title: Vilnius

abstract: (Pol., Wilno; Rus., Vilna; Yid., Vilne), capital of the republic of Lithuania. In 1323, Gediminas made Vilnius the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The city became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. It fell under the domination of the Russian Empire after the Polish Partition of 1795; in the interwar period (1920–1939) it was under Polish control. At the end of World War II it was the capital of the Lithuanian SSR until independence in 1991. The city’s large Jewish population and atmosphere earned it the nickname “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”

imgDesc: Vilna in the 1930s.

text: Lithuania

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russian Empire

text: Council

text: guilds

text: blood libel

text: kahal

text: Charity

text: Passover

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Hasidic movement

text: Mosheh ben Yitsḥak Yehudah Lima

text: Natanson

text: Strashun

text: seminary

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Aryeh Gintsburg

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: crown rabbi

text: Yehudah Leib Kantor

text: Yitsḥak Rubinstein

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Avraham Danzig

text: Yisra’el ben Ze’ev Volf Lipkin (Salanter)

text: Musar movement

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Matityahu Strashun

text: journalism

text: Ha-Karmel

text: printing and publishing

text: Romm family

text: Pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Arkadii Kremer

text: L. (Iulii) Martov

text: Shmul Gozhansky

text: Bund

text: Hirsh Lekert

text: A. Litvak

text: Moyshe Rafes

text: Zionist

text: World War I

text: Yitsḥak Rubinstein

text: Jakub Wygodzki

text: Tarbut

text: YIVO

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Maks Erik

text: Max Weinreich

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Leyzer Volf

text: Chaim Grade

text: Shmerl Kaczerginski

text: theater

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Habimah

text: Maccabi

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: Soviet Union

text: Lithuania

text: ghettos

text: Judenrat

text: Jakub Gens

text: Latvia

text: Estonia

text: Abba Kovner

glossary:
wojewoda
kahal
Torah
Gaon
magid
heder
Talmud Torah
yeshiva
Haskalah
Talmud
Ḥaredi

subconcepts:
Fifteenth–Eighteenth Centuries
Under Russian Rule (1795–1914)
World War I and Its Aftermath
Holocaust (1939–1945)
The Postwar Period


title: Luts’k

abstract: A city on the Styr’ River (a tributary of the Pripiat’), Luts’k (Pol., Łuck; Rus., Lutsk) is the administrative center of Ukraine’s Volyn’ oblast. Mentioned in the Ruthenian Chronicles of 1085, from 1320 it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from 1569 to 1795 it was a district center of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and from 1796 of the Russian Empire. Between 1921 and 1939 it was the provincial center of Volhynia in independent Poland.

imgDesc: Jewish street in the shadow of a church, Luts’k, ca. 1926. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Russian Empire

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Karaites

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: yeshiva

text: S. An-ski

text: pogroms

text: Tarbut

text: Kultur-lige

glossary: Karaites Talmud Torah yeshiva


title: Frankism

abstract: A Jewish religious movement centered on the leadership of Ya‘akov (Jakub) ben Yehudah Leib Frank (1726?–1791). The term Frankism was coined in early nineteenth-century Warsaw and was initially a slur directed at the descendants of Frank’s followers who converted to Roman Catholicism and attempted to conceal their background. It was only with the appearance of the first scholarly accounts of the movement in the second half of the nineteenth century that the term came to be used for the whole variety of phenomena connected by the authors to Frank’s activity. Sources from Frank’s era, however, provide several different perspectives. In Jewish accounts, his followers are normally not presented as a separate group but as an offshoot of preexisting heretical movements, most notably of Sabbatianism. The majority of Christian observers saw the Frankists as a Jewish sect opposed to the Talmud. The Frankists initially thought of themselves as a branch of Judaism opposed to the authority of the rabbis and rejecting some elements of rabbinic tradition. Subsequently, Frankists redefined themselves as a separate religious group, practically independent from hitherto existing forms of both Judaism and Christianity.

