition, real or presumed. Its origin is in the laws of trespass and encroachment on another’s livelihood found in the Talmud. In the context of Eastern Europe, it often applied to a situation in which a monopoly was granted with the intent of preventing uncontrolled economic competition among Jews, and between Jews and others.

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Ashkenaz

text: leasing

glossary: Talmud arenda


title: Brandstetter, Mordekhai David

abstract: (1844–1928), Hebrew novelist and poet. Mordekhai David Brandstetter was born in the town of Briegel, Galicia. When he was 14, his family arranged his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy family from Tarnów. In that city, Brandstetter became interested in Hebrew and secular literature, and began to publish his own poetry. In 1867–1868, he traveled frequently to Warsaw on business; there he became acquainted with the works of Avraham Mapu, Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon, Adam Ha-Kohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn), and Yehudah Leib Gordon.

text: Galicia

text: Tarnów

text: Warsaw

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: prose

text: Prague

text: Haskalah

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Roman Brandstaetter


title: Einhorn, Ignác

abstract: (1825–1875), rabbi, journalist, political economist, and politician. Ignác Einhorn (who also published work using the initials J. E. or the name Eduard Horn) was one of the most versatile and talented Hungarian Jews of the nineteenth century. His great-grandfather had served as rabbi of Vágújhely, and his father, Gerson (1793–1883), a wool merchant, was for many years a community leader. Einhorn was tutored privately in a traditional but enlightened fashion. At 13, he attended the yeshiva of Yeḥezkel Banet at Nyitra (mod. Nitra, Slovakia). He later studied at Pressburg and for several months in Prague, while also receiving a gymnasium eduation.

text: yeshiva

text: Slovakia

text: Pressburg

text: Prague

text: rabbinate

text: Adolf Neustadt

text: Hungary

text: religious reform

text: pogroms

text: Budapest

text: Jewish Congress

text: Orthodox


title: Bacher, Simon

abstract: (1823–1891), Hebrew poet and community leader. A branch of the illustrious Bacharach family settled in Hungary around the last third of the eighteenth century. The Bachers (the shortened form of the family name was used among non-Jewish circles; in Hebrew they continued to be called Bacharach) settled in Liptószentmiklós (now Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia) in northwest Hungary. When Simon Bacher was born, the town had a fairly large Jewish community, and was famous as a seat of traditional learning (El‘azar Löw, author of the Shemen rokeaḥ, had just come to serve as rabbi and maintained an important yeshiva), but was also known for its sympathy for the Haskalah.

text: Hungary

text: Slovakia

text: El‘azar Löw

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Neḥemyah Naḥum Trebitsch

text: Eisenstadt

text: Haskalah

text: trade

text: agriculture

text: Budapest

text: Seminary

text: Jewish Congress

text: Ha-Magid

text: Land of Israel

text: poetry

text: Haskalah

text: Mór Wahrmann

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah Talmud


title: Gamarnik, Ian Borisovich

abstract: (1894–1937), Communist Party activist, political worker, and military commissar. Ian Gamarnik was born in Zhitomir to the family of an office worker. He studied at the Saint Petersburg Psycho-Neurological Institute and the Kiev University Law Faculty. In September 1916, he joined the Bolsheviks, and by October 1917 was secretary of the Kiev Committee of the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Partiia Bol’shevikov (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party of Bolsheviks). Gamarnik was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in March 1918. He was a member of the Organization Bureau (Orgburo) that prepared the First Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

text: Communist Party

text: Zhitomir

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kiev

text: Ukraine

text: Odessa

text: Khar’kiv

text: USSR


title: Golem Legend

abstract: The literary, folkloristic tale of the creation of a golem; the most famous formation of which was said to have been effected by Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el (Maharal; d. 1609) of Prague. The notion in Jewish culture that a particularly righteous person, possessed of esoteric wisdom, could create an artificial human being out of inorganic matter—and thus imitate the Divine—has literary roots in the Talmud and early kabbalistic ideas. Some medieval readers of Sefer yetsirah (The Book of Creation), one of Judaism’s earliest mystical texts, understood the work to have practical as well as theoretical implications. In a commentary to that text, Rabbi El‘azar of Worms (ca. 1165–ca. 1230), an exemplar of German Jewish pietism, enumerated instructions for the actual creation of a golem. The kabbalistic writings of Avraham Abulafia (b. 1240) of Spain and the so-called Pseudo-Sa‘adyah—a thirteenth-century text of French Jewish origin—similarly testify to the interest of medieval Jewish mystics in the “practical” arts of creation.

imgDesc: Rabbi Löw and the Golem. Mikoláš Aleš, 1899. Ink on paper. National Gallery in Prague. (Photograph © 2006 National Gallery in Prague)

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Prague

text: Poland

text: Chełm

text: ba‘al shem

text: Prague

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Bohemia

text: Hasidism

text: Leopold Weisel

text: Wolf Pascheles

text: Altneuschul

text: Warsaw

text: Yitsḥak ben Shimshon ha-Kohen

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

glossary: Talmud Kabbalah


title: Frishman, David

abstract: (1859–1922), Hebrew and Yiddish writer and editor, literary critic, translator, and poet. David Frishman was born to a family of wealthy merchants in Zgierz, near Łódź. When he was two years old, his family moved to Łódź, and Frishman received a private education that included traditional Jewish studies, French, and German. At 16, he published his first story (written at age 13), followed by poems, translations, and articles for various Hebrew newspapers and journals (Ha-Tsefirah, Ha-Shaḥar, Ha-Boker or). Frishman’s literary views were influenced by European early modernism. As a critic he greatly valued the aesthetic form, rejecting Ahad Ha-Am and Yosef Klausner’s idea that a good writer expresses the national spirit. However, Frishman’s own short stories are simplistic, didactic, and sentimental, in the vein of Haskalah literature. Some of them show the influence of fin de siècle neoromanticism.

imgDesc: David Frishman (right) with Hebrew poets (left) Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik and (center) Zusman Segalovitsh. Postcard published by Verlag Jehudia, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Łódź

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Ha-Boker or

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Haskalah

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Ha-Melits

text: prose

text: Warsaw

text: Hebrew literature

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ha-Yom

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Breslau

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Hebrew language

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Ha-Dor

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Ha-Zeman

text: literary journals

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Gershom Shofman

text: prose

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Haynt

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: Stybel

text: The Dybbuk


title: Vatra Dornei

abstract: Town in northeastern Romania, in the region of southern Bucovina and the present county of Suceava. Traversed by one of the important trade routes linking Moldova to Transylvania, Vatra Dornei was for a long time administratively dependent on the town of Câmpulung Moldovenesc. The Jews’ early presence in the area was primarily linked to the establishment of the first sawmills, marking the beginning of the forestry industry. It was only during the second half of the nineteenth century that Vatra Dornei acquired greater importance with the discovery of natural resources for creating spa facilities and the growing realization of the tourism potential in the area. Jewish entrepreneurs were involved in the exploitation of these resources from the outset.

text: Romania

text: Bucovina

text: Suceava

text: trade

text: Moldova

text: Transylvania

text: Câmpulung Moldovenesc

text: industry

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: Hasidism

text: Vizhnits

text: Zionist

text: USSR

text: ghettos

text: Transnistria


title: Braunstein, Menaḥem Mendel

abstract: (1858–1944), philologist and educator. Raised in Iaşi, Romania, Menaḥem Braunstein (also Braunstein-Mebaşan, the latter element being the Hebrew acronym of his name) studied philology, specializing in European languages. As a young man he was part of a group of maskilim, an informal set of people with headquarters at a coffee shop in Iaşi. In 1887 he set up Doresh le-Tsiyon, an organization whose objective was to encourage immigration to the land of Israel. That same year, he founded the Yiddish newspaper Der yudishe folksfraynd.

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: land of Israel

text: Iuliu Barasch

text: Warsaw

text: Craiova

text: Vaslui

text: Bacău

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Iacob Isac Niemirower


title: Lubavitch Hasidism

abstract: Branch of Hasidism founded by Shneur Zalman of Liady (ca. 1745–1812). The townlet of Lyubavichi (Yid., Lubavitsh; commonly, Lubavitch), some 50 miles west of Smolensk, was the center between 1814 and 1915 of the main branch of Ḥabad Hasidism (Ḥabad, or ḤaBaD, is an acronym for ḥokhmah, binah, da‘at—“wisdom, understanding, knowledge”). Shneur Zalman emphasized an intellectualist form of spirituality and a systematized version of the teachings of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov (ca. 1700–1760) and Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh (1704–1772).

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: Hasidism

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Dov Ber

text: charity

text: Belorussia

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Misnagdim

text: Avraham of Kalisk

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Russia

text: Purim

text: Zhidachov

text: Vitebsk

text: David Gans

text: Chernivtsi

text: Kaliningrad

text: Warsaw

text: censorship

text: Zhitomir

text: Rostov-on-Don

text: yeshiva

text: Orthodoxy

text: Haskalah

text: Bundism

text: Zionism

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Katowice

text: Gerer

text: Poland

text: USSR

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Evsektsiia

text: Riga

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: communism

text: Czech Republic

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Slovakia

glossary: Ḥabad Magid Misnagdim rebbe Zohar Torah responsa Maimonides Gaon yeshiva Haskalah


title: Kamelhar, Yekuti’el

abstract: (1871–1937), rabbi, educator, and publisher. Born in Kołaczyce, Galicia, Yekuti’el Kamelhar was educated in Tarnów, where he was exposed to Hasidism. He gained experience as a religious educator, heading a group of Talmud students in Korczyna (from 1890) and in Rzeszów (from 1897). At the end of the nineteenth century, Kamelhar was involved in establishing several pioneering new yeshivas in Galicia, modeled after those in Lithuania and Hungary. He was appointed head of the Or Torah yeshiva in Stanisławów in 1907. An Orthodox activist, Kamelhar helped to found societies that supported a religious education network, and took part in the attempts to organize a rabbinic convention in Kraków in 1903.

