title: Vilner Trupe

abstract: (Vilna Troupe), celebrated and critically acclaimed Polish Yiddish theater company. Soon after the Germans occupied Vilna in 1915, they lifted tsarist restrictions against staging Yiddish theater. With the support of local Jewish communal leaders and some German officers of Jewish origin, a group of young actors, primarily amateurs but including several professional performers from the Russian stage, decided to establish a purely literary Yiddish company. Only professional Yiddish actors could apply for a permit to perform Yiddish theater, so the group invited Matisyohu Kovalski (Koval; 1880–1936), apparently the only professional Yiddish actor then in Vilna, to join them.

imgDesc: Members of the Vilner Trupe in Protsentnik (The Loan Shark), Poland, 1920. Photograph by Dager. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Sholem Asch

text: Kovno

text: Warsaw

text: Avrom Morevski

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yiddish literature

text: The Dybbuk

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Osip Dymov

text: Poland

text: Michał Weichert

text: Łódź

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Sholem Asch

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: A. Vayter

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Avrom Morevski

text: Henryk Berlewi

text: stage design

text: Sholem Asch

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi’ uprising

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Yisroel Shtern

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Hershele Ostropolyer

text: Golem

text: Prague

text: Jakub Rotbaum

text: Dovid Bergelson


title: Kaczerginski, Shmerke

abstract: (1908–1954), Yiddish writer and cultural activist. Born in Vilna to a poor family and educated at that city’s Talmud Torah, Shmerke (Pol., Szmerke) Kaczerginski lost both his parents during World War I. As a youth, he was involved with outlawed Communist groups and was arrested several times, serving a lengthy prison term. In the 1930s, two of his revolutionary poems became popular in Poland. He wrote short stories with a radical bent and was a correspondent and reporter for literary publications, including the semilegal leftist press in Poland and the New York Communist daily Morgn-frayhayt.

imgDesc: Partizaner geyen (Partisans on the Move), by Shmerke Kaczerginski (Bamberg, Ger.: Mifkadah ha-rashit fun der Histadrut partizanim-ḥayalim-ḥalutsim P.H.H. in Daytshland, 1948; 2nd ed.). (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Poland

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Lithuania

text: ghetto

text: Holocaust

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: YIVO

text: Zelig Kalmanovitch

text: Łódź

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon


title: Volf, Leyzer

abstract: (1910–1943), Yiddish poet. Leyzer Volf (born Mekler), a founding member of the literary group Yung-Vilne, was one of the great parodists in Yiddish poetry. Beloved by local audiences for his outrageous artistic gestures, including an attempt to break the world record in poetry writing with 1,001 untitled lyrics in June 1930, he bridged popular and elite impulses within Yung-Vilne, making him the group’s first local star. Volf is best remembered for his lack of composure, his bizarre parodies of European and Yiddish writers, his dramatic sketches and grotesque portrayals that took on contemporary political and material concerns, his literary adaptation of folk materials from Vilna’s cultural fabric, and his endless fascination with himself as a poetic subject.

imgDesc: “Foroys, land fun komunizm,” by Leyzer Volf, 1941. Poem by Leyzer Volf, “Foroys, land fun komunizm” (Onward, Land of Communism), 1941. From a notebook of poetry titled “Di broyne bestye: Antihitlerishe lider” (The Brown Beast: Anti-Hitler Poems). Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F25.9. (YIVO)

text: Yung-Vilne

text: poetry

text: Vilna

text: Yiddish literature

text: Bin

text: Max Weinreich

text: Frayland-lige

text: Poland

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: YIVO

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Kadia Molodowsky


title: Sutzkever, Avrom

abstract: (1913–2010), Yiddish poet. Born in Smorgon’, a small industrial city southeast of Vilna, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Omsk, Siberia, where his parents took refuge from the invading German armies during World War I. Following the death of his father, Sutzkever’s mother, Rayne, resettled the family in Vilna in 1921. Sutzkever attended local heders and the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.

imgDesc: Avrom Sutzkever (left) with Vilner Trupe actor Noyekh Nakhbush, Vilna, 1939. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Bin

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Shmerke Kaczerginski

text: Chaim Grade

text: Leyzer Volf

text: Warsaw

text: YIVO

text: poetry

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: USSR

text: Moscow

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Holocaust

text: Black Book

text: Poland

text: Land of Israel

text: memory


title: Yung-Vilne

abstract: (Young Vilna) was a dynamic Yiddish literary group of writers, poets, and artists who came of age creatively in Vilna in the 1930s. The group was officially established on 11 October 1929 by Zalmen Reyzen, editor of the Vilner tog, under the headline “Young Vilna Marches into Yiddish Literature,” although a number of aspiring writers and artists had already begun gathering informally a few years earlier.

imgDesc: Yung-Vilne (1934), issue no. 1. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Chaim Grade

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Elkhonen Vogler

text: Leyzer Volf

text: Shmerke Kaczerginski

text: Holocaust

text: Yiddish literature

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: YIVO

text: Max Weinreich

text: Bin


title: Kulbak, Moyshe

abstract: (1896–1937), Yiddish poet, novelist, and dramatist. Born in Smorgon near Vilna, Moyshe Kulbak was educated in a modern heder, in a Jewish Russian elementary school, and later in yeshivas. As a result, he acquired a deeper understanding of traditional Jewish culture than had most of his subsequent contemporaries in Yiddish poetry. During World War I, he lived in Kovno, where he began to write Hebrew poetry. He made his Yiddish debut in 1916 with a poem that was set to music and that became popular.

imgDesc: Moyshe Kulbak (second row, third from left), Yiddish writer H. Leyvik (fourth from left), and educator and choir leader Yakov Gershteyn (fifth from left) with students at the Jewish Real-Gymnasium, part of the CEBEKA (Central Education Committee) school system, Vilna, 1920s. Photograph by E. Cejtlin. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: heder

text: poetry

text: Kovno

text: Minsk

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: messianism

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: humor

text: Birobidzhan

text: theater


title: Weinreich, Max

abstract: (1894–1969), Yiddish linguist, literary scholar, and public intellectual. Born in Kuldiga, Latvia (then in Russia; Ger., Goldingen), Max Weinreich grew up in a German-speaking home and first took an interest in Yiddish as a teenager. His native region, Courland, had a large German population as well as a significant number of German-speaking Jews, although the historical language of the Jewish community was Yiddish. Weinreich attended Saint Petersburg University and did graduate studies in linguistics at Marburg University, where he completed his doctorate in 1923. His dissertation is entitled “Studien zur Geschichte und dialektischen Gliederung der jiddischen Sprache” (Studies in the History and Dialect Distribution of the Yiddish Language, published in 1993 with the title Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung [History of Yiddish Linguistics]). In 1923, Weinreich also published his first book in Yiddish, based on his dissertation and titled Shtaplen (Rungs). It includes four essays on the history of Yiddish philology and literature.

imgDesc: Max Weinreich (right) with his wife, Regina (first from left), and his in-laws in his apartment, Vilna, 1921. (Second from right) Regina’s father, Tsemaḥ Szabad; (third from left) mother, Stefania; and brothers Zhozya and Yasha. (YIVO)

text: Latvia

text: Russia

text: Courland

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: YIVO

text: Vilna

text: Tsemaḥ Szabad

text: Filologishe shriftn

text: Yidishe shprakh

text: Ashkenazic Jews

text: Bund

text: Bin

text: youth movements


title: Erik, Maks

abstract: (1898–1937), Yiddish literary scholar and critic. Maks Erik (Zalmen Merkin) was born in Sosnowiec to a well-to-do family and received a Jewish and general education in Russian and Polish schools. In 1921, he completed Polish military service and began studying law. In the years 1922–1923 and 1925–1926, he taught Yiddish literature and Polish studies at Yiddish high schools in Vilna.

imgDesc: Presidium of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture, Kiev, 1934. Pictured are (first row, right to left): Osher Margulis (head of the Historical Section), M. Kadishevich (head of the Birobidzhan section), Kalman Marmor (a visiting scholar from America), historian Yoysef Liberberg, Gershon Gorokhov (director of the Institute from November 1934), Shimon Dobin (staff member of the Philological Institute); (second row) bibliographer Israel Mitlman, Iona Khinchin (archivist and dean of the Jewish Division of the Kiev Teachers College), philologist Elye Spivak, ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovskii (head of the Folklore Section), literary historian Maks Erik (Zalman Merkin), Yashe Reznik (head of the Literature and Criticism Section), and Mikhl Levitan (head of the Philological Section). (YIVO)

text: Yiddish literature

text: Vilna

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Poland

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: prose

text: Haskalah

text: Yisroel Tsinberg

text: Soviet Union

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Galicia

text: Sholem Asch

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Reyzen, Zalmen

abstract: (Reisen; 1887–1941), scholar of Yiddish language and literature, editor, journalist, and cultural activist. The brother of Avrom and Sore Reyzen, Zalmen Reyzen was born in Koidanov, Belorussia; he studied in a heder and at a Russian school. His father, a maskil, wrote poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish.

imgDesc: Zalmen Reyzen, Poland, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Avrom

text: Belorussia

text: heder

text: poetry

text: Yiddish literary scholarship

text: periodicals

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Vilna

text: Yung-vilne

text: historiography

text: Haskalah

text: Maks Erik

text: Yiddish literature

text: A. Vayter

text: YIVO

text: Filologishe shriftn

glossary: heder maskil Haskalah


title: YIVO

abstract: Founded in 1925, YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) became the leading institution for scholarship in Yiddish and about the history and culture of East European Jews and their emigrant communities.

imgDesc: The dais and part of the audience at the first YIVO Conference, Vilna, 1929. Among the scholars and communal leaders on the stage are (seated, center) Tsemaḥ Szabad, (second to Szabad’s right) Max Weinreich, (second to Szabad’s left) Perets Hirshbeyn, (standing, third from right) Zelig Kalmanovitsh, and (seated, second from right) Eliyahu Tsherikover. (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Ber Borokhov

text: S. An-ski’s expeditions

text: folklore

text: Minorities Treaties

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Elye Tsherikover

text: pogroms

text: Max Weinreich

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Jakob Lestschinsky

text: proverbs

text: folk songs

text: Y. L. Cahan

text: Filologishe shriftn

text: Soviet Union

text: TSYSHO

text: American Joint Distribution Committee

text: TOZ

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Raphael Mahler

text: OSE

text: Zelig Kalmanovitsh

text: Raphael Mahler

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Marc Chagall

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Shmerke Kaczerginski

text: Strashun Library

text: Holocaust

text: Lithuania

text: Moscow

text: Russia

glossary: Haskalah Diaspora

subconcepts:
Origins and Founding
Finances
Scholarship in Times of Crisis
World War II
Postwar Adjustment


title: Lekert, Hirsh

abstract: (ca. 1879–1902), bootmaker and revolutionary activist. Born into a poor family in the northeastern Lithuanian town of Onuskis (Anushishok), Hirsh Lekert was an apprentice bootmaker as a boy. In 1895, he moved to Vilna, where he worked in a shoemaking workshop and joined a group of Jewish revolutionaries. His dedication and stormy personality gained him early notoriety. In May 1900, Lekert took an active part in attacking the city’s police station in an effort to free a group of political prisoners; he himself was later arrested for attempting to free another prisoner. Lekert was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by two years of exile in Ekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovs’k).