imgDesc: Areas of Sabbatian, Frankist, and Beshtian activity, eighteenth century. (Based on map 46, prepared by Michael K. Silber, in Evyatar Freisel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History, rev. ed. [New York, 1990], p. 50)

text: Warsaw

text: Sabbatianism

text: Buczacz

text: Czernowitz

text: Bucharest

text: Poland

text: Sephardim

text: Ukraine

text: Brody

text: Kamieniec Podolski

text: magic

text: Lwów

text: Karaites

text: Żytomierz

text: conversion

text: Lublin

text: Moldavia

text: Hungary

text: Moravia

text: Moscow

text: Brno

text: Dobruschka

text: Prossnitz

text: pilgrimage

text: Prague

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Wehle

text: El‘azar Fleckeles

glossary:
Talmud
Council of Four Lands
Karaites
Zohar


title: Preachers and Preaching

abstract: Preaching in the synagogue dates to late antiquity, when the tradition of weekly sermons given on the Sabbath and based on the reading from the Torah of that week, began. This tradition continued in Eastern Europe. There were also special occasions when the rabbi was particularly called upon to preach, notably Shabat Shuvah (the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), and Shabat ha-Gadol (the Sabbath before Passover). From the eighteenth century, the communal burial society would gather annually on the 7th of Adar, the traditional birth and death date of Moses in the Hebrew calendar, to hear a sermon from the rabbi. In larger communities, the weekly sermon would be delivered by the darshan (preacher), an appointed member of the communal establishment.

imgDesc: Yisrolik Szyldewer [Szydlewer?], a Hasid and ba‘al darshan (preacher), Staszów, Poland, 1923. Photograph by A. Rotenberg. (YIVO)

text: Sabbath

text: Passover

text: Efrayim of Luntshits

text: Dov Ber of Mezritsh

text: Yesh‘ayahu ben Avraham Horowitz

text: Sabbatians

text: Hasidim

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Dov Ber of Mezritsh

text: Rivne

text: Ya‘akov Kranz

text: Dubno

text: Besht

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Kraków

text: bet midrash

text: Berekhyah Berakh

text: Kraków

text: Ḥayim Malakh

text: Yehudah Leib Prossnitz

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl

text: Yisra’el ben Shabetai Hofstein

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Musar movement

text: Lithuania

text: Haskalah

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Prague

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Kraków

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Warsaw

glossary: Torah darshan Maimonides Haftarah Rashi Talmud Magid rebbe Musar Haskalah

subconcepts:
Sermons and Sermonic Literature
Preachers


title: Cookbooks

abstract: Compendia of instructions for the preparation of Jewish food or addressed to the Jewish reader constitute the single largest body of literature written by and for Jewish women. These cookbooks initially arose during the first half of the nineteenth century in response to the social aspirations of those who wished to add culinary refinement to the kosher kitchen. Among the earliest extant examples are several small Yiddish manuscripts from Bohemia, Moravia, or neighboring areas; they were in all likelihood intended to teach young brides to cook or to supervise a servant in the kitchen.

imgDesc: Vegetarish-dietisher kokhbukh (Vegetarian Cookbook), by Fania Lewando (Vilna: G. Kleckina, 1938) (YIVO)

text: food

text: women

text: Bohemia, Moravia

text: Oyzer Bloshteyn

text: Vilna

text: weddings

text: servant

text: Prague

text: Czech Republic

text: Poland

text: dress

text: Warsaw

text: Passover

text: Romania

text: Holocaust


title: Slobodka, Yeshiva of

abstract: In about the year 1881, Natan Tsevi Finkel founded a novel type of yeshiva in Slobodka, a suburb of Kovno. This yeshiva quickly became well known, and after the closing of the Volozhin yeshiva in 1892, it acquired an even more prominent role among Lithuanian yeshivas. Finkel was a student of Yisra’el Salanter and an adherent of the Musar movement. This movement held that the study of Talmud had to be accompanied by the systematic study of ethics, and that the goal of yeshiva study was not only to produce trained Talmudists but also to turn out highly ethical young men. The approach appealed to many young people who were sensitive to the criticism of maskilim and other modernists who claimed that study in yeshivas meant investing one’s time in hair-splitting dialectics.