text: Galicia

text: Tarnów

text: Hasidism

text: Rzeszów

text: yeshivas

text: Lithuania

text: Hungary

text: Stanisławów

text: Orthodox

text: Kraków

text: Zionism

text: Mizraḥi

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Prague

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov

text: Yehudah he-Ḥasid


title: Muneles, Otto

abstract: (1894–1967), Hebraist and historian. Otto Muneles was descended from an old Jewish family in Prague, records of which date to the sixteenth century; one of his ancestors was Avraham Muneles, who wrote an index to the Shulḥan ‘arukh. From 1904 to 1912, Muneles attended the German gymnasium in Prague and studied halakhic literature at a Talmud Torah school. From 1912 to 1915, he studied classical philology at the German University in Prague and continued to pursue Judaic studies.

text: Prague

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Jiří Mordecai Langer

text: Galicia

text: Terezín

text: Simon Hock

text: Names

text: Bohemia

text: Altneuschul

text: Hasidism

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
Torah
halakhah
Kabbalah


title: Tchernowitz, Shemu’el

abstract: (1879–1929), journalist and Zionist activist. Shemu’el Tchernowitz was born in Shebez, in the Vitebsk region of Belorussia. While studying at the Kovno yeshiva, he established a close relationship with Shemu’el Ya‘akov Rabinowitz, a rabbi and one of the first religious Zionists. With Rabinowitz’s patronage, Tchernowitz was able to pursue a career as a public activist by serving as secretary of the regional Zionist unions of Vilna and Vitebsk.

text: Zionist

text: Vitebsk

text: Belorussia

text: Kovno

text: yeshiva

text: Zionists

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Melits

text: Warsaw

text: Tushiyah

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: Kiev

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: Poland

text: Hebrew literature

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Ḥayim Tchernowitz


title: Barash, Efrayim

abstract: (1892–1943), community leader and head of the Białystok ghetto during the Holocaust. Born in Volkovysk, Efrayim Barash was an engineer who had studied in Germany. He was a member of the town council and Jewish community board, president of the Jewish Commerce Bank, and chair of the local Zionist federation. He moved to Białystok in 1934 to become the Jewish community’s executive director.

text: Białystok

text: Holocaust

text: Judenrat

text: ghetto

text: killing centers

text: informers

text: armed resistance

text: labor camps

text: Lublin


title: Steinberg, Yehudah

abstract: (1863–1908), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Yehudah Steinberg was born in Lipkany, Bessarabia, to a fervently religious Hasidic family. When he began to show signs of rebelliousness, he feuded bitterly with his father; still, when Yehudah reached age 17, his father insisted he marry a young woman so that he would “return to the fold.” After his marriage, he went to live at his father-in-law’s home in a village adjacent to the Romanian town of Shtepaneshty, a center of Hasidism. He became close to the local rebbe—a descendant of Yisra’el of Ruzhin—and absorbed the Hasidic experience in its populist rural form. Steinberg simultaneously became friendly with a local maskil who supplied him with literature that opened him up to new worlds but did not wean him away from Hasidism.

imgDesc: Gdalyohu by Yehudah Steinberg, n.d. Yehudah Steinberg. First page of Gdalyohu, n.d. Stories. Corrected page proofs. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F87.9. (YIVO)

text: Bessarabia

text: Hasidism

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: literary journals

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Hebrew literature

text: Hebrew children’s literature

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

glossary: rebbe maskil


title: Carp, Horia

abstract: (1869–1943), journalist, writer, translator, and politician. Horia Carp was born in Hârlău, Romania, where he received his elementary education; he then attended high school in Botoşani. After pursuing studies at the faculty of medicine in Iaşi, he left this program in his last year to become a journalist.

text: Hârlău

text: Romania

text: Botoşani

text: Iaşi

text: Zionism

text: Curierul Israelit

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: General Zionist


title: Miesięcznik Żydowski

abstract: Polish-language Jewish academic journal. Published by the Menora publishing house and edited by Zygmunt Ellenberg, Miesięcznik Żydowski (Jewish Monthly) appeared in Warsaw between 1930 and 1935; the periodical targeted Jewish and Polish intelligentsia. Miesięcznik Żydowski’s editorial offices were located in Łódź, but its administration and press were in Warsaw. As the journal was financed by subscription, the publishers found it difficult to maintain its continuity. They tried to remedy the problem by printing double issues; however, in 1934, publication was suspended for six months. In all, a total of 46 issues were published.

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Roman Brandstaetter

text: Filip Friedman

text: Apolinary Hartglas

text: Mojżesz Kanfer

text: Janusz Korczak

text: Jakub Leszczyński

text: Raphael Mahler

text: Mateuz (Matthias) Mieses

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Edmund Stein

text: Przemyśl

text: Kraków

text: Warsaw

text: industry

text: Łódź

text: guilds

text: historiography

text: Bałaban

text: Schorr

text: Janusz Korczak

text: Bialik

text: poetry

text: Hebrew literature

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sholem Asch

text: Franz Kafka

text: Joseph Roth

text: Julian Klaczko

text: Polish literature

text: theater

text: Habimah

text: Vilner Trupe


title: Trebitsch, Neḥemyah Naḥum

abstract: (1779–1842), rabbi and Talmudic scholar. Born in Prague, Neḥemyah Naḥum Trebitsch was the only child of Seligmann Trebitsch, the prayer leader at Prague’s Altneuschul. After his father’s death, Trebitsch was brought up in the house of Ya‘akov Günsburg, who headed a yeshiva in Prague and sat on the city’s rabbinical court. Trebitsch received rabbinical ordination from Günsburg in 1811 and from Moravia’s chief rabbi, Mordekhai Banet (1753–1829), in 1816.

text: Prague

text: Altneuschul

text: yeshiva

text: Moravia

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Prostějov

text: religious reform

text: Abraham Neuda

text: Karlovy Vary

text: Jacob Brüll

glossary: yeshiva Talmud Maimonides responsa


title: Langer, Jiří

abstract: (1894–1943), Hebrew and Czech writer. Jiří (Mordekhai Georgo) Langer was born in Prague to an assimilated merchant family. His eldest brother was the well-known Czech writer and playwright František Langer (1888–1965). Langer’s parents sent him to Czech schools, but he noted that even as a young child he was drawn to Judaism and studied Talmud and Kabbalah on a regular basis with his classmate, Alfred Fuchs.

text: Prague

text: František Langer

text: Alfred Fuchs

text: Belz

text: Galicia

text: Hungary

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Hasidism

text: psychoanalysis

text: Hebrew literature

text: Zionism

text: Eli‘ezer Steinman

text: Warsaw

text: Kolot

glossary: Talmud Kabbalah rebbe Torah


title: Polish Literature (Children’s Literature)

abstract: Children’s literature produced by Polish-Jewish writers targeted two distinct audiences: a Polish readership and a Polish Jewish readership. Texts intended for the Polish audience generally lacked special references to Jewish life and culture, while texts intended for Polish-speaking Jews mostly featured Jewish themes and motifs. Janusz Korczak (1878/79–1942) wrote for both audiences: his Król Maciuś Pierwszy (King Maciuś the First; 1923) and Kajtuś czarodziej (Kajtuś the Wizard; 1935) were aimed at Poles, whereas stories such as Ludzie są dobrzy (People Are Good; 1938) and Trzy wyprawy Herszka (Herszek’s Three Expeditions; 1939)—which appeared in the book series Biblioteka Palestyńska dla Dzieci (Palestinian Library for Children)—were intended for Polish Jews.

imgDesc: Druga brama (Second Entrance), by Halina Górska (Łódź: Ksiazka, 1946). This novel was first published in 1934. (Butler Library, Columbia University in the City of New York)

text: Janusz Korczak

text: assimilation

text: Kraków

text: Bolesław Leśmian

text: Christmas

text: Aleksander Kraushar

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Jan Brzechwa

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Chwila

text: Maurycy Szymel

text: Yosef Trumpeldor

text: Dvora Vogel

text: Holocaust

text: Stanisław Wygodzki

text: Arnold Słucki


title: Mane, Mordekhai Tsevi

abstract: (1859–1886), Hebrew poet. Mordekhai Tsevi Mane was born in Radochkovitchi (Radoshkovich), in the Vilna region. As a child he showed a talent for drawing and sketching, and his parents’ support enabled him to realize his goals and enroll in the Vilna Art School in 1876. He was then offered a place in the prestigious Saint Petersburg Royal Academy of Arts, where, thanks to the patronage of Jewish philanthropists, he studied from 1881 to 1884. After suffering a serious bout of tuberculosis, he was forced to return to his hometown, spending the remaining two years of his life in his parents’ house, surrounded by friends and admirers.

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: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: poetry

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Haskalah

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Land of Israel


title: Mandel’shtam, Nadezhda Iakovlevna

abstract: (1899–1980), memoirist and cultural critic. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam figures as the best-known and most talented “widow of Russia,” a female survivor of the Stalinist era who preserved the politically suppressed work of her husband, the poet Osip Mandel’shtam. As a memoirist and raconteur among friends, she also served as a keenly perceptive, highly opinionated source on Soviet culture and society.

text: Osip Mandel’shtam

text: Kiev


title: Hit’aḥadut

abstract: A Labor Zionist party established in 1920 uniting the Po‘el ha-Tsa‘ir (Young Workers) party of Palestine with members of Tse‘ire Tsiyon (Zionist Youth) in the Diaspora. The formal name of Hit’aḥadut, which means union, changed more than once before 1932 when the party amalgamated with Po‘ale Tsiyon (Workers of Zion) in the Iḥud ‘Olami (World Union).

imgDesc: District heads of the Hit’aḥadut party in Poland, Łódź, 1946. On the wall are portraits of (left to right) Zionist leaders Chaim Arlozoroff, Aharon David Gordon, and Berl Katznelson. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Zionist

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Land of Israel

text: Petrograd

text: Russia

text: Prague

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Ukraine

text: Tarbut

text: Gordonia

text: Aharon David Gordon

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Gdańsk

glossary:
Diaspora
Pale of Settlement


title: Gold, Hugo

abstract: (1895–1974), publisher, editor, and historian. Born in Vienna, Hugo Gold took over the publishing house of his uncle Max Hickl, the Jüdischer Buch- und Kunstverlag, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (from 1932 also in Prague), following Hickl’s death in 1924. For a time, Gold also edited the newspaper Jüdische Volksstimme (Jewish People’s Voice).

text: Max Hickl

text: Brno

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Prague

text: Jüdische Volksstimme

text: Bratislava

text: Bohemia

text: Bucovina

text: Burgenland

text: Max Brod


title: Goldfadn, Avrom

abstract: (1840–1908), playwright, theater director, poet, and impresario; considered the “Father of Yiddish Theater.” Avrom Goldfadn’s productions emerged during the period of the Haskalah movement in Russia and the cultural-nationalistic activities of East European minorities. The first director to create a viable Jewish national theater, Goldfadn built up an audience and initiated its members into Western aesthetics, secularism, and a modern Jewish consciousness.

imgDesc: Daramarea Templului (Yid., Khurbn beysamigdesh; Destruction of the Temple). Romanian–Yiddish poster advertising a performance of a play by Goldfadn. Iaşi, 1903. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Zhitomir

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Yiddish literature

text: Ha-Melits

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Kol mevaser

text: Lemberg

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: yeshiva

text: shtetl

text: love

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Minsk

text: Berdichev

text: operetta

text: pogroms

text: Poland

text: purim-shpil

text: Purim

text: Warsaw

glossary: Haskalah yeshiva


title: Kazdan, Khayim Shloyme

abstract: (1883–1979), Bundist, educator, and leader of the secular Yiddish school movement. Born in Kherson, Russia, Khayim Shloyme Kazdan received a traditional Jewish education and began his teaching career in 1902 at the professional school for girls in Kherson. In 1907, he wrote for the Yiddish press in Di hofnung, a short-lived legal daily of the Bund.