text: Vilna

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Bund

text: Julius Martov

text: Minsk

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: USSR


title: Romm Family

abstract: Family of printers and publishers in Vilna. The Romm family’s printing house, the largest in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, operated continuously for more than 120 years. In the central period of its activity, beginning at the end of the 1860s, the printing house underwent a process of modernization—overseen by Shemu’el Shraga Feigenzohn, a rabbi, entrepreneur, and administrator—that was a key to its success. Feigenzohn directed the firm for two decades beginning in 1867; he also wrote a history of the Romm printing house under the pseudonym Shafan ha-Sofer.

imgDesc: Title page of Mistere Pariz (Paris Mysteries), translated by Kalman Schulman (Vilna: Romm Press, 1858). This Hebrew translation of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris enjoyed great popularity and was reprinted many times. (YIVO)

text: printers and publishers

text: Vilna

text: Grodno

text: Shapira family

text: Zhitomir

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Lithuania

text: censorship

text: Prague

text: Czernowitz

text: Shemu’el Fuenn

text: Haskalah

text: Iakov Brafman

text: pogroms

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Lubavitch

text: David Gintsburg

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: rabbinic literature

text: Eliyahu

text: Avraham Danzig

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Tkhines

glossary:
Talmud
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Haskalah
Mishnah
rebbe
Kabbalah
halakhah
maskil
Gaon


title: Lebensohn, Avraham Dov

abstract: (1794–1878), maskil, biblical commentator, poet, and playwright. Born in Vilna, Avraham Dov Lebensohn (known by the pseudonym Adam ha-Kohen [also rendered Hakohen]) married a girl from Mikhailishok in northern Belorussia (now Mikaliskis, Lith.) when he was 13. He lived there for eight years, engaging in traditional religious studies but also teaching himself the Hebrew language and its grammar. In 1815, he moved to nearby Oshmyany, where he worked in commerce and continued to expand his knowledge of Hebrew. Known for his expertise in Jewish law, he was asked on occasion to join the local rabbinical court.

imgDesc: “Portraits of the Great Poets of Israel.” Commercially produced lithograph based on an illustration printed in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Asif, 1886. (1) Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn, (2) Yehudah Leib Gordon, (3) Naftali Herts Wessely, (4) Adam ha-Kohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn), and (5) Avraham Ber Gottlober. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Haskalah

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

text: Haskalah

text: poetry

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn

glossary: maskil Talmud Haskalah magid Torah


title: Preigerzon, Tsevi Hirsh

abstract: (also known in Russian as Grigorii Izrailevich; 1900–1969), Hebrew writer. Tsevi Preigerzon was born in Shepetovka, in the Volhynia region; his father was a Zionist maskil, and his mother a member of the well-known Halperin family that traced its roots to Rabbi Dov Ber Karasik. Preigerzon spent his early years in heder, and at the age of 13 was sent by his parents to study at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. World War I erupted while he was spending a summer in Europe, and in its wake all routes to Palestine were blocked. Faced with no other option, Preigerzon completed his secondary education at a Russian gymnasium in Odessa, where he concurrently took violin lessons at the local conservatory and spent his evenings studying at a yeshiva. He gradually became disenchanted with religion and poured his energies into Zionism, which soon had to compete with his devotion to communism. Thus in 1917, following the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Preigerzon found himself torn between these loyalties. Two years later he traveled to Moscow where he was admitted to the Academy for Mining Engineering.

text: heder

text: Odessa

text: yeshiva

text: Zionism

text: communism

text: Moscow

text: poetry

text: Soviet Union

text: Ukraine

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Shmuel Halkin

glossary: maskil heder yeshiva


title: Vinaver, Maksim Moiseevich

abstract: (1862–1926), lawyer, politician, and communal activist. Maksim Vinaver (also Vinawer) was born in Warsaw, and in 1886 he graduated with a law degree from Warsaw University. However, in 1889, the Russian government decided to prohibit Jews from becoming “legally registered” lawyers, which forced Vinaver to work for the next decade and a half as an assistant attorney in Saint Petersburg, where he became involved in the struggle for Jewish emancipation. With Baron Horace Gintsburg acting as a sponsor, Vinaver set up a defense bureau (with Oskar Gruzenberg and the Russian lawyers Vladimir D. Spasovich and Mironov), to represent Jews falsely accused of crimes.

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Horace Gintsburg

text: Oskar Gruzenberg

text: Pogroms

text: Kishinev

text: Gomel

text: revolution of 1905

text: Iulii Gessen

text: Iulii Brutskus

text: Russia

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: ORT

text: shtetl

text: Crimea


title: Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater

abstract: (Varshever Yidisher Kunst-teater; VYKT), critically acclaimed Yiddish dramatic company active in interwar Poland in 1924–1925, 1926–1928, and 1938–1939. After the extraordinary success of S. An-ski’s Der dibek (The Dybbuk; Warsaw, 1920), it became clear that a considerable audience existed in Poland for Yiddish theater with artistic aspirations. But was this new theater to confine itself specifically to Jewish subjects and style? The Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater was founded by two of the leading young representatives of Yiddish dramatic theater, Ida Kaminska and Zygmunt Turkow, who believed that the new theater should open itself to the themes and styles of contemporary European theater. Kaminska and Turkow had already assembled a company that performed at the Tsentral Theater in Warsaw in 1922–1923. The VYKT began to perform as such in 1924.

imgDesc: “WYKT. Soon to appear with their ensemble: Ida Kaminska and Zygmunt Turkow.” Polish/Yiddish poster. Artwork by Fritz. Printed by J. Fischer, Kraków, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: The Dybbuk

text: Yiddish theater

text: Ida Kaminska

text: Zygmunt Turkow

text: stage design

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Vilna Troupe

text: Joint Distribution Committee

text: Romania

text: Lwów

text: Breslau

text: operetta

text: Kraków


title: Salonta

abstract: Town in the extreme west of Romania, in the Crişurilor Plain, 14 km east of the border with Hungary and 40 km southwest of Oradea. The first written reference to Salonta (Hun., Nagyszalonta) dates to 1332 and was found in a papal document. Destroyed by the Turks in 1598, the town was rebuilt by the free soldiers of Prince István Bocskay in 1606. The town was ravaged by severe fires in 1658 and 1847, and by floods in 1816.

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Oradea

text: Zionism

text: Congress of Jews

text: Transylvania

text: Orthodox

text: Holocaust


title: Poláček, Karel

abstract: (1892–1945), Czech journalist and novelist. Poláček was born to a Czech-speaking Jewish family in the small Bohemian town of Rychnov nad Kněžnou. Although he failed at the local gymnasium, he finished his studies in Prague in 1912; after a short period in law school he was drafted and served on the Russian and Serbian fronts. In Serbia he crossed over into “voluntary captivity” and spent the last two months of the war as a prisoner. On his return to Prague, he launched his career as a journalist, specializing in both short, humorous essays (sloupky) and court reports (soudničky); he wrote hundreds of each in his career. He also wrote two plays, a number of film scripts, and several volumes of short stories, establishing himself by the end of the 1920s as one of the republic’s wittiest writers. Poláček directed his sharp satires at extremism on both sides of the political spectrum, as well as at the complacent banality of the middle classes; he was particularly sensitive to clichés, empty phrases, and the abuse of language. His barbed Žurnalistický slovník (Journalistic Dictionary; 1934) mocked the stereotyped thinking of the political press.

text: Prague

text: satire

text: humor

text: Czech literature

text: Terezín


title: Sabbath Rest

abstract: The question of Sabbath rest, also called Sunday rest, goes directly to the heart of two fundamental issues that confronted Jews in Eastern Europe as they entered the modern era: the question of relations with the non-Jews among whom they lived, and the issue of Jews’ ability to adapt to the surrounding society while maintaining their own separate sense of identity and community.

text: Sabbath

text: relations with the non-Jews

text: Polish Commonwealth

text: Kraków

text: leaseholders

text: taverners

text: servants

text: trade

text: Poznań

text: Kraków

text: Vladimir

text: pogroms

text: Warsaw

text: Minorities Treaty

text: Zionist

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Folkist

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Feliks Perl


title: Latzky-Bertholdi, Ya‘akov Ze’ev

abstract: (1881–1940), journalist and Zionist socialist leader. Born in Kiev, as a young child Ya‘akov (more fully, Ya‘akov Ze’ev Wolf; also later called Wilhelm) Latzky moved to Riga. After receiving a Jewish education, he went on to study at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, from which he was expelled in 1901 because of political activity. In 1901 or 1902 Latzky went to Berlin, where he became involved with Naḥman Syrkin’s Ḥerut group (a Zionist socialist organization), and where he took part in the publication of its Yiddish organ, Der hamoyn (The Masses), in 1903.

text: Zionist

text: Kiev

text: Riga

text: Russia

text: Daugavpils

text: ORT

text: Ukraine

text: Frimorgn

text: Natan Note Hannover


title: Kiss, József

abstract: (1843–1921), poet and editor. József Kiss was born in Mezőcsát; both his grandfathers had moved to Hungary from Lithuania. His father, István Klein, was a poor merchant who sent his son to study in a yeshiva. Kiss, however, left that school when he was 13 to attend a gymnasium. For five years he was a melamed (itinerant teacher), wandering from village to village, “for all but nothing, some food, tobacco and a new shoe sole.”

text: Hungary

text: Lithuania

text: yeshiva

text: Timişoara

text: Budapest

text: Hungarian literature

glossary: yeshiva melamed


title: Wrocław

abstract: Capital city of the province of Lower Silesia, in Poland. The first reference to Jews in the vicinity of Wrocław (Lat., Vratislavia; Ger., Breslau; Czech, Vratislav) dates to before 1153; the next citation is from the beginning of the thirteenth century. The oldest Jewish gravestone, dated 1203 (for David ben Sar Shalom), indicates that there probably was permanent Jewish settlement at that time. In 1267, a synod of bishops in Wrocław imposed limitations on the Jewish population, yet the restrictions were probably never implemented. The first privilege was granted in about 1273 by Duke Henry IV Probus, confirmed by his successor Henry V in about 1290 (neither has been preserved). At that time, Wrocław had the largest Jewish community in East Central Europe after Prague. The main occupations of Jews were moneylending, trade, and, marginally, artisanry.

imgDesc: Tombstone of David ben Sar Shalom. The oldest Jewish tombstone in Poland, it is dated 1203, Wrocław. Photograph by Marcin Wodziński. (Courtesy of the photographer)

text: Silesia

text: Poland

text: Prague

text: pogrom

text: profanation of the Host

text: Bohemian

text: trade

text: Haskalah

text: Reform Judaism

text: Orthodox

text: Seminary

text: Kaunas

text: Terezín

text: labor camps

text: Kielce

text: ORT

text: TOZ

text: theater

text: Jakub Rotbaum

glossary:
de non tolerandis Judaeis
Council of Four Lands
kehilah
Haskalah


title: Acsády, Ignác

abstract: (1845–1906), historian, journalist, and fiction writer. Ignác Acsády (Adler until 1875) was born in Nagykároly, Hungary, the oldest son of a wealthy landowner. Acsády’s father served as head of the Jewish community of Hajdúszoboszló for almost 30 years and was a member of the board of Hajdú county. Acsády earned a law degree in 1869 and a doctorate in 1877 at the University of Budapest. With his wide interest in the humanities, he decided against limiting his career to law.