imgDesc: Photomontage of portraits of rabbis and students of the Yeshiva of Slobodka, near Kaunas, Lithuania, 1922. (YIVO)

text: yeshiva

text: Kovno

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Musar movement

text: study of Talmud

text: yeshiva

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Holocaust

glossary: yeshiva Musar Talmud


title: Haas, Willy

abstract: (1891–1973), critic and editor. The son of a German-speaking Jewish lawyer in Prague, Willy Haas became friendly with Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Franz Werfel while still at school and was a central member of the literary Prague circle, serving as editor, with Otto Pick, of its literary magazine Herder-Blätter. The journal was sponsored by the Herder-Verein, a society founded by the Prague branch of B’nai B’rith to promote Jewish culture, and named after the eighteenth-century writer and ethnologist Johann Gottfried Herder. Lacking funds, the magazine was issued only four times (April 1911 and February, May, and October 1912), but it published the works of notable young writers from Prague, Vienna, and Berlin, including Brod, Kafka, Werfel, Max Mell, Franz Blei, and Ernst Blass.

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Franz Werfel

text: Prague

text: Otto Pick

text: Prague

text: Czechoslovakia


title: Uman

abstract: Established in the mid-seventeenth century in what is now Ukraine, Uman (Pol., Humań) played a prominent role in the economic and political life of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. When the Haidamaks, who were rebelling against the Polish authorities, attacked the town in 1749, many Jews were killed and their property was plundered. In the 1750s, Count Franciszek Salęzy Potocki rebuilt Uman as a commercial center and allowed some 450 Jews to reside there. Their newfound security was short-lived, however: in 1768, a reinvigorated Haidamak insurrection under the leadership of a Zaporozhian Cossack, Maksim Zhelezniak, devastated numerous Ukrainian towns and estates.

imgDesc: Hasidim in town to visit the grave of Rabbi Naḥman, Uman, Ukraine, 1995. Photograph © Gueorgui Pinkhassov. (Magnum Photos)

text: Ukraine

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Kiev

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: pogroms

text: Hasidic

glossary: Haskalah mikveh


title: Betar

abstract: Hebrew acronym for Berit Yosef Trumpeldor (Joseph Trumpeldor Alliance), a youth movement founded in Riga in 1923 by Aharon Propes. Conceived as a small-scale local organization, during its early years Betar’s ideological platform was somewhat vague, concerned chiefly with reviving the idea of the Jewish legions that had operated during World War I.

imgDesc: Members of the soccer team of the Kaunas branch of Betar, 1930s. (Jabotinsky Institute, courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives)

text: Yosef Trumpeldor

text: Riga

text: World War I

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Zionist Revisionists

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Romania

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Gdańsk

text: Romania

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia


title: Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, Ha-

abstract: Zionist socialist youth movement. Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir (The Young Guard) educated and trained its members for immigration to a kibbutz in Palestine. The movement originated in Galicia—at that time a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—a result of the merger of Tse‘ire Agudat Tsiyon, which was involved in the teaching of Hebrew, Judaism, and Jewish history, with Ha-Shomer, an amalgamation of scouting organizations that considered the distinct Palestine Ha-Shomer organization a worthy model to emulate. In 1916, at a meeting of Galician refugees from World War I in Vienna, the two groups officially united to form Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir.

imgDesc: “The shomer is the pioneer of the renaissance of his people, his language, and his homeland.” Hebrew poster. Poland. One of a series of posters on the “ten commandments” of the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir movement. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Zionist

text: youth movement

text: Galicia

text: Land of Israel

text: Lwów

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: ghettos

text: Białystok

text: Mordekhai Anielewicz

text: Vilna

text: Abba Kovner

text: Holocaust

text: beriḥah


title: Heder

abstract: (Heb., ḥeder; Yid., kheyder; lit., “room”), the most widely accepted and widespread elementary educational framework among East European Jewry since the Middle Ages. Study in heder was considered an integral part of the process of raising and socializing a Jewish child, including the inculcation of Jewish religious and cultural values through imparting basic knowledge of the canonical sources—Torah, Mishnah, Talmud—and of the liturgy. Pupils spent the entire day in heder, beginning with morning prayers, followed by study of various subjects, and ending with evening prayers. (In certain areas it was customary to give pupils a midday break of one or two hours.) Both boys and girls studied in many heders (Heb., ḥadarim), either together or separately. There were no criteria for acceptance to heder, and no consideration was given to disparities in the intellectual and cognitive abilities of the students.