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: Russia

text: Bund

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Warsaw

text: TSYSHO

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Lithuania

text: Heder

text: Medem Sanatorium


title: Cilibi Moise

abstract: (1812–1870), author of adages and aphorisms. Froim Moise, known in Romanian literature as Cilibi Moise, was the son of Alexander Sender Schwartz, a native of Galicia. Illiterate in Romanian, Moise would dictate his compositions to printers and sell them in pamphlets in the market towns of Walachia, where he was a traveling merchant. The 14 pamphlets issued as of 1858 included adages and sayings, maxims, thoughts, and moral lessons drawn from the school of life, revealing a picturesque and lively mixture of popular wisdom, Balkan humor, and Jewish folklore.

text: Romanian literature

text: Galicia

text: Walachia

text: humor

text: Moses Gaster

text: Schwarzfeld


title: Aksenfeld, Yisroel

abstract: (1787–1866), Yiddish playwright, novelist, and exponent of the Haskalah. Born in Nemirov (Nemyriv), western Ukraine, to an important Hasidic family, Yisroel Aksenfeld was brought up as a Bratslaver Hasid (he was personally acquainted with Reb Nosn, the Bratslav tsadik’s famous secretary) and was married at an early age into another family of Bratslav followers. The marriage ended quickly in divorce, a circumstance that changed the trajectory of Aksenfeld’s life and beliefs. He became a maskil and an enemy of Hasidism who studied foreign languages, mainly Russian and German.

text: Haskalah

text: Nemyriv

text: Ukraine

text: Bratslaver Hasid

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Odessa

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: proverbs

text: shtetl

text: headgear

text: Russian army

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: riddles

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

glossary: Haskalah maskil


title: Kayserling, Meir

abstract: (1829–1905), rabbi and historian. Meir Kayserling was born in Hannover, Germany, where he attended high school at Meyer Michel David’s Freischule between 1838 and 1844. He then studied at a yeshiva in Halberstadt and at the Talmudic academy of Samson Raphael Hirsch in Nikolsburg. In 1849, he went to study with Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport in Prague and later with Seligmann Baer Bamberger in Würzburg.

text: yeshiva

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Prague

text: Pest

text: Hungary

text: Sámuel Kohn

text: Sephardim

glossary: yeshiva Neolog


title: Emyot, Yisroel

abstract: (1909–1978), author, poet, and critic. Born in Ostrów Mazowiecka, Yisroel Emyot (originally Goldwasser; Emyot is a combination of the Polish names of his father’s initials: Meylekh Yanowski, “em” and “yot”) descended from two prominent Hasidic families. After his father’s immigration to the United States, Emyot was raised and educated in the home of his maternal grandparents; as an adolescent, he studied at a yeshiva in Warsaw. Emyot’s first poem—signed Y. Yanover—was published in 1926 in the periodical Inzer hofenung (Our Hope), edited by Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg. Emyot’s literary ability was also recognized by Nakhmen Mayzel, editor of Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages), which published his poems, as did other literary journals.

imgDesc: Letter from Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport (S. An-ski) to Shmuel Niger, 1920. From Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport (S. An-ski) in Warsaw, to Shmuel Niger in New York, 8 October 1920, written not long before the writer's death. He thanks Niger, who might have had something to do with arranging the large sums of money that have been sent to Rapoport the Stybel Publishing house. He is mystified about the ultimate source of the funds. He has heard from Khayim Zhitlovski that Niger had sold the rights to Rapoport's play for performance by a theater in New York and is curious to know which theater and whether Rudolf Schildkraut will be involved. It is too bad that the Yiddish actor and director David Herman is in Vilna now and not in New York, because Rapoport really admires him. Rapoport is sending Niger several Hasidic tales related to Ba‘al Shem Tov and his followers. There is little in the way of Yiddish literature being published in Warsaw at the moment. The newspapers Haynt and Moment are trying to make up for the dearth of other venues, but are hampered by newsprint shortages. Rapoport is sending Niger poems by two young poets, Yisroel Emyot and Iosef Papiernikov. He writes that he managed to flee Otwock one day before it was taken by the Bolsheviks and that his health is poor: he is unable to walk much because his legs are swollen. He plans to go to Berlin in a month. He has heard from Max Weinreich, who has married Tsemaḥ Szabad's daughter and is living in Berlin. The Vilner Trupe has gone downhill now that some of its leading lights are gone. Avrom Morevski is depressed about this and also about "Snyegov," a "talentless meshumed [convert, traitor]" who is now reaping success in America. (The letter includes brief mentions of Alter Kacyzne, Yona Rozenfeld, and Fritz Yaffe.) Yiddish. RG 360, Shmuel Niger Papers, F57. (YIVO)

text: yeshiva

text: Warsaw

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Orthodoxy

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Yisroel Shtern

text: Poland

text: Białystok

text: USSR

text: Moscow

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt

text: Birobidzhan

text: Birobidzhaner shtern


title: Tchernichowsky, Sha’ul

abstract: (1875–1943), poet and translator. Sha’ul Tchernichowsky was born in the village of Mikhailovka (Tavria province), on the Russia–Ukraine border. His family was rooted in a non-Jewish environment and was also closely associated with the Haskalah and the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. Tchernichowsky was first taught exclusively in Russian and only gained a Hebrew education after attending a local modern heder. According to his autobiography, he began to write creatively at the age of 12. Ultimately, he and Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik became the most influential poets of the period of Hebrew Revival.

imgDesc: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky. An excerpt from his poem “Shir ‘eres” (Lullabye) appears with his portrait: “If the day of the redemption too, is delayed / Step by step / Do not lose faith, hopeful one / Our sun will yet rise.” Postcard published by Verlag Central, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: poet

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Haskalah

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: heder

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Odessa

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Warsaw

text: Finland

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Stybel

text: Moscow

glossary: Haskalah heder


title: Segalovitsh, Zusman

abstract: (1884–1949), writer and poet. Born in Białystok, where his father was an unsuccessful merchant and the family frequently suffered deprivation, Zusman Segalovitsh received his education in heder and from private tutors. Between 1903 and 1905, he was a member of Bundist underground circles, an affiliation that led to his imprisonment. Following a pogrom in Białystok in 1906, Segalovitsh’s family moved to Łódź.

text: Białystok

text: heder

text: Bundist

text: Łódź

text: Der fraynd

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Crimea

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Haynt

text: Poland

text: Der moment

text: Professional Association of Writers and Journalists

text: Leo Finkelshteyn

text: Lithuania

text: Russia


title: Lachower, Yeruḥam Fishel

abstract: (1883–1947), literary historian, Hebrew critic, and editor. Yeruḥam Fishel Lachower was born in Horzel, western Poland. As a child and adolescent he received both a Jewish and a general education. Following his marriage in 1904, he settled in Ciechanów, where he worked in commerce (his father had tried unsuccessfully to introduce him to the business world). That same year, he published his first article in the newspaper Ha-Tsefirah, analyzing the poetry of Sha’ul Tchernichowsky. From 1906 to1907, Lachower contributed review essays on Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik and Ahad Ha-Am to Yosef Ḥayim Brenner’s monthly Ha-Me‘orer, and published other criticism on the burgeoning Hebrew literature.

text: Poland

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: poetry

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Hebrew literature

text: Warsaw

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: David Frishman

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Stybel

text: Moscow

text: Ya‘akov Cahan


title: Yehoshu‘a Heshel of Kraków

abstract: (1578–1648), halakhist and rabbi. Born in Vilna, Yehoshu‘a Heshel of Kraków served as rabbi in Grodno, Tiktin, Przemyśl, and Lwów between 1634 and 1639. In 1640, he replaced Natan Shapira for 12 months as head of the yeshiva in Kraków; he then served in this role in an honorary capacity. Among his outstanding students were Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen, Gershon Ulif Ashkenazi, and Menaḥem Mendel Auerbach.

text: Kraków

text: Przemyśl

text: yeshiva

text: Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Poland

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
yeshiva
halakhah
responsa
Talmud
Rashi
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Feder, Tuviah

abstract: (1760–ca. 1817), Hebrew poet, novelist, playwright, and linguist. Born in Przedbórz (in the Kraków district), Tuviah Feder wandered from Piotrków Trybunalski where his father-in-law lived, to Chełm, Kempen, Wołodarka, Berdichev, and finally to Brody and Tarnopol. Failing at commerce, he worked as a proofreader, a preacher, and an assistant cantor. As of 1786, he led the life of a poor, itinerant teacher. While in Galicia, Feder became acquainted with the first maskilim and was known for his aggressive style. He aspired to bring Haskalah closer to Jewish tradition.