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: assimilation

text: Galicia

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle


title: Ger Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: The Ger dynasty (also Gur), named for the town of Góra Kalwaria in the Warsaw district, had the largest following of any Hasidic group in central Poland until the Holocaust and to a large degree dominated Jewish religious life in the area around Warsaw for some 80 years. Ger was distinguished among Hasidic groups by its particular emphasis on traditional yeshiva-type study. Ger leaders were also known for their deep and visible involvement in political and public affairs.

imgDesc: Followers of the third Gerer rebbe, Avraham Mordekhai Alter, bidding farewell to him at a railroad station as he departs for vacation in Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), Góra Kalwaria, Poland, ca. 1935. (Jerzy Tomaszewski, courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: yeshiva

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: Hasidism

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: Hasidism

text: Zionism

text: assimilation

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Orthodoxy

text: Land of Israel

glossary: yeshiva rebbe Torah


title: Kluger, Shelomoh ben Yehudah

abstract: (1785–1869), Orthodox leader, rabbi, dayan (religious court judge), magid (preacher), and halakhic decisor. Shelomoh ben Yehudah Kluger was born in Komarów, Poland, and studied in nearby Zamość. Orphaned in 1801, he moved to Rawa Ruska in Galicia, where he married the daughter of one of the lay leaders of the community. From 1810 to 1820, Kluger officiated as rabbi in Kulików, Galicia, and in Józefów, Poland. In 1820 he was appointed dayan in the Galician community of Brody, where he then served as chief judge and magid for almost 50 years, until his death.

text: Poland

text: Zamość

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Brody

text: Efrayim Zalman Margoliot

text: Haskalah

text: Yosef Natanson

text: Orthodoxy

text: Sabbath

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Romania

text: Pale of Settlement

glossary:
magid
Haskalah
responsa
Talmud
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Pale of Settlement


title: Shomer Yisra’el

abstract: (Guardian of Israel), political and ideological society founded in Lemberg (Lwów) at the end of 1868 following the granting of freedom of organization in the Austrian Constitution of 1867. Among its founders were Filip Mansch, Ruben Bierer, Emil Bik, and Joseph Kohn; Salomon Buber was also a member.

text: Lemberg

text: Salomon Buber

text: Galicia

text: Yosef Sha’ul Natanson

text: Tsevi Hirsh Orenstein

text: seminary

text: Orthodoxy

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: assimilationists


title: Mitin, Mark Borisovich

abstract: (1901–1987), philosopher and Communist Party activist. The son of a laborer from Zhitomir, Mark Mitin joined the Communist Party in 1919. In 1929, he completed his studies in the philosophy department at the Institut Krasnoi Professury (Institute of Red Professors; IKP).

text: Communist Party

text: Zhitomir

text: Soviet Union

text: Zionism


title: Löw, Yirmiyahu

abstract: (1811–1874), leading Hungarian Orthodox rabbi. Yirmiyahu Löw was descended from the most distinguished line of rabbis in Hungary after the Sofer-Eger family. Both his father, Binyamin Ze’ev, the author of Sha‘are Torah, and his grandfather El‘azar, the author of Shemen rokeaḥ, were famous scholars and important heads of yeshivas in Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, and, finally, in Hungary. Löw enjoyed great prestige by virtue of his descent, personality, and acknowledged wisdom, and was considered a natural leader among Orthodox rabbis, second only to the rabbi of Pressburg, Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer (Schreiber), the Ketav Sofer. A man of not inconsiderable Western culture who was fluent in German, Löw was also the head, in Újhely, of one of the largest Hungarian yeshivas, with between 100 and 150 students in 1865.

text: Orthodox

text: Hungary

text: Sofer

text: El‘azar

text: Poland

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Pressburg

text: Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Sátoraljaújhely

text: Tsevi Hirsh Friedman

text: Hasidism

text: seminary

text: Buda

text: Jewish Congress

glossary:
Torah
Neolog
Status Quo
Maimonides


title: Anti-Zionist Committee of The Soviet Public

abstract: Founded as one of many public groups mobilized to further Soviet policy aims, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (Anti-Sionisticheskii Komitet Sovetskoi Obshchestvennosti; AKSO) was part of a broader program intended to diminish the motivation of Soviet Jews to apply for emigration. In accordance with a decision of 29 March 1983 by the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (CC CPSU), the committee’s budget was to be provided by the Soviet Peace Foundation, and the technical staff was to operate within the framework of the joint administration of Soviet social organizations. AKSO activities were supervised jointly by representatives of the Department of Propaganda and by the KGB.

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: USSR


title: Schlesinger, Akiva Yosef

abstract: (1837–1922), pioneer of ultra-Orthodoxy, early Jewish nationalist, and Yiddishist. Akiva Yosef Schlesinger’s father, Yeḥi’el (1814–1891), a close disciple of Rabbi Mosheh Sofer, was a minor rabbinical functionary in his hometown of Pressburg. As a child, Schlesinger was raised in an ascetic manner, wakened by his grandfather at midnight to mourn the destruction of the Temple. His first teacher was his father, whom he would recognize as his sole master and mentor. It was he who imbued the boy with the spirit of Orthodoxy and the conservative legacy of Sofer. Nevertheless, Schlesinger also attended four years of elementary school, learning to read and write German and mastering mathematics, at which he particularly excelled.

text: Orthodoxy

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: yeshiva

text: Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer

text: Ḥayim Sofer

text: Mosheh Schick

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: Land of Israel

text: Kolomea

text: Galicia

text: assimilation

text: religious reform

text: Eli‘ezer Tsevi Zweifel

text: name

text: language

text: dress

text: crafts

text: agriculture

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer

text: messianism

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

glossary: yeshiva maskil Neolog Torah Yishuv kolel


title: Lichtenstein, Hillel

abstract: (1814–1891), rabbi; pioneer of ultra-Orthodoxy; Yiddishist. Hillel Lichtenstein was born in the small community of Vécs, not far from Pressburg in what today is Slovakia (hence his alternate appellation as Hillel Vécs; he was also known as Hillel Lesh, an abbreviated form of his family name, and later as Hillel Kolomea). His father, Barukh Bendit (d. 1839), served as the town’s dayan. Lichtenstein gloried in his distinguished rabbinic lineage: he was a descendant of both Mordekhai Yafeh and Yesha‘yahu Horowitz (known as Shlah). That the latter was one of only a handful of rabbis ever to be called kadosh (saint) had a decisive impact on young Hillel, who in time himself came to be regarded as a holy man.

text: Orthodoxy

text: Pressburg

text: Slovakia

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Yesha‘yahu Horowitz

text: piety

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Yehudah Aszód

text: Sandz

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: rabbinate

text: Transylvania

text: preacher

text: Hasidism

text: amulets

text: Cluj

text: Reform

text: Miskolc

text: Ḥayim Sofer

text: Munkács

text: Budapest

text: Akiva Yosef Schlesinger

text: assimilation

text: Galicia

text: Jewish Congress

text: Zhidachov Hasidim

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: antisemite

text: messianism

text: Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer

glossary: rebbe yeshiva halakhah Maskil Diaspora kolel


title: Kunitz, Mosheh

abstract: (1774–1837), rabbinic scholar. Born in Alt-Ofen (Óbuda), Hungary, Mosheh Kunitz studied Talmud with the leading authorities of his day: Wolf Boskowitz, Mosheh Münz, Yeḥezkel (Ezekiel) Landau, and Isaiah Berlin (Pick) of Breslau. In Prague he was influenced by the maskil Baruch Jeitteles. Kunitz also studied languages and secular subjects in Breslau.

text: Hungary

text: Mosheh Münz

text: Yeḥezkel (Ezekiel) Landau

text: Breslau

text: Prague

text: Baruch Jeitteles

text: liturgy

text: Aharon Chorin

text: religious reform

text: Buda

text: Haskalah

text: rabbinic literature

text: haskalah

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

glossary: Talmud maskil Zohar responsa Haskalah halakhah


title: Synagogue Architecture

abstract: There has been neither uniformity nor consistency in the synagogue architecture of Eastern Europe. The constants are the ritual necessities—primarily the bimah and the ark containing the Torah scrolls—and illumination suitable for reading, adequate seating, and at least 10 adult Jewish men to perform the complete services. From the seventeenth century on, it became common practice to hang a perpetual lamp above the ark, a menorah near it, and a curtain over the ark. Male congregants sat on benches around the building’s perimeter and on the sides of the bimah, with elders perhaps seated on either side of the ark. The focal point was the ark–bimah axis and the bimah desk at which the officiants stood. Individual chairs and reading stands—and occasionally even pews in the nineteenth century—were added, to increase seating capacity.

imgDesc: Eighteenth-century wooden synagogue, Wolpa, Poland (now Voupa, Bel.), ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Altneuschul

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: Poznań

text: Vilna

text: Mukacheve

text: L’viv

text: Lublin

text: Przemyśl

text: Zhovkva

text: Luts’k

text: Ashkenazic

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Belorussia

text: El Lissitzky

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Russia

text: Hungary

text: Kraków

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Odessa

text: Wrocław

text: Lipót Baumhorn

text: Poznań

text: Zamość

text: archives

text: Rzeszów

text: Tykocin

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Belarus

text: Moldova

text: Lithuania

glossary: Torah Zohar


title: Rülf, Isaak

abstract: (1831–1902), rabbi, journalist, and author. From 1865 to 1898, Isaak Rülf served as rabbi to the Jewish community of Klaipėda (Ger., Memel) in East Prussia, on the border between Prussia and the Russian Empire. Through his philanthropic and journalistic activities on behalf of the Jewish communities of Lithuania, Rülf attained the status of a spokesperson for Russian Jewry. He was also among the minor intellectual fathers of modern Zionism.

text: Klaipėda

text: East Prussia

text: Russian Empire

text: Lithuania

text: Zionism

text: pogroms

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Kovno


title: Sandomierz

abstract: Town in the Świętokrzyskie province on the Vistula River, and one of the oldest Jewish communities in Little Poland. In the period of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sandomierz (Yid., Tsuzmir) played an important role as a trade center on a river route to Gdańsk and on a trade route from Kraków to Vilna. The town lost its importance after the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.

imgDesc: Aerial view of Sandomierz, 1930. (Tomasz Wisniewski, www.szukamypolski.com)