imgDesc: A teacher known as “Binyomin Hersh the Beard,” Biała Bielec, Poland, 1920s. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. The photographer’s inscription: “The longest beard in Biała, which students have more than once nailed to the table while he dozes off. That’s why he has such wonderful, sad eyes.” (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: liturgy

text: Galicia

text: Sabbath

text: yeshiva

glossary:
heder
Torah
Mishnah
Talmud
gemara
melamed
yeshiva
Talmud Torah
magid

subconcepts:
The Melamed
Modernization


title: Me’ir Simḥah ha-Kohen

abstract: (1843–1926), rabbi and commentator. One of the outstanding Orthodox thinkers in Lithuania during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Me’ir Simḥah ha-Kohen was a wealthy merchant’s son. He received his religious education first in his hometown of Butrimonys and later in Eishishok, where he studied under Mosheh Denishevsky.

text: Lithuania

text: Białystok

text: Misnaged

text: Daugavpils

text: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Land of Israel

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Zionist movement

text: Musar movement

glossary: Musar Kabbalah Maimonides Torah Talmud responsa


title: Sirkes, Yo’el

abstract: (1561–1640), one of the foremost Talmudic scholars and halakhists of Poland, better known by the acronym Baḥ, after the abbreviation of his Bayit ḥadash commentary. Sirkes was born in Lublin to a distinguished rabbinic family and served as rabbi in the prominent communities of Brest Litovsk and Kraków, where he also headed a yeshiva. He was an active participant in the Council of Four Lands and attended numerous fairs where he was involved in halakhic deliberations.

text: Poland

text: Lublin

text: Brest

text: Kraków

text: yeshiva

text: Menaḥem Mendel Krochmal

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Kalisz

text: Sabbath

glossary:
yeshiva
Council of Four Lands
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
Rashi
Tosafot
responsa
Arba‘ah turim
Kabbalah
Torah
Mishnah


title: About this Article (Lublin)

abstract: To treat the history of Jewish settlement in Lublin, this entry is divided into two articles, the first on the pre-Partition period and the second on the post-Partition period until the present.

imgDesc: A group of Jewish men on the eve of their induction into the Polish army at the age of 21, with a portrait of Marxist Zionist theoretician and founder of the Po‘ale Tsiyon party Ber Borokhov, Lublin, 1919. (YIVO)


title: Antisemitic Parties and Movements

abstract: Political groups seeking to limit the role of Jews in Central and East European states and societies emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century against the background of economic crisis, ethnic and political tensions, reaction to Jewish emancipation, and the increasing prominence of Jews in economic and cultural life. Such groups appeared first in Germany around 1880 and, shortly thereafter, in Austria-Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

imgDesc: “Come Visit the ‘ION’ Caricature Exhibition.” Romanian poster. Printed by Lumina Moldovei, Iaşi, Romania, 1923. Advertisement for an antisemitic exhibition held in the hall of the newspaper Nationalistul (The Nationalist). “Every good Romanian must visit this exhibition, which includes kosher things . . . such as epileptic rabbis, Talmudic criminal scenes, as well as diverse types of kikes. . . . Entrance for dogs and kikes, 1 leu.” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

text: pogroms

text: Tiszaeszlár

text: Hungary

text: Russia

text: Budapest

text: Bratislava

text: Kahal

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Minorities Treaties

text: World War I

text: Slovakia

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Béla Kun

text: Lithuania

text: Transylvania

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Hungary

text: Béla Kun

text: Budapest

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Slovakia

text: killing centers

text: Soviet Union

text: Leon Trotsky

text: cosmopolitanism

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Rudolf Slánský

text: Ana Pauker

text: Ukraine

text: L’viv

text: Belarus

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Jedwabne

text: Slovakia

text: Romania

text: Hungary

glossary:
Kahal
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
numerus clausus