text: Kraków

text: Chełm

text: Berdichev

text: Brody

text: Tarnopol

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: satire

text: Ya‘akov Shemu’el Bick

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: parody

glossary: Haskalah musar Zohar


title: Schwarzfeld Family

abstract: Romanian intellectuals active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beniamin Schwarzfeld (1822–1897) was a Hebrew-language writer and educator. His sons Elias (1855–1915), Wilhelm (1856–1894), and Moses (1857–1943) were writers and historians, and his daughter Adela Schwarzfeld-Wechsler (1859–1953) was the mother of the poet Beniamin Fundoianu (Fondane).

text: Beniamin Fundoianu

text: Ivano-Frankivs’k

text: Haskalah

text: Iaşi

text: Ha-Magid

text: Haskalah

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Iaşi

text: Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein

text: Bacău

text: Iuliu Barasch

text: proverbs

text: Cilibi Moise

text: Egalitatea

glossary: Haskalah Magid


title: Russian Criticism and Scholarship (Literary Criticism and Scholarship)

abstract: One of the salient features of modern literary criticism is the proliferation of schools, approaches, and methodologies. In his cross-cultural survey made in 1961, the eminent scholar of comparative literature René Wellek was able to distinguish six “main trends” especially characteristic of the era, ranging from psychoanalytic to myth criticism. As for twentieth-century Russian literary criticism, it was shaped in the main by two divergent, and often opposing, forces—the vitality of the “modern” movement in the arts and, throughout the Soviet period, the privileged status of Marxist or quasi-Marxist perspectives. While many of the figures mentioned in this article have recognizably Jewish names, any connection between their background and the critical methodologies that they championed seems to be tenuous at best.

text: Roman Jakobson

text: Viktor Shklovskii

text: Iurii Tynianov

text: Leon Trotsky

text: Iurii Lotman

text: Tartu

text: Estonia

text: Pasternak


title: Stratin Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Line of Hasidic leaders, active in eastern Galicia from the 1820s until the Holocaust. Some of the dynasty’s offshoots reached Israel, the United States, and Canada. The founder, Yehudah Tsevi Brandwein (ca. 1780–1844), a ritual slaughterer from the village of Stratin, succeeded his teacher, Uri of Strelisk (1757–1826), and was considered to be a leading tsadik of his time. Brandwein’s name appears in a list of prominent tsadikim appended to a report on the Hasidic movement in Galicia, written in 1838 by Lemberg’s chief of police. After Brandwein’s death, most of his Hasidim followed his eldest son, Avraham (ca. 1805–1865), who succeeded him in Stratin; a minority preferred another son, Eli‘ezer (ca. 1810–1865), who established a court at Azipolia.

text: Hasidic

text: Galicia

text: Uri of Strelisk

text: Lemberg

text: bet midrash

text: Sandz

text: Holocaust

text: Land of Israel

text: Stanisławów

text: Ruzhin


title: Kompert, Leopold

abstract: (1822–1886), novelist, poet, and journalist. The son of a struggling wool merchant in Münchengrätz (Mnichovo Hradiště), Leopold Kompert owed much of his interest in Judaism to his mother and his grandfather, a rabbi. He wrote during a time of great change: Jews in Bohemia were finally allowed to move and settle wherever they wished.

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Bratislava

text: Adolf Neustadt

text: Hungary

text: Zionist


title: Kerler, Yoysef

abstract: (1918–2000), Yiddish poet, lyricist, and literary editor. Yoysef Kerler was born in Haysyn (Rus., Gaisin), southern Ukraine. He was named after his grandfather, who was a tailor and a badkhn (wedding jester and rhymester). In 1930, his family moved to Mayfeld, a Jewish kolkhoz (collective farm) in northern Crimea, where Kerler worked and continued his secondary education. In 1934, he attended a Yiddish machine-building technical school in Odessa, and also studied Yiddish literature and creative writing with Irme Druker (1906–1982). Kerler’s first poems appeared in the newspaper Odeser arbeter in 1935.

text: Ukraine

text: badkhn

text: Crimea

text: Odessa

text: Yiddish literature

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: theater

text: Riga

text: Soviet Union

text: Eynikayt

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Birobidzhan

text: Birobidzhaner shtern

text: Moscow

text: Anna Iakovlevna Guzik

text: refuseniks

text: samizdat

text: Iulii Daniel’


title: Grinberg, Uri Tsevi

abstract: (1896–1981), Hebrew and Yiddish poet, essayist and journalist. Uri Tsevi Grinberg (or Greenberg) was a trailblazer of radical modernism in both Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, one of the leaders of the Revisionist Zionist movement (from 1930), and a member of the first Israeli Knesset.

imgDesc: Portrait of Uri Tsevi Grinberg. Henryk Berlewi, Warsaw, 1922. The drawing appeared in Grinberg’s book of poetry, Mefisto (Warsaw: Farlag “Literatur-fond” baym Fareyn fun Yidishe literatn un zshurnalistn in Varshe, 1922). (Joe Fishstein Yiddish Poetry Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library)

text: poet

text: Hebrew

text: Yiddish

text: Revisionist Zionist

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: heder

text: Shmuel Yankev Imber

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: pogrom

text: Moscow

text: Warsaw

text: Di Khalyastre

text: Poland

text: Zionism

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: messianism

text: Shabetai Tsevi

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Revisionist Zionists

text: holocaust


title: Agriculture

abstract: From their earliest days, a small proportion of East European Jews engaged in agriculture. Jews began to penetrate the region’s agricultural economy in the late sixteenth century. In particular, many Jews leased the great latifundia of Ukraine, paying noble landowners large sums that the lessees recouped by running the estates. In this way, some Jews became involved in agricultural management. From at least the sixteenth century, also, Jewish merchants and drovers in southeastern Poland were prominent in the cattle trade. They purchased oxen and other cattle, often in Moldavia, and drove them to major trade fairs chiefly in western German lands.

imgDesc: Two men plowing a field with oxen near Dubossary, USSR (now Dubăsari, Moldova), 1920s–1930s. (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Photo Archives)

text: leased

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: trade

text: Moldavia

text: taverns

text: Russian Empire

text: Pale

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Transylvania

text: Romania

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Kishinev

text: pogroms

text: USSR

text: shtetls

text: Haskalah

text: Pogroms

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Belorussia

text: Ukraine

text: Russian Civil War

text: ORT

text: Crimea

text: OZET

text: Birobidzhan

subconcepts:
Russian Government Initiatives
The Impact of Ideology
Soviet-Era Colonization


title: Alter, Wiktor

abstract: (1890–1943), leader of the Polish Bund, and of Poland’s Jewish trade union movement. Wiktor Alter was born in Mława to a Hasidic family. His father, a wood merchant, died when Alter was a year old; subsequently, the family moved to Warsaw. Alter was educated in a public school, as his stepfather wanted his children to receive a secular education. When Alter was 15, the 1905 Revolution broke out. He and other students at his Warsaw gymnasium organized a students’ strike to protest the fact that studies were conducted in Russian rather than Polish.

text: Bund

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Russia

text: Henryk Erlich

text: Soviet regime

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Birth and Birthing

abstract: The birth of a child in the premodern period was accompanied by many fears, anxiety, and a sense of powerlessness. There were many possible dangers for both the mother and the baby. In traditional Jewish life, these dangers were perceived as connected not only to objective difficulties, but also to the influence of the world of demons and evil spirits.

imgDesc: Rosh Hashanah greeting card depicting schoolboys and their teacher reciting the Shema‘ at the bedside of a woman who has just recently given birth. It is a custom for children to come to the home of a newborn boy to recite this prayer on the night before his circumcision ceremony in order to ward off evil. (Collection of Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem. Courtesy Dov Noy, Hebrew University, Jerusalem)

text: demons

text: Magical

text: amulets

text: Sabbath

text: circumcision

text: ḥazakah

text: Tykocin

text: charity

text: Poznań


title: Izhbits-Radzin Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: One of the most radical dynasties in nineteenth-century Hasidism. Although the Izhbits-Radzin (Pol., Iżbica-Radzyn) Hasidim never attracted a large following, their influence on contemporary Hasidic and non-Hasidic Judaism has been profound. The dynasty was founded by Mordekhai Yosef Leiner (1800–1854) and continues to thrive both in Brooklyn, New York, and in Bene Berak, Israel.

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

text: childhood

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: Akiva Eger

text: Tsadok ha-Kohen of Lublin

text: Lublin

text: Lithuania

text: Warsaw

text: messianism

text: Sabbatian

glossary: Torah Zohar Maimonides


title: Bachmann, Jacob

abstract: (1846–1905), cantor and synagogue composer. Jacob Bachmann was born in the town of Berdichev, Volhynia province (present-day Ukraine). His early music education came as a meshoyrer (Heb., meshorer), an apprentice choir singer, for Moyshe Pasternak, a noted Berdichev cantor.

text: cantor

text: Berdichev

text: Ukraine

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Odessa

text: Budapest


title: Brüll, Jacob

abstract: (1812–1889), rabbi and Talmudic scholar. Jacob Brüll was born in Rousínov (Ger., Neu-Raussnitz) in the Habsburg province of Moravia. He attended several yeshivas in Hungary (Bonyhád, Pressburg, and Buda) before returning to Moravia, where he was ordained by Michael Wronik, rabbi of Rousínov, and Neḥemyah Trebitsch, chief rabbi of Moravia. He later married Trebitsch’s daughter, Regina. Brüll served as rabbi of Kojetín (Kojetein), Moravia, from 1844 until his death.