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: trade

text: Gdańsk

text: Kraków

text: Vilna

text: crafts

text: blood libel

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: theater

text: Maccabi

text: labor camp

text: Kielce

text: archives

text: memorial

text: tombstones


title: Amulets and Talismans

abstract: Items generally worn around the neck or on the wrist, meant to protect or aid those who carried or wore them. The Hebrew word for amulet, kame‘a, is evidently connected to the notion of tying or binding. Jewish amulets are usually comprised of texts (either letters or graphic symbols) that are inscribed on some sort of material; some may also contain plant matter or precious stones. For the most part, an amulet has a specific purpose: to ease childbirth, facilitate recovery from illness, improve one’s livelihood, and so on.

imgDesc: Amulet. Warsaw, ca. 1850. Paper, ink, stone lithograph. This amulet promises miracles to those who make charitable donations and a blessing in the name of Rabbi Me’ir Ba‘al ha-Nes, a Mishnaic sage whose name means “Master of the Miracle.” (Gross Family Collection)

text: Sabbath

text: angels

text: magical powers

text: ba‘ale shem

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Poznań

glossary: Mishnah Talmud Maimonides


title: Mezhyrichi

abstract: Village on the Stava River (Pripiat’ basin) in Ukraine’s Rivne (Rovno) region. Mezhyrichi, known as Mezhirech in Russian and Międzyrzecz in Polish, was called Mezhirich Gadol by Jews; currently known as Velikie Mezhyrichi (Great Mezhyrichi), it has also been referred to as Mezhyrichi Koretskie. From 1569 it was in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and from 1793 in the Korets district of the Russian Empire’s Volhynia province. Between 1921 and 1939 the town belonged to independent Poland.

imgDesc: Feyge Goldfarb, Toyvye Czarny, Rokl Elncwajg, and Moyshe Erdfarb, Mezhyrichi, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Rivne

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russian Empire

text: Ostróg

text: Dov Ber

text: bet midrash

text: Hasidism

text: heder

text: Tarbut

text: USSR

text: Judenrat

glossary: magid heder


title: Angels

abstract: Jewish tradition considers angels to be messengers of God, but holds that they must not be substituted for God. Isaiah 63:9 speaks of the angel of God’s divine countenance—an important designation in Jewish mysticism that has variously been taken to mean the archangel Metatron, the Shekhinah (or immanent divine presence), or the redeeming angel and was understood by some to be an extension of God and a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. The Talmud (Ḥagigah 13b) declares that each divine angelic legion is formed of a million members, but that the legions themselves are numberless.

imgDesc: Amulet to protect a woman and her newborn son, with invocations of Adam and Eve, Lilith, and several angels; Podolia or Ukraine, late nineteenth or early twentieth century. (The Russian Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia)

text: mysticism

text: Sabbath

text: Sabbath

text: magic

text: Kiev

text: Hasidism

text: Shklov

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Natan Spira

text: shtetls

text: humor

text: proverbs

text: folk songs

glossary: Talmud Torah Gaon Zohar tsadik Kabbalah

subconcepts:
Ashkenazic Traditions
Folklore


title: Teller, Yisakhar Ber

abstract: (d. 1687), physician and surgeon. The inscription on Yisakhar Ber Teller’s tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague gives his father’s name as Leib Berouns (derived from the Bohemian town of Beroun), although the introduction to his work refers to his father more formally as Yehudah. The name Teller, undoubtedly acquired from the emblem of the Barber-Surgeons Guild—a plate—does not appear on his tombstone but is in the epitaph of his son, Yehudah Leib Teller, who followed him in both the medical profession and the service of the Prague burial society.

imgDesc: From Be’er mayim ḥayim, by Yisakhar Ber Teller (New York: Tal Or Oth Publishers, 1988; facsimile edition). Portrait of the author; the Hebrew inscription reads: “Ber rofe’ ben 43 shanim” (Ber the Physician, 43 years old). (YIVO)

text: Prague


title: Letteris, Me’ir

abstract: (1800?–1871), Hebrew poet; editor and translator of poetry and dramatic works. Me’ir (Max) ha-Levi Letteris was born in Żółkiew, eastern Galicia, into a family of Hebrew publishers. His father also served as head of the town’s Jewish community for many years. After receiving a traditional education, Me’ir Letteris pursued general studies with a tutor, and in 1820 traveled to Vienna where he studied at the Academy of Natural Sciences for two years. Between 1826 and 1830, he was at the University of Lwów, and later attended the University of Vienna. Letteris earned his living in those years as a journalist, writing literary and dramatic criticism. At an older age (in 1844), he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Prague.

text: Hebrew poet

text: Żółkiew

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: Prague

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Hebrew literature

text: Haskalah

text: satire


title: Spira, Natan Note ben Shelomoh

abstract: (1585–1633), rabbi, preacher, and kabbalist. Natan Note Spira (also Natan Nata Shapira) was born to a rabbinical family and was named after his grandfather, a rabbi in Grodno who was the author of Mavo she‘arim (1575) and Imre shefer (1597). Natan Note, a rabbi and head of the yeshiva in Kraków, became a famous kabbalist after composing Megaleh ‘amukot (published posthumously in 1637), in which he interpreted the prayer of Moses in the weekly Torah portion “Va-Etḥanan” (Deut. 3:23–25) in 252 different ways, some based on numerology (gimatriyah) or complex mathematical calculations and others on kabbalistic interpretations from various traditions.

text: Grodno

text: yeshiva

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Sabbatian

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: messianism

glossary:
yeshiva
Torah
Kabbalah
Lurianic Kabbalah


title: Nepomniashchii, Shlomo Iakov Moiseevich

abstract: (1896–1930), publicist and literary critic. Born in Krolevets, Ukraine, Nepomniashchii was raised in a traditional Jewish family that after numerous moves finally settled in Poltava. His father was a supporter of Ḥoveve Tsiyon who devoted special attention to the Jewish education of his eldest son. Nepomniashchii showed an inclination for writing at an early age. While still a child he took part in editing a children’s magazine. As he grew older he was sent to a nearby yeshiva where, along with studying Talmud and Jewish law, he read Hebrew poets Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik and Sha’ul Tchernichowsky.

text: Ukraine

text: yeshiva

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Kiev

text: Elias Tcherikower

text: pogroms

text: Moscow

text: Evsektsiia

text: Zionism

text: Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land

glossary:
publicist
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
yeshiva
Talmud


title: Popper Family

abstract: Merchants and communal leaders in Bohemia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Popper family came from Bresnitz (Břesnice), a commercial junction in southern Bohemia owned by the Kolowrat barons, one of the few noble families of Slavic descent that remained in Bohemia after 1620. During the seventeenth century, the Popper family provided a range of services to the Kolowrats, particularly granting credit. Under Kolowrat patronage, the Popper family business expanded substantially, also moving into commerce.

text: Bohemia

text: credit

text: industry

text: trade

text: Prague

text: Galicia

text: Familiants Law

text: economic life


title: Rabinowitz-Te’omim, Eliyahu David ben Binyamin

abstract: (1842/43–1905), rabbi in Lithuania and Jerusalem. Eliyahu Rabinowitz-Te’omim was born in Pikeln (Lith., Pikeliai), in western Lithuania. His father, Binyamin Rabinowitz (1813–1869), served as a rabbi in several Lithuanian communities. Eliyahu had a twin brother, Tsevi Yehudah (rabbi of Ragula; d. 1887), and this is the source of the additional name Te’omim, or “twins.” Rabinowitz was the father-in-law of Avraham Yitsḥak Kook, the first chief rabbi of Palestine.

text: Lithuania

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: bet midrash

text: Mir yeshiva

text: rabbinate

glossary: Torah yeshiva Talmud responsa


title: Sirota, Gershon

abstract: (1874–1943), cantor, concert singer, and recording celebrity. Gershon Sirota was born in 1874 in Podolia; little is known about his early years. His first appointment as a cantor was in Odessa, and he also served in Vilna. In 1908, he became cantor of the Tłomackie Street Synagogue in Warsaw, a position that he left in 1927 to devote himself to a concert career. He toured the United States several times and in 1935 became the cantor at Warsaw’s Nożyk Synagogue. He died with his family in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.

imgDesc: Cantor Gershon Sirota, ca. 1910. (YIVO)

text: cantor

text: Odessa

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw


title: Demons

abstract: In East European Jewish culture, the demon—variously referred to as ruaḥ (spirit), mazik (evildoer), ḥitson (the external one), and shed (demonic spirit)—embodied forces of evil. Jews imagined demons as various sorts of evil forces seeking to intrude into the Jewish realm to destroy the well-being of individuals. The early eighteenth-century medical doctor Tobias Cohen reported a widespread belief in demons among East European Jews, which he found unparalleled elsewhere.

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Yesha‘yahu Horowitz

text: Shimshon of Ostropolye

text: Efrayim of Sudilkov

text: amulets

text: ba‘ale shem

text: ba‘ale shem

text: magic

text: circumcision

glossary: Kabbalah Talmud Zohar


title: Przemyśl

abstract: (Ukr., Peremyshl; Yid., Pshemishel), city in southeastern Poland. It is presumed that at the beginning of the eleventh century a Jewish trading post existed in Przemyśl. Larger groups of Jews settled in the town in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and by the end of the fourteenth century a Jewish community had been constituted. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, this community numbered as many as 100 persons. A document from 1459 mentions a “Jewish” street in Przemyśl. Jews settled primarily in the northeastern part of the city, establishing a distinct quarter. They were involved in both local and long-distance trade, and also made their living as moneylenders and artisans, the latter maintaining their own guilds.

imgDesc: Hebrew inscription on a building that was once an orphanage, Przemyśl, Poland, 1964. The inscription reads, “Our brothers from Przemyśl in America, to benefit the orphanage.” Photograph by Jacob Roth. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: trade

text: guilds

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidism

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Bund

text: Matthias Mieses

text: Józef Mieses

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Russia

text: labor camps


title: Shtetl

abstract: The Yiddish term for town, shtetl commonly refers to small market towns in pre–World War II Eastern Europe with a large Yiddish-speaking Jewish population. While there were in fact great variations among these towns, a shtetl connoted a type of Jewish settlement marked by a compact Jewish population distinguished from their mostly gentile peasant neighbors by religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetl was defined by interlocking networks of economic and social relationships: the interaction of Jews and peasants in the market, the coming together of Jews for essential communal and religious functions, and, in more recent times, the increasingly vital relationship between the shtetl and its emigrants abroad (organized in landsmanshaftn).

imgDesc: View of the marketplace, Rezhishtshev (Rzhyshchiv, Ukr.), ca. 1900. The arrow points to the birthplace of Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Hungary