subconcepts:
Before World War I
Between the World Wars
Under Communist Rule
After Communism


title: Poland before 1795 (Poland)

abstract: The seventeenth-century Hebrew chronicler Gavri’el ben Yehoshu‘a Schossburg characterized the historical status of the Jewish community in medieval and early modern Poland as “a delight to all the lands of the Exile for its Torah, honor and greatness” (Petaḥ teshuvah, 1651 4a). By the end of the seventeenth century, Polish Jewry had the highest number of Jews and the most individual communities of any Jewish population center; at least until the Shoah, the majority of Jews in the world could trace their ancestry to this region. Jews in Poland enjoyed extensive autonomy and collective economic prosperity, while developing sophisticated institutions of communal governance. Their rich cultural life included a complex infrastructure of religious and educational institutions, a wealth of significant additions to the Jewish library, and the cultivation and elaboration of received Ashkenazic and other traditions. Later generations have often regarded the precedents set by Polish Jewry in such areas as communal autonomy, education, halakhah, and Jewish self-definition as classic models.

imgDesc: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Partitions of Poland. Boundaries shown are ca. 1795.

text: Russia

text: Lithuania

text: Belarus

text: Latvia

text: Ukraine

text: Estonia

text: Kraków

text: Wrocław

text: Khazaria

text: Kiev

text: Crimea

text: Ashkenaz

text: Kalisz

text: shtetls

text: ghettos

text: Kraków

text: Poznań

text: Lublin

text: Przemyśl

text: Lwów

text: Luts’k

text: Ludmir

text: Brest

text: Hrodna

text: Vilna

text: Pinsk

text: Brody

text: Dubno

text: Leszno

text: Opatów

text: Ostróg

text: Zamość

text: Zhovkva

text: trade

text: crafts

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

text: pogroms

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Uman

text: banking

text: leasing

text: credit

text: Poznań

text: Lewko

text: Fiszel

text: trade

text: guild

text: cantors

text: ba‘ale shem

text: kahal

text: councils

text: Sabbath

text: Lublin

text: charity

text: shtadlonim

text: demons

text: magic

text: food

text: dress

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: tkhines

text: synagogue architecture

text: mystical doctrines

text: ba`ale shem

text: Sabbatianism

text: Frankism

text: Hasidism

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Kraków

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Yo’el Sirkes

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Brest

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Lublin

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Ostróg

text: Shmuel Edels

text: Poznań

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: bet midrash

text: kloyz

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Berek Joselewicz

glossary:
Torah
halakhah
gzeyres takh vetat
arenda
kahal
kehilah
mikveh
Council of Four Lands
Va‘ad Arba‘ Aratsot
Gaon
Maimonides
Naḥmanides
Kabbalah
Zohar
musar
heder
yeshiva
pilpul


title: Misnagdim

abstract: (also Mitnagdim; Heb., opponents), common name for rabbinical opponents of the Hasidic movement, based largely in Lithuania, northern Belorussia, and northeastern Poland, that is, the territory inhabited by Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews). While the terms Menagdim and  were first employed in defensive Hasidic writings from the 1770s to describe the rabbinical enemies of the movement, those opponents of Hasidism eventually came to embrace the appellation with pride. Over time, and with the growth of non-Hasidic and anti-Hasidic religious institutions—most notably the Lithuanian yeshivas and the Musar Movement—whose purpose was, at least in part, to counteract the rapid spread of Hasidism, the term Misnagdim took on a positive connotation among non-Hasidic Jews of northeastern Europe, and became almost synonymous with Lithuanian Jewry. (In contemporary Israel, the term Lita’im [Hebrew for Lithuanians] is commonly used instead of Misnagdim.)