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: David Kaufmann

text: rabbinic literature

text: Tsevi Hirsh Chajes

text: Orthodoxy

text: Ben Chananja

glossary: Talmud Mishnah Torah responsa


title: Friedman, Filip

abstract: (1901–1960), Polish Jewish historian. Filip Friedman was born in Lwów and studied at the University of Vienna under the direction of Alfred Pribram, and at the Jewish Paedagogium under Salo Baron. Friedman earned his doctorate in 1925 with his dissertation titled Die galizischen Juden im Kampfe um ihre Gleichberechtigung (1848–1868) (The Jews of Galicia and Their Struggle for Legal Equality [1848–1868]), which was published in Frankfurt in 1929.

imgDesc: Letter from Filip Friedman, 1937. From Filip Friedman in Łódź, Poland, to (?) in New York, 12 December 1937. Friedman thanks the recipient for a donation to YIVO in Łódź from the New York Aid Committee for Łódź. He notes that the donation will help fund the first volume of the YIVO publication, Lodzher shriftn, a multivolume work. Yiddish. (YIVO, RG 107) (YIVO)

text: Lwów

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: YIVO

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Holocaust

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland

text: Joint Distribution Committee


title: Curierul Israelit

abstract: Weekly Romanian newspaper founded in Bucharest on 25 December 1906 by I. Negureanu and M. Schweig. Curierul Israelit (The Israelite Courier) was issued with frequent interruptions until 25 March 1945; Schweig eventually appeared on its masthead as owner and director. The publication carried the subtitle “Organ septemânal pentru apărarea intereselor evreieşti” (Weekly Organ for the Defense of Jewish Interests); in 1944 this slogan was altered to “Organ al Uniunii Evreilor Români” (Organ of the Union of Romanian Jews).

text: Bucharest

text: Horia Carp

text: Ion Călugăru

text: Zionist

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim


title: Katz, Bentsiyon

abstract: (1875–1958), journalist and editor. Bentsiyon Katz was born in Doyg (Lith., Daugai) in Lithuania to a prestigious rabbinical family. At the age of 16, he began to send articles on contemporary problems to Ha-Melits and Ha-Tsefirah, frequently dealing with the need to adapt halakhah to modern times. From 1893 he lived in turn in Vilna, Kovno, and Saint Petersburg, received a university education, and by the end of that decade had published studies on halakhah (Mi-Zekenim etbonen [From the Elders I Shall Gain Wisdom]; 1894), on the Talmud (Or nogah: ‘Al sheme ha-Talmud [A Shining Light upon the Heavens of the Talmud]; 1895), and on Jewish history (Le-Korot ha-yehudim be-Rusyah, Polin, ve-Lita’ bi-shenot me’ot ha-shesh ‘esreh veha-sheva‘ ‘esreh [History of the Jews of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries]; 1899).

text: Lithuania

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Vilna

text: Kovno

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Russia

text: Zionist movement

text: censorship

text: Mendel Beilis

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Stybel

glossary: halakhah Talmud


title: Hock, Simon

abstract: (1815–1887), historian, publicist, and businessman. Simon (Sinai) Hock was born into family that had been in Prague for several generations. He studied at the city’s yeshiva and the Jewish Normalschule. In 1835, he helped found Aurora, the Prague society for youth participating in morning prayers, a group committed to blending religious tradition and ideas of the Enlightenment. During the 1840s, Hock wrote about the impact of political conditions on Jewish life in Bohemia and on religious reform; his articles were printed anonymously in the newspapers Die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and Der Orient.

text: Prague

text: yeshiva

text: Normalschule

text: Bohemia

text: religious reform

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: David Kaufmann

glossary: publicist yeshiva Talmud


title: Avraham ben Aleksander ha-Kohen of Kalisk

abstract: (1741–1810), Hasidic rabbi and leader. Avraham was a disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and a follower and colleague of Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk. It is said that before his attachment to Hasidism he had apparently studied with the Gaon of Vilna. Avraham assisted Menaḥem Mendel in leading a group of Hasidim to the Land of Israel in 1777 and then moved with him from Safed to Tiberias. Letters to their followers in Belorussia–Lithuania are signed by both rabbis, with Avraham occasionally adding his own words. When Menaḥem Mendel died in 1788, the Hasidim of Tiberias, as well as a portion of followers in Eastern Europe, deemed Avraham to be their leader.

text: Dov Ber

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Hasidism

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Land of Israel

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Avraham of Kalisk

glossary: Magid Gaon


title: Niemirower, Iacob Isac

abstract: (1872–1939), rabbi and philosopher of Judaism. Born in Lemberg (Lwów), Iacob Isac (Ya‘akov Yitsḥak) Niemirower received a traditional Jewish education. His parents moved to Iaşi, Romania, when he was a child. Initially influenced by Hasidism, Niemirower later followed the rationalist current characteristic of the Haskalah. In 1890, he went to Berlin to study philosophy, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Bern in Switzerland in 1895. In Berlin he also studied at the Neo-Orthodox rabbinical seminary and was ordained by Rabbi Ernest Biberfeld. Niemirower also decided to become a Reform rabbi, and was ordained in 1896 by Rabbi Michael Hamburger of Strolitz. Niemirower was additionally influenced by the philosophy of Moritz Lazarus.

text: Lemberg

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: seminary

text: Zionist movement

text: Sephardic

text: Bucharest

text: Ashkenazi

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Curierul Israelit

glossary: Haskalah Torah


title: Beck, Karl Isidor

abstract: (1817–1879), poet and promoter of German-language culture. Karl Beck was born in Baja, a large Jewish community in southern Hungary; his father was a businessman. Beck was a medical student in Vienna until illness forced him to return home. After a brief interlude in the business world, he studied philosophy in Leipzig. There he associated with young radical Austrian writers, including Moritz Hartmann, Ignaz Kuranda, and Alfred Meissner (all of whom went into exile to avoid the severe censorship practiced under Metternich’s government), and made literary contacts within the libertarian Young Germany movement. Beck ultimately opposed nationalism, advocated the dominance of German-language culture throughout the Habsburg Empire, and venerated Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor.”

text: Hungary

text: Moritz Hartmann


title: Parties and Ideologies

abstract: The history of Jewish political parties in Eastern Europe was short, stretching as it did only from the 1880s until 1949, when what little remained of them after World War II was liquidated by the then recently established Communist regimes. Even during that brief period, experience demonstrated that their ability to change the circumstances in which the Jewish populations lived was severely limited. With the Jewish people in the states and major historic regions of Eastern Europe only rarely exceeding 10 percent of the total population, the parties could not realistically have been expected to gain a significant share in government.

imgDesc: Delegates to the conference at which the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement was founded, Katowice, Poland, 1884. (Front row, center) Lev (Leon) Pinsker, author of the proto-Zionist manifesto Autoemancipation. (YIVO)

text: Russian Empire

text: Orthodox

text: religious reform

text: Galicia

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionists

text: Orthodoxy

text: Hungary

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Hasidic

text: Haskalah

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Bund

text: Katowice

text: pogroms

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Odessa

text: Bund

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Romania

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Galicia

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: Agudas Akhim

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: revolution of 1905

text: pogroms

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Mizraḥi

text: Land of Israel

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Folkspartey

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Maksim Vinaver

text: Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Ger

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: Mizraḥi

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Bucharest

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: World War I

text: revolutions

text: Civil War

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Romania

text: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

text: General Zionist

text: Bund

text: Fareynikte

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Land of Israel

text: Hit’aḥadut

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Ester Frumkin

text: Evsektsiia

text: communism

text: Yiddish-language school system

text: settle Jews on the land

text: Crimea

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Estonia

text: Tarbut

text: Minorities Treaty

text: TSYSHO

text: Mizraḥi

text: General Zionist

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Leon Reich

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Židovská Strana

text: Romania

text: Bucovina

text: Transylvania

text: Bessarabia

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Dror

text: antisemitic movements

text: Hungary

text: youth movements

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Gordonia

text: Prague

text: Revisionist Zionist

text: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Białystok

text: Lublin

text: Vilnius

text: Kaunas

text: Vladimir Kossovskii

text: Yekusiel [Noyekh] Portnoy

text: Betar

text: Henryk Erlich

text: Wiktor Alter

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Einsatzgruppen

text: ghettos

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Vilna

text: Minsk

text: Białystok

text: armed resistance

text: Mordekhai Anielewicz

text: Yitsḥak Zuckerman

text: Gisi Fleischmann

text: Mikha’el Weissmandel

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: Alexandru Şafran

text: Ottó Komoly

text: Rudolf (Rezső) Kasztner

text: Budapest

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
numerus clausus
Haskalah
Congress Poland
Neolog
Status Quo
kehilah
rebbe
Diaspora
Yishuv
Torah

subconcepts: Social, Religious, and Geographical Divisions


title: Botoşani

abstract: Town in northeast Romania in the area of the former principality of Moldova; administrative center of the county that shares its name. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Jewish merchants were already present in Botoşani, (Yid., Botoshan), known for its fairs and located at the crossroads of economic routes from Poland to the Danube. Jewish numbers increased as a result of emigration from Galicia and Ukraine. This tendency was stimulated by the geographic location of the town, which permitted trade with both Bucovina and Bessarabia, as well as by the relative religious tolerance prevailing in Moldova.

text: Romania

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: trade

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: crafts

text: industry

text: Orthodoxy

text: Haskalah

text: Romania

text: Bessarabia

text: Transnistria


title: Wygodzki, Stanisław

abstract: (1907–1992), writer, poet, and translator. Abandoning his youthful involvement in the Zionism embraced by his father, Yitsḥak, Stanisław (Szaja) Wygodzki became active in the Communist movement and suffered political repression in Poland. As a member of the Polish section of the International Office of Revolutionary Literature in Moscow, he contributed to its Polish paper, Kultura Mas, and other left-wing periodicals.

text: Zionism

text: Poland

text: Moscow

text: Będzin

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Asch

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Froyim Kaganovski

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Holocaust

text: Polish children’s literature

text: Julian Tuwim


title: Feldman, Wilhelm

abstract: (1868–1919), literary historian, writer, critic, editor, and politician. Born into a poor Orthodox family in Zbaraż, Wilhelm Feldman ultimately found a place among Poland’s intellectual elite. At 18 he broke with his Hasidic milieu and moved to Lwów, a stronghold of the Haskalah movement. There he joined Agudas Akhim, a group of young maskilim promoting Polish (as opposed to the traditionally German) political orientation among Galician Jews. Intense social activism did not prevent him from immediately launching a career as a writer, publicist, and literary critic.