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Subcarpathian

text: Lublin

text: leasing

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: Sabbath

text: taverners

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Galicia

text: Russian Empire

text: assimilation

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Odessa

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: pogroms

text: Holocaust

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: satire

text: Berdichev

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: industry

text: Soviet Union

text: kahal

text: money

text: Yiddish literature

text: Zionists

text: Passover

text: guilds

text: Gender

text: economic life

text: Tsene-rene

text: tkhines

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: cooking

text: clothing

text: proverbs

text: Eastern Yiddish

text: Sabbath

text: youth movements

text: beggars

text: press

text: theater

text: literature

text: film

text: yeshivas

text: Hasidism

text: emigration

text: pogroms

text: Przytyk

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Bund

text: Landkentenish

text: YIVO

text: folklore

text: Birobidzhan

text: Russian civil war

text: communism

text: Evsektsiia

text: Moscow

text: Leningrad

text: Holocaust

text: parody

text: Hebrew literature

text: Haskalah

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Sholem Abramovitsh

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: humor

text: pogroms

text: antisemitism

text: Sholem Asch

text: Yitskhok (Itshe) Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Oyzer Varshavski

text: Izi Kharik

text: Mikhl Burshtin

text: Mordkhe Gebirtig

text: yizker-bikher

text: memory

glossary:
Diaspora
arenda
gzeyres takh vetat
Pale of Jewish Settlement
kahal
Mishnah
kehilah
maskil
Haskalah

subconcepts: The Transformation of the Shtetl: Poland and the Soviet Union


title: Firkovich, Avraam Samuilovich

abstract: (1787–1875), Karaite author and collector of ancient manuscripts. Avraam Firkovich was born in Łuck; his family, though possessed of a long and distinguished lineage, was poor, and Firkovich did not receive much education in his childhood. After his marriage in 1808, Firkovich worked as a miller in Volhynia. In 1813 he studied Torah with the prominent Karaite scholar Mordekhai Sultanskii, with whom he eventually quarreled. Firkovich moved to the Crimean city of Gözleve in 1822, and in 1825 was appointed ḥazan (head) of the local Karaite community (although ḥazan refers to a cantor in Rabbinite communities, for the Karaites the term refers instead to the head of a community). He used his status to submit memorandums suggesting to the Russian government that it resettle Rabbinite Jews from the border areas and recommended that they be forced into agriculture, a measure that he thought would prevent them from involvement in smuggling (Rabbinite Jews, who practiced rabbinic rather than scripture-based Judaism, were scorned by Karaites).

imgDesc: Avraam Samuilovich Firkovich (seated at right) with other Karaites. From Description ethnographique des peuples de la Russie (Ethnographic Description of the Peoples of Russia), by Theodore de Pauly (St. Petersburg: F. Bellizard, 1862). Illustration by C. Huhn, lithographed by J. B. Kuhn. (The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary)

text: Karaite

text: Łuck

text: agriculture

text: Land of Israel

text: Crimea

text: Khazars

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg


title: Luzki, Simḥah Yitsḥak ben Mosheh

abstract: (1716–1760), prominent eighteenth-century Karaite scholar and spiritual leader; also known as the Karaite Rashi and ‘Olam Tsa‘ir (meaning microcosm; from an acronym based on the gimatriyah, or mystical substitution of numerical values for the Hebrew letters of his name). Simḥah Yitsḥak Luzki (Lutski) lived in Łuck (Lutsk) until 1754, when the wealthy patron Mordekhai ben Berakhah, one of the leaders of the local community in Chufut-Kale, invited him to become head of that community’s study house, and Luzki taught there for the rest of his life.

imgDesc: Oraḥ tsadikim (The Way of the Righteous), by Simḥah Yitsḥak Luzki. Crimea, ca. 1800. (The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary)

text: Karaite

text: Lutsk

text: rabbinic literature

glossary:
Rashi
halakhah
Kabbalah
Lurianic Kabbalah
Karaites
Maimonides
Gaon
Naḥmanides


title: Troki, Yitsḥak ben Avraham

abstract: (1533–1594; according to others: 1525–1586), Karaite scholar who was born and lived in the Lithuanian town of Trakai. Yitsḥak ben Avraham wrote several compositions on Karaite ritual law (a collection of responsa on ritual slaughter is attributed to him), composed versed prayers, served as a dayan (judge) for both the Karaite and Rabbinite Jewish communities of Trakai, and served for a year as secretary to the Karaite Council of Lithuania.

text: Karaite

text: Trakai

text: Lithuania


title: Dybbuk, The

abstract: (Yid., Der dibek; Heb., Ha-Dibuk), dramatic work by the writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) that became the most celebrated play in the history of both Yiddish and Hebrew theater. The Dybbuk was based on material An-ski collected on an ethnographic expedition he had organized through Jewish towns of western Russia just before World War I; he had originally written the play in Russian, then translated it into Yiddish. In fact, An-ski lost his Yiddish manuscript of Der dibuk when he fled Bolshevik Russia; he reconstructed it on the basis of Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik’s Hebrew translation, published in Ha-Tekufah (vol. 1) in 1918.

imgDesc: (Left to right) Noach Nachbush, Miriam Orleska, and Alexander Stein in a Vilner Trupe production of Der dibek (The Dybbuk), Poland, 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: theater

text: Russia

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Warsaw

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Avrom Morevski

text: Poland

text: Habimah

text: Moscow

text: Avrom Morevski

text: purim-shpil

text: operettas

glossary: Tsadik yeshiva rebbe


title: Dragunskii, David Abramovich

abstract: (1910–1992), army general and public figure. After finishing the Frunze Military Academy in 1941, David Dragunskii commanded a tank battalion and then a brigade during World War II and was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union (in 1944 and 1945) for combat exploits in the crossing of the Vistula and the capture of Berlin. Altogether, he won 13 awards during his military career. He was one of a very few high-ranking Jewish officers who were retained in the armed forces after the late 1940s.

text: Soviet Union

text: Holocaust

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Central Committee of Polish Jews

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public


title: Ḥayim Ḥaykl of Amdur

abstract: (d. 1787), Hasidic leader. Ḥayim Ḥaykl ben Shemu’el was a leading disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and did much to introduce Hasidism in Lithuania. According to Hasidic tradition, he had begun his career as a cantor in Karlin, and had been a close disciple of Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna, before coming to Hasidism.

text: Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh

text: Hasidism

text: Lithuania

text: cantor

text: Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna

text: Grodno

text: Misnagdim

text: Warsaw

glossary: Magid Gaon Misnagdim tsadik


title: Chernobil Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: (Ukr., Chernobyl; later, Twersky Hasidic Dynasty), one of the leading Hasidic communities in nineteenth-century Ukraine. The Chernobil dynasty was founded by Rabbi Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobil (1730?–1797), a student of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov and Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh. In addition to serving as the magid (preacher) of Chernobil, Reb Naḥum apparently traveled around Ukraine, mediating, advising, and spreading his teachings.

imgDesc: Letter from Rabbi Shelomoh Bentsiyon ben Yesh`ayah Meshullam Twersky of Chernobil, 1930. From Shelomoh Bentsiyon ben Yesh`ayah Meshullam Twersky of Chernobil in Kiev to his follower Pesaḥ Katzman in Palestine, August 1930. He acknowledges Katzman's contribution of two dollars, and complains that he has not heard in detail about the situation of his follower, Avraham Gershon. Twersky assures Katzman that he is in the rebbe’s prayers and that the rebbe prays for his spiritual and material well-being. Hebrew. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Dov Ber

text: Hasidism

text: Bratslav Hasidim

text: pilgrimage

text: Pogroms

text: Kiev

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucharest

glossary: magid rebbe


title: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

abstract: (ca. 1740–1809), rabbi, Hasidic leader, and Jewish folk hero. Levi Yitsḥak ben Me’ir of Barditshev (Rus., Berdichev; mod. Ukr. Berdychiv) was a major figure within the circle of disciples around Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and played a central role in the dissemination and defense of Hasidism in the third generation of the movement’s leadership.

text: Berdychiv

text: Dov Ber

text: Hasidism

text: Mikulov

text: Poland

text: Misnagdim

text: Pinsk

text: Brest

text: rabbinate

text: Purim

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Maharal

text: Prague

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Ukraine

glossary: Magid Misnagdim Torah tsadik Naḥmanides


title: Zabłudów

abstract: (Yid., Zabludove), town on the Meletina River (in the Western Bug basin) in the Białystok district and province of Poland. Zabłudów is first mentioned in archival sources in 1525. From 1569, the town was in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; from 1795 it was belonged to East Prussia; from 1807 to 1918 it was in the Russian Empire.

imgDesc: Bimah in the seventeenth-century wooden synagogue, Zabłudów, Poland, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Białystok

text: Poland

text: East Prussia

text: Russian Empire

text: Council

text: Tykocin

text: Grodno

text: Lithuania

text: synagogue architecture

text: trade

text: guild

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Talmud Study

text: bet midrash

text: Zionist

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Belorussia

text: USSR

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
maskil
Talmud
Talmud Torah
Torah


title: Sore bas Toyvim

abstract: (Sarah bat Tovim; 18th century), author of women’s prayers (Yid., tkhines; from Heb., teḥinot). Sore, daughter of Mordekhai (though various editions list her as the daughter of Yitsḥak or Ya‘akov), of Satanów in Podolia, Ukraine, was a great-granddaughter of Rabbi Mordekhai of Brisk (on this, all editions agree). She became the emblematic tkhine author, and one of her works, Shloyshe sheorim (Three Gates), was perhaps the most beloved of all tkhines. Unusual for this genre, her works contain a strong autobiographical voice. She refers to herself as “I, the renowned woman Sore bas Toyvim, of distinguished ancestry,” and tells the story of her fall from a wealthy youth to an old age of poverty and wandering, attributing her fate to the sin of talking in synagogue.

text: tkhines

text: Ukraine

text: piety

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sabbath

text: liturgy

text: Sabbatian

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Julian Tuwim


title: Osherovitsh, Hirsh

abstract: (1908–1994), Yiddish poet. Hirsh Osherovitsh was born in Ponevezh (Panevėžys, Lith.). Together with thousands of other Jews who lived in the Russian border region, his family was exiled at the outbreak of World War I to the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. In 1921, the family returned to Ponevezh, and in 1928 Osherovitsh graduated from the local Hebrew high school. He studied law at Kaunas (Kovno) University, graduating in 1933. Osherovitsh began to write poetry at a very young age, and began publishing in 1934, when he worked for various newspapers, in particular Kaunas’s Di yidishe shtime.

text: Panevėžys

text: Ukraine

text: Kaunas

text: poetry

text: Vilna

text: Moscow

text: Lithuania

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Itzik Manger

text: Yiddish Literature

text: USSR


title: Book Design and Illustration

abstract: The tradition of design and illustration in East European Hebrew and Yiddish printing is connected to the history of itinerant families of printers who wandered in Central and Eastern Europe, transporting their typographical knowledge. Their skills usually originated in the cradle of Jewish printing in northern Italy. The development of book design followed different trajectories in Prague and in printing centers farther east, although both were clearly influenced by the earlier, chiefly Italian, patterns. Prague ultimately was the location of five presses owned by families of Jewish printers.