imgDesc: View of the Great Synagogue, or Uzgor’e Synagogue, a stronghold of the Misnagdim (opponents of Hasidism) and a meeting place for Zionists, on Suvorer Street in the business district, Vitsyebsk, 1910. A Yiddish inscription on the back of the photograph notes, “This is where the memorial for Herzl’s death took place.” (YIVO)

text: Lithuania

text: Belorussia

text: Poland

text: Litvaks

text: Hasidism

text: yeshivas

text: Musar Movement

text: Hungary

text: Bohemia

text: Ashkenazim

text: liturgy

text: Sephardim

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Prague

text: Shelomoh ben Mosheh Khelm

text: Shklov

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Vilna

text: Brisk

text: Minsk

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Passover

text: piety

text: Sabbatian

text: Frankist

text: Pinsk

text: Magid of Mezritsh

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Karlin-Stolin dynasty

text: Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak of Volozhin

text: Volozhin

text: Mir

text: Telz

text: Slobodka

text: Ponevezh

text: Kamenets

text: assimilation

text: religious reform

text: Orthodoxy

glossary: Musar Misnagdim Gaon Torah Kabbalah Magid Ḥabad tsadik Talmud Mishnah yeshiva rebbe

subconcepts: History Theology


title: Orthodoxy

abstract: Present-day Orthodox Judaism has a distinct and readily identifiable profile. It finds its expression in robust institutionalized forms such as nationwide organizations of synagogues, communities, and rabbis; schools and yeshivas; newspapers and other media; and even political parties in Israel and Hasidic townships in the United States that are self-designated as Orthodox. Orthodoxy in all its variety is characterized by a firm ideological stance, defining itself in relation to rival trends within Judaism. It implies more than an adherence to traditional forms of religious observance; rather, it is an ideology committed to the preservation of tradition. It is this conservative posture that lies at the very core of the self-definition of the modern-day Orthodox. As such, it is a relatively new phenomenon, a consequence of the challenges posed to tradition by modern ideologies. With the authority of tradition no longer taken as self-evident, it has had to be consciously defended and justified, augmented and amplified. Orthodoxy thus emerged in response to ideologies that challenged tradition and presented themselves as legitimate alternatives. It did not arise in the absence of ideological confrontation even where there was noticeable erosion of tradition associated with modernization.

imgDesc: Rosh Hashanah greeting postcard depicting a Reform and an Orthodox Jew shaking hands. The Yiddish verse reads: “‘German’ [Reform Jew] or Hasid, rich or poor, / Be brotherly and shake hands! / May you be inscribed for the new year— / Whoever or whatever you are!” Published by Verlag Jehudia, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Sephardic

text: Ashkenazic

text: Russian Empire

text: Haskalah

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Prague

text: Silesia

text: Sabbath

text: Land of Israel

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Arad

text: Mosheh Kunitz

text: Buda

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Hungary

text: yeshiva

text: rabbinate

text: Reform

text: Bohemian lands

text: Hasidic

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Posen

text: Breslau

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Minsk

text: Kalisz

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: rabbinate

text: Eisenstadt

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: Akiva Yosef Schlesinger

text: dress

text: seminary

text: Jewish Congress

text: Yirmiyahu Löw

text: Újhely

text: Maharam (Mosheh) Schick

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: Shelomoh Kluger

text: Sandz

text: Tsevi Hirsh Chajes

text: Żółkiew

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Belz

text: Shim‘on Sofer

text: Kraków

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: yeshiva of Volozhin

text: Zionism

text: Mizraḥi

text: Misnagdim

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: Vilna

text: Gur

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Katowice

text: Munkatsh

text: Communism

text: Lubavitch Hasidim

glossary:
Haskalah
responsa
halakhah
Torah
yeshiva
rebbe
Congress Poland
Pale of Settlement
Neolog
Status Quo
Shulḥan ‘arukh
publicist
Misnagdim


title: Moscow

abstract: Present-day capital of the Russian Federation, Moscow was capital of the Russian state from the end of the fifteenth century until 1712, and capital of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1991. Jews were first mentioned in connection with Moscow in the fifteenth century. During the reign of Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible; r. 1533–1584), Jews were forbidden to enter the region of Muscovy. They first appeared in Moscow during the Russian–Polish war of 1645–1667, some converting to Christianity and remaining in the city.