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: Haskalah

text: Agudas Akhim

text: assimilation

text: antisemitism

text: Zionism

text: Kraków

glossary: Haskalah publicist


title: Kipnis, Menakhem

abstract: (1878–1942), singer, critic, photographer, and ethnographer of Yiddish song. Born in Uzhmir, Volhynia, Menakhem Kipnis was a cantor’s son who entered the world of Jewish music at a young age. He served as a cantor’s assistant in local synagogues on the High Holidays and as a choirboy at the Choral Synagogue in Zhitomir. He also performed throughout the Pale of Settlement.

imgDesc: Klezmer musicians at a wedding, playing an accompaniment to the arrival of the groom, Ukraine, ca. 1925. Photograph by Menakhem Kipnis. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: photographer

text: cantor

text: Zhitomir

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: folk song

text: Haynt

text: music

text: theater

text: Folk Songs


title: Boker Or, Ha-

abstract: (1876–1886), Hebrew literary monthly. Ha-Boker or (The Morning Light) was founded in Lwów by the writer Avraham Ber Gottlober as a counterpoint to Perets Smolenskin’s monthly, Ha-Shaḥar (The Dawn). Between 1874 and 1875, Smolenskin had used his monthly to publish sections of his collection of essays ‘Et lata‘at (A Time to Plant), which was devoted, in the main, to attacking the Berlin Haskalah founded by Moses Mendelssohn. Gottlober, a moderate maskil of the older generation, saw it as his duty to defend Mendelssohn’s honor, and in 1876 and 1877 Ha-Boker or provided a platform for Gottlober’s supporters. They were not opposed to Smolenskin’s maskilic, nationalist goals, and therefore concentrated their efforts on refuting claims that Mendelssohn was antinationalist, or that he was responsible for assimilationist trends among Jews.

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

text: Lwów

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Haskalah

text: assimilationist

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Eli‘ezer Zweifel

text: Salomon Buber

text: David Frishman

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature


title: Ba-Derekh

abstract: Hebrew-language newspaper published in Poland between 1932 and 1937. Ba-Derekh (On the Way) represented the last in a series of attempts by the Polish Zionist Organization to establish a daily newspaper in Hebrew. Efforts to do so had started in 1919 with plans for the renewed publication of the long-running Ha-Tsefirah (The Morning/The Dawn), and continued with the founding of Ha-Yom (Today; 1925–1926) and with other failed attempts at once again resuming publication of Ha-Tsefirah (1926–1928; 1931).

text: newspaper

text: Poland

text: Zionist

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Yom

text: Poland

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Yehoshu‘a (Ozjasz) Thon

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Tsevi Zevulun Weinberg

text: Bialik

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Tarbut


title: Lesser, Aleksander

abstract: (1814–1884), painter, sketch artist, illustrator, art critic, and amateur researcher of antiquities. Lesser holds a place in the chronicles of Polish art as an outstanding representative of his country’s historical school. He was also one of the first artists to paint scenes from the modern history of Polish Jews.

imgDesc: Pogrzeb pięciu poległych w Warszawie, 2 marca 1861 na Cmentarzu Powązkowskim (The Funeral of the Five Victims of the Demonstration of 2 March 1861 in Warsaw at the Powazki Cemetery). Aleksander Lesser, 1866. Oil on canvas. (Muzeum Narodowe, Kraków)

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Esterke

text: Berek Joselewicz

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: Markus Jastrow

text: Mathias Bersohn

text: Poznań

text: L’viv


title: Słucki, Arnold

abstract: (1920–1972), poet, publicist, and translator. Born into an Orthodox family in Tyszowce, near Lublin, Arnold Słucki (originally Aron Kreiner) attended the State Seminary for Teachers of Judaism in Warsaw between 1934 and 1939. A Communist activist, Słucki fled the invading Nazis to the USSR, where he worked as a teacher and Komsomol instructor. In 1942, he joined the Red Army, later transferring to Polish units. After demobilization, he studied philosophy in Warsaw. A member of the Communist Party (1945–1966), he emigrated from Poland following the antisemitic campaign of 1968, eventually settling in West Berlin.

text: Lublin

text: Warsaw

text: USSR

text: Poland

text: Maurycy Szymel

text: shtetl

text: Holocaust

text: Marc Chagall


title: Brzechwa, Jan

abstract: (1898–1966), poet, satirist, and children’s book author. Jan Brzechwa (Jan Wiktor Lesman), a cousin of the poet Bolesław Leśmian, was born into a family of assimilated Jews; his father converted to Protestantism. Brzechwa fought on the Polish side in the Polish–Soviet War of 1920. After studying law in Warsaw from 1920 to 1924, Brzechwa worked as a lawyer, copyright expert, and legal author. He was a member of the literary circle around the poetry group Skamander and the journal Wiadomości Literackie, and also wrote for cabarets and composed song lyrics. Brzechwa cofounded the Union of Stage Artists and Composers. After World War II, he worked for UNESCO.

imgDesc: Imię wielkości: Wiersze o Józefie Pilsudskim (Name of Greatness: Poems about Józef Piłsudski), by Jan Brzechwa (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo J. Mortkowicza, 1938). (Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America. All rights reserved.)

text: Bolesław Leśmian

text: Warsaw

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: children’s literature

text: Poland

text: Julian Tuwim


title: Kraushar, Aleksander

abstract: (1843–1931), historian, poet, and translator. Born in Warsaw, Aleksander Kraushar came from a moderately prosperous commercial family—his father, Herman, was a senior broker in the Warsaw stock exchange. Kraushar attended a scientific gymnasium and was in the same class as the banker Hipolit Wawelberg. He then studied law at the Szkoła Główna, the proto-university established by Aleksander Wielopolski in the early 1860s.

text: Warsaw

text: Hipolit Wawelberg

text: Jutrzenka

text: Izraelita

text: Mathias Bersohn

text: assimilation

text: Frankist movement


title: Rafalovich, Artur Germanovich

abstract: (1853–1921), economist and financial agent for the Russian government. Although Artur Rafalovich was born and raised in Odessa, he lived in France from the 1880s on, where he wrote a series of economic studies. His analyses remain valuable today as a resource for learning about the economic history of Europe.

text: Russian

text: Odessa

text: Revolution of 1917


title: Pápa

abstract: City in Veszprém county, Hungary. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Pápa was home to one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in Hungary. Situated favorably at the crossroads between north and south in Transdanubia, Pápa was designated as a “privileged market town” that belonged to a branch of the Esterházy family. Since before 1840 Jews were excluded from most of the “royal free or privileged cities,” it was in noble-owned, large market towns such as Pápa that they flourished. The population was primarily Hungarian with a sizable Calvinist and Lutheran minority alongside the Roman Catholic majority. The Pápa fair attracted merchants from the mercantile centers to the north and west—Pressburg, Györ, and Sopron—who bought up agricultural produce from the southern counties.

text: Hungary

text: Pressburg

text: Sabbath

text: Leopold Löw

text: Reform

text: Orthodoxy

text: Tiszaeszlár blood libel

text: Budapest

text: Shimon Sofer

text: Jewish Congress

text: Zionism

glossary: responsa Torah Neolog


title: Lipski, Leo

abstract: (1917–1997), Polish prose writer. Born in Zurich into a Polonized Jewish family, Leo Lipski (originally Lipschütz) spent his childhood and youth in Kraków where he studied psychology and philosophy and made his literary debut. He fled to Lwów in 1939, where he was arrested by the Soviets and sent to labor camps in 1940. Managing to leave the USSR with the Polish Army, he fell ill with typhoid fever and encephalitis in Tehran and, as a result, was discharged from the army. After briefly studying in Beirut, Lipski settled in Tel Aviv in 1944. Partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly, he typed his works with one hand, later switching to dictation. In 1975 he traveled to Paris with the poet Lucja Gliksman, who cared for him.

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: USSR

text: Poland

text: communism

text: Holocaust


title: Ebner, Mayer

abstract: (1872–1955), Zionist politician and journalist. Mayer Ebner was born in Cernăuți (Czernowitz) to an assimilated bourgeois family, and he studied law there at Franz Joseph University. As early as his teenage years, Ebner supported the concept of developing a new Jewish national movement. He felt that the liberal ideal of Jewish assimilation had failed, and that outbreaks of antisemitism in the last decades of the nineteenth century required change. It was in this spirit that he utilized the model of the Kadimah association (created by Jewish students in Vienna) to set up the student society Hasmonäain Cernăuți in 1891. In this project, he worked with Philipp Menczel, Isak Schmierer, and Josef Bierer.

text: Zionist

text: Cernăuți

text: assimilation

text: Bucovina

text: Romania

text: Wilhelm Filderman


title: Operetta

abstract: Modern Yiddish theater, as conceived by Avrom Goldfadn (1840–1908) in the 1870s, was above all a musical theater, and operetta was doubtless its dominant genre. This musical theater accommodated not only the tastes of the audiences but also the skills of aspiring performers—who, in the early years, joined theatrical troupes on the strength of their singing rather than their acting. As a central element of East European Jewish culture, music suffused everyday life—and Jewish musical culture was highly eclectic: it often appropriated and blended sacred and secular strains, Jewish and non-Jewish elements, and folk and art music. The Yiddish operetta was built on this musical culture and presented it in a new, theatrical form.

imgDesc: “Bar Kokhba, by the celebrated author Goldfadn.” Romanian poster. Printed by Libraria Smolinsky. Advertisement for a benefit performance of a Goldfadn operetta by Group Tikvas Kanada (Hope of Canada) from Paşcani (now in Romania) to raise funds for “two hundred starving people on their way to the Land of Israel,” 1900. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: songs

text: dance

text: pogroms

text: Russia

text: Lemberg

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Czernowitz

text: Warsaw

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Łódź

text: Kiev


title: Klaczko, Julian

abstract: (1825–1906), political activist and journalist. Julian Klaczko was born to a wealthy merchant family in Vilna. Influenced by his father’s Haskalah ideology, he was educated in both Hebrew and Polish, and was tutored by Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn, among others. Klaczko published his first poems when he was 13, initially in Polish in the collection Pierwsza ofiara (The First Sacrifice; 1838) and then in Hebrew in the volume Dudaim (1842). Other texts in Hebrew such as the novel The Fisherman remained unpublished. Those works were strongly influenced by the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz.

text: Vilna

text: Haskalah

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Königsberg

text: conversion

text: Russia

text: Kraków


title: Kanfer, Mojżesz

abstract: (1880–1942), publicist, literary and theater critic, and translator. Born in Buczacz, Galicia, Mojżesz Kanfer received both a religious and a secular education. He studied law in Lwów, earning a doctorate in 1908. After serving in the Austrian army during World War I, Kanfer wrote for the Polish-language Zionist daily press as well as for Polish Jewish and Yiddish literary and scholarly journals. He moved to Kraków in 1923, working for the literary section of Nowy Dziennik (1923–1939). He was also an active member of the Jewish Theater Society and was involved in establishing a permanent Yiddish scene in the city.

text: Buczacz

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: Kraków

text: TSYSHO

text: Sholem Asch

text: Holocaust

text: Judenrat

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Yiddish theater


title: Hartmann, Moritz

abstract: (1821–1872), poet and journalist. Moritz Hartmann was born in Dušnik, Bohemia, and died in Vienna. Coming from a well-to-do family, he studied medicine and philosophy in Prague and Vienna. Hartmann associated with a circle of writers who wrote in German; some of them, including Leopold Kompert and Ludwig August Frankl, were Jews; others, such as August Meissner and Joseph Rank, were Christian. As was the case with the members of his circle, Hartmann wrote poetry based on themes from Czech history. He lived for a time in Breslau, then in Leipzig, where he befriended the German Jewish writer Berthold Auerbach.