imgDesc: Title page of Merkeves hamishne (Kraków: Helicz, 1534-1535), the earliest Yiddish book published by the first Hebrew printing press in Poland. (Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem)

text: Prague

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Passover

text: Lublin

text: Helicz brothers

text: Bak

text: prose

text: Yosef Perl

text: Mosheh Landau

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature

text: Wolf Pascheles

text: Kraków

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Helicz brothers

text: conversion

text: Prostějov

text: yeshiva

text: Prostitz

text: angels

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Fayvesh

text: Russia

text: censorship

text: Ukraine

text: Shapira

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Shklov

text: Tsene-rene

text: Romm

text: Moriah

text: Odessa

text: Stybel

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: Vitebsk

text: Marc Chagall

text: El Lissitzky

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Michał Weichert

text: Yung-yidish

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: poetry

text: Kultur-lige

text: Kiev

text: Białystok

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Der Nister

text: Yisakhar Ber Rybak

text: Natan Al’tman

text: Maks Erik

text: Yiddish Literature

text: Warsaw

text: shtetl

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Passover

text: Bruno Schulz

text: Artur Szyk

glossary: © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris. Print courtesy of YIVO

subconcepts: Book Design in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

subconcepts: The Nineteenth-Century Shift toward Modernity


title: Religious Year

abstract: The rhythm of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was governed substantially by the Jewish calendar, although the calendar of the majority culture impinged on Jewish lives as well. Merchants’ calendars published in Hebrew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicated not only the Jewish months, with their associated astrological signs and holidays, but the Christian ones as well. In one calendar, for example, Easter is designated tselem tog: Cross Day. And particular social and business customs were observed by some Jews on Christmas. Still, the Jewish year served as the timeline and background for much of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In the twentieth century, secular Jewish movements retained much of the calendar while reinterpreting the significance of some holidays.

imgDesc: Yom Kippur. Maurycy Minkowski, 1906. Oil on canvas. Tel Aviv Museum of Art. (Gift of the Zionist Organization Königsberg; © Tel Aviv Museum of Art)

text: calendars

text: Christmas

text: yeshivas

text: Misnagdic

text: Hasidic

text: charity

text: memory

text: tkhines

text: cards

text: Lithuania

text: charity

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Bund

text: Vilna

text: Councils

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Purim

text: geese

text: Passover

text: games

text: money

text: Land of Israel

text: Purim

text: Passover

text: weddings

text: calendars

text: cutouts

text: guilds

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: pogroms

text: Holocaust

text: Poland

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Torah
rebbe
gzeyres takh vetat


title: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

abstract: (1780–1844), disciple of Naḥman of Bratslav and disseminator of his teachings. Natan Sternhartz served as informal leader of the Bratslav Hasidic sect following his master’s death. He was never considered to be the rebbe of the community, however, and Bratslav Hasidim thus remain faithful to the group’s founder.

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Bratslav Hasidic sect

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Haskalah

text: Yosef Perl

text: Misnagdim

text: Savran

glossary:
rebbe
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Haskalah
Misnagdim


title: Lubliner, Ludwik

abstract: (1809–1868), lawyer and journalist. Born in Warsaw, Ludwik Ozjasz Lubliner attended a Piarist (Catholic) school against the wishes of his observant parents. As a student at a polytechnical college, he then joined the uprising of 1831, during the course of which he received numerous injuries and was decorated with military honors.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Jan Czyński

text: Leon Hollaenderski


title: Courland

abstract: (Ger., Kurland; Lat., Kurzeme), a historic and ethnographic area of west and southwest Latvia. The territory of Courland was conquered in the thirteenth century by the German Livonian Order. One-third of its territory (Piltene) went to the bishopric of Courland and two-thirds to the Livonian Order. In 1309, Jews were banned in the territories by Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, Grand Master of the Order. In 1561 a treaty between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Livonian Order ended Livonian independence; the document forbade Jews to settle in Courland or even to reside there temporarily for commercial transactions. The Duchy of Courland was dependent on the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout its existence (1561–1795). Perhaps reflecting scattered and periodic Jewish residence, a series of laws to ban Jews from engaging in commerce was adopted in the Courland Landtag in 1692, 1698, and 1699. Only in autonomous Piltene, formerly ruled by the bishop, and, from 1585, by Poland, was Jewish residence officially permitted.

imgDesc: Baltic States. Boundaries shown are ca. 2000.

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Jelgava

text: Russia

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Riga

text: Russia


title: Toeplitz, Teodor and Henryk

abstract: Financiers and supporters of the Haskalah in Warsaw. Teodor Toeplitz (1793–1838), advocate of the work of Moses Mendelssohn, was the grandson of Juda Leopold Toeplitz (who had emigrated from the Czech lands to Leszno) and the son of Samuel (Szymon) Toeplitz (1766–1838), a wealthy merchant from Warsaw. Teodor’s son Henryk Toeplitz (1822–1891) was an industrialist, politician, and patron of Jewish education.

text: Haskalah

text: Warsaw

text: Leszno

text: Poland

text: Szmul Zbytkower

text: antisemitism

text: Markus Jastrow

text: Russian Empire


title: Klausner, Yosef

abstract: (1874–1958), critic, researcher, and editor. Yosef Klausner was born in Olkeniki, near Vilna. In 1885, his family moved to Odessa and he became involved in the activities of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and in organizations promoting Hebrew as a spoken language. In 1893 his first publications addressed both topics—Zionist activism and the revitalization of Hebrew. He then wrote his initial work on literary criticism, on Yehudah Leib Gordon (1894). Between 1897 and 1902, Klausner studied at the University of Heidelberg, simultaneously establishing a reputation as an outstanding critic of renascent Hebrew literature.

imgDesc: Yosef Klausner, during the period when he was editor of the monthly Ha-Shiloaḥ, Odessa (?), 1911. (The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem)

text: Vilna

text: Odessa

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Hebrew

text: Zionist

text: literary criticism

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: Land of Israel

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik


title: Koidanover, Aharon Shemu’el and Tsevi Hirsh

abstract: Father and son; rabbis and scholars. Aharon Shemu’el Koidanover (Kaidanower; 1614–1676) was an eminent Talmudic and halakhic scholar and preacher; Tsevi Hirsh (d. 1712) is known primarily for his book of moral and ethical instruction, Kav ha-yashar.

text: Minsk

text: yeshiva

text: Brest

text: Biała

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Vilna

text: Lublin

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: Moravia

text: Nikolsburg

text: Rzeszów

text: Kraków

text: Dubno

text: Slutsk

text: angels

text: piety

glossary:
yeshiva
gzeyres takh vetat
Talmud
halakhah
responsa
Zohar
Kabbalah


title: Chełm

abstract: Former Polish royal town, now in the province of Lublin. According to local tradition, the Jews of Chełm (Yid., Khelem) were granted their first privilege by King Władisław Jagiełło, though tombstones once thought to be from the fifteenth century are now considered of a later date. Hence, while earlier settlement is very probable, a Jewish community is known to have been in Chełm from the beginning of the sixteenth century; a synagogue functioned in 1580.

imgDesc: Jewish and non-Jewish students from the state gymnasium, Chełm, 1934. (YIVO)

text: Lublin

text: tombstones

text: golem

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Wrocław

text: Gdańsk

text: Hasidism

text: Zionist movement

text: Bund

text: yeshiva

text: charity

text: Ignacy (Yitsḥak) Schiper

text: wise men of Chełm

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer


title: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

abstract: (The Seer of Lublin; 1745–1815), the most influential Hasidic leader in Poland and Galicia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Though he did not found a dynasty, the majority of tsadikim living at his time in that region considered themselves to be his disciples.

imgDesc: Restored polychromatic tombstone of Ya'akov Yitsḥak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin, dating from 1815. He died on the Ninth of Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temple.  Photograph by Andrzej Trzciłski. (Courtesy of the photographer)

text: Lublin

text: Hasidic

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Yesha‘yahu ben Avraham Horowitz

text: Dov Ber

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Pshiskhe

glossary: Magid rebbe tsadik Torah


title: Pigs

abstract: The prohibition to consume pork is perhaps the most familiar aspect of kashrut, the system of Jewish dietary laws, even though the pig is only one of a number of unclean animals mentioned in the Pentateuch. In Jewish memory, the rejection of pigs is an indicator of Jewish difference; one Yiddish expression characterizes a pig, dover akher (“another thing”) as something not to be mentioned by name.

text: military draft

text: Kishinev

text: Poland

text: Soviet

text: agricultural

text: Crimea

text: Ukrainian

text: Birobidzhan

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: shtetl

text: Leyb Kvitko


title: Chess

abstract: European Jews knew of and played chess long before their arrival in Eastern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Leading Polish rabbis, Mosheh Isserles in the sixteenth century and Avraham Gombiner in the seventeenth, explicitly permitted playing chess, including on the Sabbath, as long as money was not wagered on the outcome (Shulḥan ‘arukh, Oraḥ ḥayim, 338:5). There were also condemnations of chess, notably in Shevet musar, a very popular work of the eighteenth century that took a negative stance influenced by kabbalistic sources (chap. 42). Nevertheless, and particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, chess was widely played in Jewish households of various levels of observance and, often enough, by both sexes.

imgDesc: Hasidic boys playing chess, Łowicz, Poland, 1919. (YIVO)

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Avraham Gombiner

text: Sabbath

text: money

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mikhail Botvinnik

text: Orthodox

text: Prague

text: Mikhail Tal’

text: Akiba Rubinstein

text: Rostov-on-Don

subconcepts: APPENDIX: PROMINENT JEWISH CHESS PLAYERS


title: Bacău

abstract: Town in northern Moldavia, at the confluence of the Bistrița and Siret Rivers. Oral tradition claims that the first synagogue was erected in the late fifteenth century, but the oldest documentary reference to the existence of a Jewish community is a tombstone from 1703. In 1742, the Moldavian prince Constantin Mavrocordat granted two Jewish merchants from Hotin (in Bessarabia) the right to settle in the town and exempted them from taxes. Prince Ioniță Sandu Sturza, who encouraged the settlement of Jewish merchants, adopted a similar policy in 1823.

imgDesc: Title page of the pinkes of a Bessarabian gemilut ḥesed (charitable society), Bacău, Bessarabia (now in Moldova), 1836. (YIVO)

text: Moldavia

text: Bessarabia

text: Romania

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Botoşani

text: rabbinate

text: Bucharest

text: Transylvania

glossary: Talmud Torah mikveh responsa


title: Dawidsohn, Ḥayim

abstract: (1760–1854), merchant, leading member of the Warsaw Jewish community, and its chief rabbi. Ḥayim Dawidsohn was born in Pińczów and, after the death of his father, grew up at the home of the wealthy Tsentseminer family, Warsaw bankers to whose daughter he was wed as a young man. Thanks to an inheritance from his father-in-law and to the sharp business acumen of his wife, Dawidsohn’s family amassed a great fortune, acquired among other means by obtaining the leasehold for taxes on kosher meat. His teacher, Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum of Lissa (Leszno), ordained him. In 1797, on the basis of the Prussian law regarding Jewish surnames, Ḥayim became the first member of his family to assume the family name of Dawidsohn.