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Leopold Kompert

text: Breslau

text: El‘azar Fleckeles


title: Steinherz, Samuel

abstract: (1857–1942), historian, medievalist, and editor. Born in Güssing (Burgenland), Austria, to the family of an estate agent, Samuel Steinherz spent his childhood in Vienna and Graz. At the latter city’s university, he studied German literature and history, and his first job was at the Institute for Austrian History in Vienna. He later returned to Graz, where he studied law.

text: Burgenland

text: Prague

text: Terezín

text: Bohemia


title: Barbash, Shemu’el

abstract: (1850?–1922?), banker, Zionist activist, and philanthropist. Nothing is known of Shemu’el Barbash’s childhood beyond the fact that he was given a traditional Jewish education. He also was familiar with modern Hebrew literature, had acquired some secular knowledge, and excelled in mathematics.

text: Zionist

text: Odessa

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Kalonymus Wissotzky

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: yeshiva

text: Simon Dubnow

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

text: crown rabbi


title: Berlin, Naftali Tsevi Yehudah

abstract: (1816–1893), head of the Volozhin yeshiva and one of the great Torah scholars of the nineteenth century. Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin (known as Netsiv) was born in Mir (Minsk district) into a distinguished family of merchants based in Shklov. His father, Ya‘akov, was a wealthy textile merchant, who at the end of his life sold all his property and settled in Jerusalem. At the age of 14, Berlin married Rayna Batyah, the daughter of Yitsḥak, son of Ḥayim of Volozhin, founder of the Volozhin yeshiva. For many years Berlin studied on his own with great diligence, but his father-in-law’s family remained unaware of his promise as a scholar.

text: Volozhin

text: Minsk

text: Shklov

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: yeshiva

text: Soloveichik

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Passover

text: rabbinate

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Land of Israel

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl Epstein

text: Warsaw

glossary: yeshiva Torah Gaon halakhah responsa pilpul Talmud


title: Rabinowitz, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1874–1948), Hebrew, Yiddish, and German writer. Ya‘akov Rabinowitz was born in Volkovysk, Russia (now Belarus). After receiving a traditional education at heder and a yeshiva, he studied secular topics and taught in Vitebsk. Before he began composing his major literary output in German and Hebrew, he wrote a number of Zionist brochures in Yiddish, the earliest of which (Vu iz undzer oylem? An ernst vort tsum folk [Where Are Our Masses? A Serious Word to the People]) was published in Berdichev in 1899.

imgDesc: Ya‘akov Rabinowitz, Volkovysk, Russia (now in Belarus), ca. 1900. Photograph by Davidovitsh. (Asher Barash Gnazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

text: Russia

text: Belarus

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Vitebsk

text: Zionist

text: Berdichev

text: David Frishman

text: Kraków

text: Ha-Dor

text: Odessa

text: Warsaw

text: 1905 October Revolution

text: pogroms

text: Vilna

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Asher Barash

text: Land of Israel

text: Avraham Mapu

glossary:
heder
yeshiva
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Teichthal, Yisakhar Shelomoh

abstract: (1885–1945), Hasidic rabbi. Born in Nagyhalász in northeastern Hungary and educated in Hasidic yeshivas in Poland and Hungary, Yisakhar Shelomoh Teichthal studied in several Hasidic kloyzn (small study and prayer houses) in Poland during his teen years, most notably in the kloyz of the Sandz Hasidim in Tarnów, before returning to Hungary. There he became a close disciple of Mosheh Grünwald (1853–1910) at the renowned yeshiva of Chust, the second largest Orthodox yeshiva in the country.

text: Hasidic

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: kloyz

text: Sandz Hasidim

text: Tarnów

text: yeshiva

text: Orthodox

text: Slovakia

text: Munkatsher

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Budapest

text: Holocaust

text: Bratislava

glossary:
yeshiva
responsa
Neolog
Status Quo
rebbe


title: Bershadsky, Yesha‘yahu

abstract: (1871–1908), Hebrew writer. Born in the village of Zimoshti in the Grodno region, Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky (originally surnamed Domashevitski) received a private education in Hebrew and Russian. From 1887 he worked as a teacher in Białystok. In 1889, he started publishing articles in Ha-Melits, and in the early 1890s, his stories appeared in Ha-Tsefirah. He moved to Baku in 1896, and from there to Ekaterinoslav, where he taught and compiled his principal works.

imgDesc: Jewish writers and intellectuals, Vilna, 1905. (From left to right) Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky, M. Kabak (seated), Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz (standing), Berta Tshernovits, Ernestina Rabinovitz (daughter of the writer Sholem Aleichem and Berkowitz’s wife), playwright Perets Hirshbeyn, and Shemu’el[?] Tshernovits. (YIVO)

text: Białystok

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Warsaw

text: Haskalah


title: Szerb, Antal

abstract: (1901–1945), novelist, critic, and literary historian. Like a number of modern Hungarian literary artists of Jewish origin, Antal Szerb saw himself as a Hungarian writer only, with no significant ties to Jewish culture and religion. Indeed, his only connection to the Jewish people was that he was killed as a Jew. Some of his close writer friends and contemporaries (e.g., György Sárközi, Gábor Halász, László Fenyő), however, were also assimilated Jews, or converts to Christianity, who became victims of the Holocaust.

text: Holocaust

text: Hungarian literature

text: Budapest


title: Gorenshtein, Fridrikh Naumovich

abstract: (1932–2002), prose writer, playwright, and screenwriter. Fridrikh Gorenshtein was born in Kiev; his father, a professor, was repressed in 1935. A graduate of the Dnepropetrovsk Mining Institute (1955), Gorenshtein also completed a course in screenwriting (1963). Between 1963 and 1980, he wrote 15 screenplays, including Solaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovskii; 1972) and Raba liubvi (Slave of Love; dir. Nikita Mikhalkov; 1976). In the Soviet Union, Gorenshtein was permitted to publish just one piece, the story “Dom s bashenkoi” (House with a Turret; 1964); however, his novella, Stupeni (Steps), was included in a celebrated “unofficial” collection, Metropol’ (1979). In 1980 he emigrated to Germany, where he remained until his death in 2002.

text: Kiev

text: Dnepropetrovsk

text: Soviet Union


title: Kremer, Arkadii

abstract: (1865–1935), socialist political leader; known as “Father of the Bund.” Alternately called Aleksandr or Solomon, Arkadii Kremer was born in Sventsian (now Švenčionys, Lith.), Vilna guberniia, to a religious maskilic family. At age 12 he moved to Vilna, where he attended Realschule, later studying at the Technological Institute in Saint Petersburg. His studies were interrupted in 1889 when he was jailed for revolutionary activity. Upon his release in 1890, Kremer was banned from Saint Petersburg.

text: Bund

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Shmul Gozhansky

text: L. Martov

text: Minsk

text: Warsaw

text: Bund

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Białystok

text: Bund

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Poland


title: Kamenev, Iurii

abstract: (Lev Borisovich Rosenfel’d; 1883–1936), a principal leader of the Bolshevik party and the early Soviet government. Apprenticed in radical politics during his high school and truncated university careers, Kamenev was an early recruit to the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democrats (1904), growing close to Lenin during the revolutionary period 1905–1907. He spent the years of political reaction in emigration (1908–1914), where he and Grigorii Zinov’ev became Lenin’s most trusted lieutenants. As the more analytically and literarily inclined of the two, Kamenev collaborated with Lenin, editing a series of Bolshevik periodicals. A man of mild temperament, he avoided personal invectives and maintained good relations with political opponents.

imgDesc: (Left to right) Bolshevik leaders Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Lev (Iurii) Kamenev, USSR, n.d. Trotsky and Kamenev, the first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, were both of Jewish origin. (Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: Soviet

text: Grigorii Zinov’ev

text: Russia

text: February Revolution of 1917

text: Petrograd

text: Moscow

text: Trotsky

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Zionists

text: Evsektsiia


title: Solieli, Menaḥem

abstract: (1883–1957), political figure, Zionist leader, and biblical scholar. Born in Kovno to a distinguished and wealthy family, Menaḥem Solieli (Max Soloveichik) studied at the university in Saint Petersburg and continued his education at various institutions of higher learning in Germany. His particular interest was in the biblical period. In 1904, in Saint Petersburg, he was among the founders of the Russian-language Zionist journal Evreiskaia zhizn (Jewish Life).

text: Zionist

text: Kovno

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Lithuania

text: Chaim Weizmann


title: Ventspils

abstract: (Ger., Windau), town in northwestern Latvia on the shore of the Baltic Sea. From 1561, Ventspils belonged to the Duchy of Courland (Kurland) and was under the sovereignty of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until it was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1795. The first Jews came to Ventspils in the second half of the eighteenth century from neighboring localities as well as from Prussia and Lithuania. A burial society and cemetery, however, were not established until 1831. Later a synagogue and a bet midrash were built.

text: Latvia

text: Courland

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russian Empire

text: Lithuania

text: bet midrash

text: Yehoshu‘a Falk

text: Ruvn Rubinshteyn

text: Bundists

text: Zionists

text: World War I

text: Maccabi


title: Shtern, Lina Solomonovna

abstract: (1878–1968), biologist and physiologist. Born in Russian-controlled Courland, which later became part of Latvia, Lina Shtern studied at Geneva University, where she also later worked, becoming a full professor—the university’s first female professor—in 1917. She settled in the Soviet Union in 1925 and held leading academic positions. In her first post (1925–1948) she served as head of the physiology department at the Second Moscow University (after a reorganization of 1930, the department was part of the Second Moscow Medical Institute). Simultaneously, Shtern was director of the Physiology Institute of the Academy of Medical Sciences from 1929 to 1948 and became the first female member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939. She joined the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences in 1944.

imgDesc: Lina Shtern with other prominent Soviet women, mid-1940s(?). Pictured (from left to right): the highly decorated fighter pilot Polina Gelman, the mathematician Pelegeia Kochina, Shtern, and the opera singer Deborah Pantofel-Nechetskaia. (The State Archives of the Russian Federation. Print courtesy Joshua Rubenstein)

text: Courland

text: Latvia

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Kohn, Hans

abstract: (1891–1971), Zionist activist, journalist, and scholar of modern nationalism. Hans Kohn was born in Prague to a bilingual (Czech and German) Jewish family; his parents came from the Czech regions outside the Bohemian capital. In 1910, upon his graduation from a German high school and just before he was accepted as a student of law at the Karl-Ferdinand German University of Prague, Kohn joined the Zionist students’ Bar Kochba association, which, until the outbreak of World War I, was the center for Zionist activity in Prague. He served as its chair from 1912 to 1913.

imgDesc: Hans Kohn as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, Prague, 1914. Photograph by American Photo Studio. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: Zionist

text: Prague

text: Bar Kochba association

text: land of Israel

text: Hugo Bergmann

text: Robert Weltsch


title: Yitsḥak ben Shimshon ha-Kohen

abstract: (ca. 1560–1624), son-in-law of Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el (Maharal of Prague); scholar of midrash. Yitsḥak ben Shimshon ha-Kohen was born and died in Prague. According to family tradition, he served as rabbi in Nikolsburg and Vienna and was also a member of Prague’s rabbinic court. He was one of the circle of scholars in Prague who were colleagues and disciples of his father-in-law, Maharal of Prague. The group shared wide-ranging intellectual interests: halakhah and agadah, Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy, Bible and Hebrew poetry.

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Prague

text: Nikolsburg

text: Tsene-rene

text: Ha-Magid

text: rabbinate

text: piety

glossary: halakhah agadah Kabbalah Rashi Magid responsa Torah


title: Epstein, Kalonimos Kalman of Kraków

abstract: (1754–1823), Hasidic master. Kalonimos Kalman Epstein of Kraków was born in Neustadt (now Prudnik), Poland, to a prestigious rabbinic family. He is considered one of the most influential masters of the third generation of Hasidism. Epstein settled in Kraków early in his life and was primarily a disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk (1717–1786/87), who, as a student of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh (1704–1772), had been sent to Kraków to spread the teachings of the Ba‘al Shem Tov. When Epstein met Dov Ber, Kraków had no discernible Hasidic presence, and Epstein is considered to have been the first major Hasidic master in that city.

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Hasidism

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl of Zlotshev

text: Hasidism

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: pilgrimage

glossary: Magid tsadik Torah


title: Grydzewski, Mieczysław

abstract: (Grycendler; 1894–1970), editor, publisher, publicist, and literary critic. Mieczysław Grydzewski converted to Protestantism before World War I, studied in Moscow and later in Warsaw (under the direction of Marceli Handelsman), and earned a doctorate in history in 1922. As a student, he wrote for the academic journal Pro arte and studio. Beginning in 1920, he published—and, from 1921 on, edited—a monthly associated with Skamander, a group of poets. In 1924, he began copublishing, with Antoni Borman, Wiadomości Literackie, the most prominent literary and cultural journal in interwar Poland, of which he remained the only editor until the outbreak of World War II.

text: Moscow

text: Warsaw

text: Marceli Handelsman

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Poland

text: assimilationist


title: Guzik, Anna Iakovlevna

abstract: (1909–1994), variety artist. Born in Kharkov, Anna Guzik was the daughter of Iakov Guzik, founder of the Yiddish Traveling Folk Ensemble of Musical Comedy. She first appeared in her father’s troupe in 1924, acting in Avrom Goldfadn’s comedies and operettas and appearing in stage versions of Sholem Aleichem’s works. She sang, danced, acted, read feuilletons from the stage, and performed Jewish folk songs. In the mid-1930s Guzik toured the USSR with a Jewish folk music ensemble and also appeared on the Russian stage in musical comedies. In 1939 she won a national contest for variety performers.

text: Kharkov

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: operettas

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: folk songs

text: USSR

text: Moscow

text: Riga

text: Ukraine

text: Moldavia


title: Neustadt, Adolf

abstract: (1812–1875), journalist, editor, and communal leader. Adolf Neustadt (Neustadtl) was exposed early in his life to the world of the Prague literati in his father’s antique bookshop. While studying at the local Piarist secondary school where his literary talent was encouraged, he also came under the wing of the maskil Peter Beer. In his youth, Neustadt made fast friendships with some of the outstanding personalities of his generation, including the publicist and political figure Ignaz Jeitteles; the journalist, editor, member of parliament, and Viennese communal leader, Ignaz Kuranda; and the high civil servant Baron Karl Hock, whose conversion did not diminish their close relationship.

text: Prague

text: Peter Beer

text: Ignaz Jeitteles

text: conversion

text: Moritz Gottlieb Saphir

text: Hungary

text: Leopold Kompert

text: Ignác Einhorn

text: Arad

text: Pressburg

glossary: maskil publicist Talmud


title: Uri ben Pinḥas of Strelisk

abstract: (1757–1826), Hasidic leader. Uri ben Pinḥas lived in eastern Galicia during the period when Hasidism expanded significantly. He was probably born in the town of Janów or nearby, the son of a poor artisan. His main teacher of Hasidism was Shelomoh of Karlin, who lived in Ludmir at the time. After Shelomoh was killed by Russian soldiers in 1792, Uri ben Pinḥas became the leader of a group of Hasidim in Lwów. Later he moved to Strelisk, where he continued as a Hasidic leader, although apparently without establishing a formal court. Among those who traveled to study with him and identified themselves as his students, Shalom Rokeaḥ, founder of the Belz dynasty, stood out.

text: Galicia

text: Hasidism

text: Karlin

text: Ludmir

text: Lwów

text: Belz dynasty

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Stratin Hasidic dynasty

text: Tsevi Hirsh of Zhidachov

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak of Pshiskhe


title: Jakobson, Roman Osipovich

abstract: (1896–1982; convert to Orthodox Christianity in 1975), Russian linguist and philologist. One of the twentieth century’s most versatile and imaginative linguists and literary scholars, Roman Jakobson was born in Moscow. Already in his high-school days—he graduated in 1914 from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow—three hallmarks of his long scholarly career were apparent. The first was a penchant for group research and collaborative work; as a student of Slavic philology at the University of Moscow, he cofounded the Moscow Linguistic Circle in March 1915, and joined with the Russian formalists in their efforts to redirect the attention of literary scholars to the construction and form of literary works. A second hallmark was his impressive range of interests, stretching from folklore and mythology through literature, the visual arts, linguistics, and semiotics.

text: Moscow

text: Civil War

text: Prague

text: Brno

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Russia

text: Iurii Tynianov

text: YIVO

text: Max Weinreich


title: Kohn, Sámuel

abstract: (1841–1920), rabbi and historian. Sámuel Kohn was born in Baja, Hungary. Several of his ancestors were rabbis, including his paternal grandfather, Götz Kohn-Schwerin, chief rabbi of Baja and Bács County and one of the outstanding rabbinic authorities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Kohn attended the Catholic gymnasium in Baja and then studied at the yeshivas of Esriel Hildesheimer in Kismarton and Sámuel Sommer in Pápa. In 1858, Kohn enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau; at the same time, he attended the University of Breslau, where he studied philosophy, history, and linguistics, completing his doctoral dissertation, “De Pentateucho Samaritano” (The Samaritan Pentateuch), in 1865.

text: Hungary

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Pápa

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

text: Pest

text: Jewish Congress

text: Meir Kayserling

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania


title: Psychoanalysis

abstract: Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, had deep roots in Eastern Galicia. Freud’s father’s family was from Tyśmenica and Buczacz; his mother was born in Brody and spent her childhood in Odessa, and his wife Martha’s family was from Brody as well. Many of the contributors to the development of psychoanalysis in subsequent decades—and all of Freud’s original followers—also had roots in Eastern Galicia. To this day, a high number of notable psychoanalysts are second- or third-generation descendants of East European Jews.

text: Galicia

text: Buczacz

text: Brody

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Hungary

text: Rostov-on-Don

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union

text: Sándor Ferenczi

text: Lithuania

text: YIVO

text: Vilna

text: Max Weinreich


title: Hebrew Literature (Children’s Literature)

abstract: Children’s literature began to take form in Hebrew at the end of the eighteenth century, following the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement in Western Europe. Books and stories for young readers in that language then became standard in Eastern Europe, where the genre continued to develop. After World War I, Hebrew literature flourished more often in Palestine while becoming less popular in Eastern Europe, though texts were published until World War II.

imgDesc: Otsar ha-limud ha-‘ivri (Treasury of Hebrew Studies), by Y. Garzuvsky and S. L. Gordon (Warsaw: Tushiyah, 1904). Illustrations by G. Tshurny. Hebrew primer. The depiction of girls reading books perhaps reflects the growth of interest in the Jewish community in formal education for girls. The Jean Moldovan Collection, Gift of the Jesselson Family, 1993.853. (Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York)

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature

text: Haskalah

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Prague

text: Breslau

text: proverbs

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Warsaw

text: Avraham Shalom Friedberg

text: riddles

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Odessa

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Tushiyah

text: Yehudah Steinberg

text: Tushiyah

text: Shemu’el Leib Gordon

text: Moriah

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: Grodno

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Lwów

text: Galicia

text: Tarbut

text: Vilna

text: Zeitlin

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

glossary: Haskalah Talmud