text: Warsaw

text: Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum

text: Leszno

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: agriculture

text: Antoni Eisenbaum

glossary: Misnaged Talmud Torah


title: Lec, Stanisław

abstract: (1909–1966), poet, satirist. and aphorist. Stanisław Lec, whose surname means jester in Hebrew (lets), was born in Lwów into a family of wealthy landowners and bankers. With an aristocratic title and socialist views, and his education at the best academic institutions in his home city and Vienna, Lec represented a unique combination of now-extinct Austro-Hungarian, Jewish, and Polish cultures.

text: poetry

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: humor

text: memory

text: proverbs


title: Proverbs

abstract: Yiddish speakers had at their disposal a rich repertoire of proverbs. The term proverb (Yid., shprikhvort) in a narrow sense refers to complete sentences of anonymous origin that are used in conversation to comment, often metaphorically, on a matter at hand. An example is Patsh zikh nit in baykhele ven fishele iz nokh in taykhele (Don’t pat yourself in the belly when the fish is still in the stream; in other words, “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched”). Related to proverbs are proverbial phrases, proverbial comparisons, and “winged words.”

text: Passover

text: Money

text: Ignatz Bernstein

glossary: Talmud get


title: Brafman, Iakov Aleksandrovich

abstract: (1825–1879), a notorious Russian convert from Judaism and author of the most successful and influential work of Judeophobia in Russian history. Iakov Brafman was born to a poor Jewish family, grew up almost uneducated and rebellious, and clashed with the kahal (the Jewish self-governing community) in his native Kletsk. When faced with the draft, he chose to convert, becoming first Lutheran and later Russian Orthodox.

text: kahal

text: Minsk

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

text: kahal

text: Kahal

text: censor

text: Vilna

text: Russia

glossary:
kahal
Talmud
Protocols of the Elders of Zion


title: Mahler, Raphael

abstract: (1899–1977), historian. Born in Nowy Sącz, Raphael Mahler received a traditional yeshiva education until age 15. He completed secondary school in Kraków before matriculating at the University of Vienna in history and philosophy and continued his Talmudic studies at the modern rabbinical seminary in Vienna. After earning his doctorate in 1922 with a dissertation on the sociological problems of progress, Mahler returned to Poland. There he taught history at Jewish secondary schools while participating in the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon and promoting modern Jewish historical research. With Emanuel Ringelblum, Mahler cofounded the Jewish Young Historians Circle that eventually affiliated with YIVO’s Historical Section, where he was actively involved both as a researcher and an editor.

imgDesc: Jewish historians in the office of the Jewish Section at an international historical congress, Warsaw, 1933: (left to right) Ignacy Schiper, Abraham Duker, Emanuel Ringelblum, Raphael Mahler, Salo W. Baron, Me’ir Halevi, Majer Bałaban, M. Stein, and an unidentified participant. (YIVO)

text: yeshiva

text: Kraków

text: seminary

text: Poland

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: YIVO

text: Karaites

text: Hasidic movements

text: historiography

text: Haskalah

text: rabbinic literature

text: messianism

text: economic life

glossary: yeshiva Karaites Haskalah


title: Cahan, Yehudah Leib

abstract: (1881–1937), Yiddish folklorist. Born in Vilna, Yehudah Leib Cahan moved to Warsaw in 1889. He studied in heder and later learned watchmaking. At a young age he began to collect and notate Yiddish songs. In 1899 he became a frequenter of the Saturday gatherings in the home of the writer Y. L. Peretz, who encouraged him in his interest in gathering folk songs. In 1901 he moved to London, where he founded the Zionist labor union Forverts (Forward), gave speeches for proletarian Zionist groups, and continued to collect songs.

text: folklorist

text: Warsaw

text: heder

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: folk songs

text: YIVO

text: Burgenland

text: Filologishe shriftn

text: Max Weinreich


title: Szabad, Tsemaḥ

abstract: (1864–1935), physician and public figure. Tsemaḥ (Yid., Tsemakh) Szabad was born in Vilna and educated in the traditional Jewish system and in a Russian secondary school. In 1881, he moved to Moscow, completing his medical studies at Moscow University in 1889. Five years later, Szabad returned to Vilna and worked as a physician at the local hospital. Because of his involvement in the 1905 Revolution, he was forced to leave Vilna for several years. During World War I, he provided care and support to Jews living in the battle zones.

imgDesc: Tsemaḥ Szabad reading to his grandsons, Uriel and Gabriel, the sons of noted linguist and scholar Max Weinreich, Vilna, 1931. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Moscow

text: 1905 Revolution

text: World War I

text: OZE

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Lithuania

text: ORT

text: Society for the Promotion of Culture

text: Russia

text: YIVO

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Folkist


title: Suwałki

abstract: Town in northeastern Poland. Jewish residence apparently began in the nineteenth century when Suwałki experienced a period of substantial development. In 1808, there were 44 Jews living in the town, a number that had risen to 1,209 by 1827. In 1856, the community had grown to 6,407, and in 1897 to 7,165 (representing 40% of the total population). From the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century, the Jewish population increased again, reaching 13,002 in 1908 (56%). From 1897 to 1914, the town was the site of a substantial Russian garrison of some 10,000 soldiers.

imgDesc: Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers at a soup kitchen, Suwałki, Poland, 1918. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: yeshiva

text: Shemu’el Mohilewer

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Lithuania

text: TSYSHO

text: Tarbut

text: pogroms

text: Przytyk

text: East Prussia

text: Soviet Union

text: Lublin

text: Biała

glossary: halakhah Kabbalah yeshiva Talmud Torah


title: Volodymyr Volyns’kyi

abstract: A city on the Luga River (a tributary of the West Bug), Volodymyr Volyns’kyi (Pol., Włodzimierz; Yid., Ludmir; Latinized as Lodomeria) is the district center of Ukraine’s Volyn’ oblast. An important regional center of Volhynia since the tenth century, it passed in 1319 to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in 1569 to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in 1795 to the Russian Empire. Between 1921 and 1939 it belonged to independent Poland.

imgDesc: View down Farna Street, the main thoroughfare, Volodymyr Volyns’kyi, 1920s. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russian Empire

text: tombstones

text: leased

text: trade

text: crafts

text: councils

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Karliner Hasidic dynasty

text: Maiden of Ludmir

text: bet midrash

text: yeshiva

text: pogroms

text: Tarbut

text: Beys Yankev

text: ORT


title: Granovskii, Aleksandr Mikhailovich

abstract: (1890–1937), director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr; GOSET). Aleksandr Granovskii (Yid., Aleksander Granovski) was born into a wealthy merchant family in Moscow that moved to Riga while he was an infant. There he was raised in an assimilated environment. Beginning in 1910, he studied theater in Saint Petersburg, where he was influenced by the avant-garde and experimental theater of the Russian Silver Age. He continued his studies under the tutelage of Max Reinhardt in Germany, and developed an appreciation for theater as spectacle. In 1914, he returned to Saint Petersburg and began directing theatrical productions, including Macbeth, Faust, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko.

imgDesc: Zrelishscha (Entertainment), no. 89 (June 1924). The cover of this Moscow journal features a montage by I. Makhlis celebrating the GOSET (Moscow State Yiddish Theater), with Aleksandr Granovskii as the locomotive that pulls the train and actor Solomon Mikhoels as the conductor atop the engine. (YIVO)

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Moscow

text: Riga

text: Saint Petersburg

text: theater

text: Sholem Asch

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: satire

text: Marc Chagall

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: cinema


title: Karelits, Avraham Yesha‘yahu

abstract: (1878–1953), Talmudic scholar and Orthodox religious authority. Avraham Yesha‘yahu Karelitz, known as Ḥazon Ish, was one of the most prominent religious authorities of the twentieth century and a major leader of Ḥaredi Jewry in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s.

text: Orthodox

text: Lithuania

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Vilna

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: Sabbath

text: Holocaust

text: Musar movement

text: Sabbath

text: Holocaust

text: Holocaust

text: daas Toyre

glossary: Ḥaredi heder yeshiva Talmud Torah Musar Yishuv halakhah Responsa Maimonides


title: Magid, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew weekly, published between 1856 and 1903. Ha-Magid (The Preacher) was the first Hebrew weekly newspaper, and in many respects its establishment marked the beginning of the modern Hebrew press. For censorship reasons it was published outside the borders of tsarist Russia (first in Lyck, Prussia, and after 1890 successively in Berlin, Kraków, and Vienna), but its contents were aimed first and foremost at the Russian Jewish reading public. Because of its broad content, however, it was distributed to many Jewish communities in Europe and beyond.

text: censorship

text: Russia

text: Kraków

text: Haskalah

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionist movement

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Kraków

text: Galician

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Tsefirah


title: Ford, Aleksander

abstract: (1908–1980), motion picture director. Born Moyshe Lipshutz in Łódź, Ford went to Warsaw in the late 1920s to study art. He was an early member of the avant-garde cine-club START, making short films—one on the working-class neighborhood where he grew up, another a portrait of Warsaw street vendors—that anticipated Italian neorealism in their use of staged documentary.

text: motion picture

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Habimah

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Bund

text: Medem Sanatorium

text: Soviet Union

text: Lublin

text: Prague

text: Janusz Korczak


title: Romm, Mikhail Il’ich

abstract: (1901–1971), film director, scriptwriter, and educator. In 1925, Mikhail Romm graduated from the Moscow Higher Art–Technical Institute and worked as a sculptor and translator. From 1928 to 1930, he held a fellowship at the Institute for Methods of Extracurricular Work, where he did research on issues relevant to cinema. Starting in 1929, he wrote screenplays, completing the texts for Revansh (Revenge; 1930), Riadom s nami (Next to Us; 1931), and Konveier smerti (The Conveyor of Death; 1933). He served as an assistant at the Mosfilm Cinema Studio in 1931 and became a director two years later. From 1938, he taught at the Actors and Directors Workshop of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography and in 1948 became its director.

text: Moscow

text: cinema

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Holocaust


title: Yizker-bikher

abstract: The Yiddish term yizker-bikher (sg., yizker-bukh) has come to refer primarily to a vast body of memorial books commemorating Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, primarily from prewar Poland though also throughout Eastern Europe (similar works have been created for other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean region). Survivors and émigrés from various communities that have organized landsmanshaftn (associations of Jews from the same hometowns abroad) in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere have produced many hundreds of such books, generally in Yiddish and/or Hebrew.

imgDesc: Der untergang fun Zlotshev (The Fall of Złoczów), by Szlojme Mayer (Munich: Farlag Ibergang, 1947). (YIVO)

text: Holocaust

text: Poland

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: World War I

text: Pogroms

text: Russian Civil War

text: shtetl

text: Yiddish literature

text: YIVO


title: Anticosmopolitan Campaign

abstract: Euphemism for the victimization of the Jewish intelligentsia in the late Stalin years. The anticosmopolitan campaign did not commence as an anti-Jewish offensive, but rather as a concomitant of the policy of promoting “Soviet patriotism,” which in the immediate postwar years dictated the eradication of extraneous influences in culture and the reversal of the relative ideological relaxation of the war years. This trend was the other face of the isolationism the Soviet Union fostered as it instituted the Iron Curtain.

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Doctors’ Plot


title: Wegmeister, Joel

abstract: (1837–1919), entrepreneur, Jewish community leader in Warsaw, follower of the Ger Hasidic dynasty, and member of the Polish Council of State. Nothing is known about Joel Wegmeister’s family background. As a successful merchant and entrepreneur, he was active in a large number of mainly religious associations, some of which he founded, as well as in the Warsaw Jewish community. In addition, he strove to increase the influence of Ger Hasidism on Polish Jewry.

text: Warsaw

text: Ger Hasidic dynasty

text: Hasidism

text: pogroms

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: shtadlan

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Katowice

text: Silesia

text: World War I

text: Kazimierz Natanson


title: Burshtin, Mikhoel

abstract: (1897–1945), Yiddish novelist and short-story writer. Born in Błonie (Yid., Bloyne) near Warsaw, Mikhoel Burshtin moved to Warsaw in 1912, where he attended high school and studied to be a teacher of history and literature. He first published in Yiddish around 1930, and his earliest book, Iber di khurves fun Ployne (Over the Ruins of Ployne; 1931), received positive reviews from Yiddish literary critics. He contributed to the Warsaw Yiddish dailies Haynt and Moment, as well as the New York newspaper Forverts, the monthly Di tsukunft, and other publications.

imgDesc: Postcard from Mikhoel Burshtin to Yoysef Opatoshu, 1932. From Mikhoel Burshtin in Warsaw to Yoysef Opatoshu in New York, 26 January 1932, saying that he agrees with Opatoshu's assessment that the second part of Burshtin's novel Iber di khurves fun Ployne (Over the Ruins of Ployne) is less concentrated than the first half. The book has been well-received in the press in Europe, but is ignored in America. He reminds Opatoshu that they have personally met, in Warsaw: "Your characteristic face made a deep impression on me and I can still see you before my eyes." He has written other things but there is nowhere to publish them, as the world of Yiddish literature seems to be in flux, with everyone paralyzed by the need to rethink all previously held positions. In addition, the Yiddish literary scene in Poland is lacking a "central figure" capable of serving as a "moral" example for writers. Working as a schoolteacher takes up almost all of his energy and so he finds it difficult to carve out the time to write. Yiddish. RG 436, Joseph Opatoshu Papers, F23. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: Landkentenish

text: Białystok

text: Moscow

text: censorship

text: Kaunas

text: Poland

text: shtetl

text: conversion

text: humor

text: Poland

text: prose


title: Kharik, Izi

abstract: (1898–1937), Soviet Yiddish poet. In his short life, Izi (Israel) Kharik was one of the most significant and powerful Soviet Yiddish writers, a poet whose work engaged aesthetic movements as varied as expressionism and socialist realism and who, despite his position of power, expressed deep ambivalence about the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution.

imgDesc: Af der erd (On the Land), by Izi Kharik (Moscow: Farlag Shul un bukh, 1926). (YIVO)

text: Belorussia

text: Yiddish poetry

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: shtetl

text: communism

text: Soviet Union


title: Linetski, Yitskhok Yoyel

abstract: (1839–1915), Yiddish author. Born in Vinnitsa, Podolia (mod. Vinnytsya, Ukr.) to a father who was a rabbi and a devout Hasid, Yitskhok Linetski was a child prodigy. As he entered adolescence, he grew interested in the Haskalah, spending time in enlightened circles and reading secular books. Attempting to prevent what he saw as moral corruption, Linetski’s father married him at age 14 to a girl of 12; when Linetski convinced his wife to explore the Enlightenment, his father forced him to divorce her and, at 16, to marry a deaf, mentally handicapped girl, reinforcing Linetski’s hostility to traditionalist and particularly to Hasidic ways of life.

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: seminary

text: Breslau

text: Zhitomir

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Yiddish theater

text: Kiev

text: Ha-Melits

text: Russia

text: Kol mevaser

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Botoşani

text: Romania

text: Zionist

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Hebrew literature

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon


title: About this Article (Population and Migration)

abstract: To treat the demography of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe—its size, its movement within the region, and migration from it—this entry includes three articles. The principal division is chronological, using World War I, a time of great upheaval that disrupted large numbers of people and an event that led to the end of the empires of Eastern Europe and a redrawing of the area’s political map, as the point of division. The first article covers population and migration before World War I; the second and third articles separately treat these topics after the war. For further discussion, see the entries on specific countries, regions, and cities.

imgDesc: Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in a farming colony in Argentina, 1905. (YIVO)


title: Mieses, Józef

abstract: (1882–1942), rabbi, scholar, and Polish army chaplain. The elder brother of author and scholar Matthias Mieses, Józef Mieses was born in Przemyśl and lived there until he completed his high school education in 1900. Sent to Vienna to study in the rabbinical seminary and university, he was ordained as a rabbi and received his doctorate in 1907. Since very few posts for modern rabbis existed in Galicia at that time, Mieses accepted a position as instructor in Jewish religion in the first Polish gymnasium established in his hometown.

text: Matthias Mieses

text: Przemyśl

text: seminary

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Warsaw


title: Zamość, Yisra’el ben Mosheh ha-Levi

abstract: (also Segal; ca. 1700–1772), early maskil who promoted the study of science and wrote commentaries on three classics of medieval Jewish thought. Yisra’el ben Mosheh was born in Bóbrka (near mod. L’viv) to an undistinguished family and studied in Zamość, which is why he is generally known as Yisra’el Zamość. The scientific knowledge he acquired in Zamość was astonishingly broad but outdated, drawn only from Hebrew books, almost all medieval (one exception was Yosef Delmedigo’s Sefer elim [1629], on which Yisra’el wrote a commentary, now lost). His authorities were Aristotle and Ptolemy (his unpublished astronomical treatise, “Arubot ha-shamayim” [The Windows of Heaven], takes a geocentric approach). The exceptional availability of books, many in manuscript, reflected the high level of learning in Zamość, a town with a presence of Sephardic Jews deliberately brought there by its founder, Jan Zamoyski (1541–1605). In Zamość, Yisra’el had followers and allies; the town became a center of early Haskalah a generation later.

text: L’viv

text: Zamość

text: Haskalah

text: Brody

text: Hasidism

glossary: maskil Haskalah Talmud Maimonides Kabbalah halakhah


title: Savran-Bendery Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Hasidic dynasty active from the second decade of the nineteenth century until the Holocaust. The founder was Shim‘on Shelomoh (d. ca. 1802), a disciple of the Magid of Mezritsh, who was a preacher in Savran (Podolia). Shim‘on’s two sons established independent Hasidic dynasties in Podolia and Bessarabia.

imgDesc: Wine cup. Moscow, 1837. Silver, niello, engraved, gilt. This niello cup was made by a Russian master silversmith in Moscow in 1837, probably for sale to an aristocrat or wealthy merchant. It was acquired by a Hasidic man who had it inscribed in Hebrew, “Cup of Elijah,” and gave it as a gift to Yitsḥak Wertheim, the Bender rebbe. It was not unusual for Hasidic rebbes to receive sumptuous gifts from their followers. After the rabbi’s death, the cup was inscribed at the bottom, “The inheritance of the admor, the Rabbi Yitsḥak, the righteous of blessed memory of Bender.” (Gross Family Collection)

text: Hasidic

text: Holocaust

text: Magid of Mezritsh

text: Bessarabia

text: Odessa

text: Zionism

text: Mizraḥi

text: Poland

text: Barukh of Mezhbizh

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Ukraine

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Chernobil

text: Apt

text: Bratslav Hasidim

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

text: Holocaust

text: USSR

text: Kosov-Vizhnits dynasty

glossary: rebbe tsadik


title: Shestov, Lev

abstract: (born Lev Shvartsman; 1866–1938), Russian philosopher, advocate of religious existentialism. Born to a wealthy family in Kiev, a city open then to a small number of Jews, Shestov was taught Jewish subjects by private tutors. Early in life, however, he chose assimilation to Russian culture as the keystone to his intellectual development.

text: Kiev

text: assimilation

text: Russia

text: Aron Steinberg

text: Benjamin Fondane


title: Karlovy Vary

abstract: (Ger., Karlsbad or Carlsbad), town and spa in the Czech Republic, 110 kilometers west of Prague. In 1921 and 1923, Karlovy Vary hosted the Twelfth and Thirteenth World Zionist Congresses.

imgDesc: Montage of portraits of delegates to the Twelfth Zionist Congress, which convened in Karlovy Vary in 1921. Photograph by A. Person. (YIVO)

text: Czech Republic

text: Prague

text: Zionist

text: Galicia

text: Jakub Frank

text: Holocaust


title: Jeitteles Family

abstract: Prominent Bohemian family, principally associated with Prague. The main branch of the Jeitteles (Jeiteles, Geidels, Geitler) family descended from David Jeitteles in the seventeenth century. David’s son Leib was a physician; David’s grandson, Mishl Leib (d. 1760) bought the existing Jewish pharmacy in Prague, together with its pertinent privileges, from his cousin David Kisch (d. 1742) in July 1725.

imgDesc: Jonas Jeitteles, a physician, ca. 1800. Lithograph. (The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem)

text: Bohemian

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Haskalah

text: Frankists

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Haskalah

text: Brno

text: Normalschulen

text: Kerem ḥemed

glossary: Haskalah yeshiva maskil


title: Zhidachov-Komarno Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Galician Hasidic dynasty that flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the third and fourth generations of Hasidism. Its tsadikim (lit., “righteous ones”), renowned for their esoteric learning and even purportedly for performing miracles, attracted many disciples. The dynasty continues to exist, primarily in the United States, although many of its members and leaders were murdered during the Holocaust.

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: Holocaust

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak

text: Lublin

text: Besht

text: Galicia

text: Yosef Perl

text: Haskalah

text: Hungary

text: Munkács

text: mysticism

text: Sabbatianism

glossary: Zohar Torah Mishnah Haskalah tsadik halakhah Kabbalah


title: Bakst, Léon

abstract: (1866–1924), Russian artist. Of the many artists of the Russian Silver Age, Léon Bakst (Lev Samoilovich Rozenberg) deserves the highest acclaim for his achievements in studio painting and the applied arts. He was especially successful in portraiture, interior decoration, book illustration, haute couture, and, above all, stage design.

imgDesc: Sketch by León Bakst for the costume of the wolf for Tchaikovsky's ballet La Belle au Bois Dormant (The Sleeping Beauty), performed in Paris, 1921; watercolor, gouache, and gold on paper. Private Collection. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource NY)

text: stage design

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Marc Chagall

text: Boris Pasternak

text: shtetl