imgDesc: Stalls owned by Jews in a marketplace, Moscow, ca. 1903. Stereograph by William H. Rau. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-69975)

text: Russian Federation

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: guilds

text: Iakov (Ya‘akov) Maze

text: economic life

text: Eli‘ezer (Lazar; Leon) Poliakov

text: Kalonymus Wissotzky

text: Zionist

text: Stybel

text: revolutionary events of 1917

text: Habimah Theater

text: Warsaw

text: Elye (Elias) Tsherikover

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Der emes

text: Aleksandr Granovskii

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: yeshiva

text: Lubavitch

text: Yiddish-language educational

text: Shemaryahu Yosef Medal’e

text: Markus Braude

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Solomon Shlifer

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Kol Ya‘akov Yeshiva

text: samizdat

text: Refuseniks

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: antisemitic organizations

text: Ukraine

text: Simon Dubnow

glossary:
Central Zionist Archives
yeshiva
Ḥabad


title: Hannover, Natan Note

abstract: (d. 1683), chronicler of the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising (gzeyres takh vetat). Presumably born in Ostróg in Volhynia, Natan Note (often Neta‘ or Nata) Hannover studied at the local yeshiva and then seems to have traveled across Europe as an itinerant preacher before marrying and settling in Zasław, Ukraine. He published a sermon from this period—presented in Kraków in 1646—in Sefer ta‘ame sukah (1652).

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Ostróg

text: yeshiva

text: Ukraine

text: Kraków

text: Purim

text: Iaşi

text: Walachia

text: Uherský Brod

text: Moravia

text: Sholem Asch

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Yankev Shatzky

glossary:
gzeyres takh vetat
yeshiva
Kabbalah


title: Crimea

abstract: A peninsula in the Black Sea with a multiethnic population. Since 1992, Crimea has been an autonomous republic within independent Ukraine. Russia annexed the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783. From 1921 it was an autonomous republic of the Russian SSR; it was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954. Jews have lived there since at least the first century CE, consisting of Karaite, Krymchak, and Ashkenazic elements. The Jewish population remained below 10,000 until the 1880s.

imgDesc: Jewish agricultural settlements in southern Ukraine and Crimea, 1920s–1930s. (Based on Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924-1941 [New Haven, 2005], by permission of the Cartographic Laboratory, Geography Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Tamar Soffer])

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Karaite

text: Krymchak

text: Ashkenazic

text: Pale

text: pogroms

text: agriculture

text: Russian Civil War

text: Zionist

text: Yosef Trumpeldor

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Odessa

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Zhovkva

abstract: (Yid., Zhovkve; Pol., Żółkiew; Rus., Nesterov between 1951 and 1992), town with a Jewish presence from the late sixteenth century; under Ukrainian sovereignty since 1991. Zhovkva was a private town in the Polish Commonwealth until 1772, when it became a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From 1918 through 1939 it belonged to independent Poland and then was taken over by the USSR. From 1941 through 1944 it was occupied by Germany.

imgDesc: An example of a haskamah from Nivḥar me-ḥaruts: Kitsur sefer ha-‘ikarim (Żółkiew, 1722). (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: USSR

text: Lwów

text: printing press

text: Sabbatian

text: Becal

text: Haskalah

text: Tarbut

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
Haskalah


title: Mizraḥi

abstract: Orthodox Zionist movement whose name was derived from the words merkaz ruḥani (spiritual center), and whose slogan was “the Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel.” The movement advocated the realization of the Zionist vision and incorporated some of its modern and revolutionary characteristics. The adoption of Zionist ideology, however, was accomplished for the most part by denying its secular and innovative aspects, or by assigning religious interpretations to its basic tenets.

imgDesc: Farewell dinner for members of Mizraḥi leaving for Palestine, Warsaw, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Land of Israel

text: Vilna

text: Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines

text: Orthodox

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Hungary

text: Bratislava

text: Poland

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Farbstein

text: Yitsḥak Nissenbaum

text: Tse‘ire Mizraḥi

text: Shemu’el Brodt

text: Bernard Hausner

text: Yitsḥak Rubinstein

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Slovakia

text: Hungary

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Walachia

text: Moldavia

glossary:
Torah
Congress Poland


title: Ḥaluts, He-

abstract: Zionist pioneering movement. Local pioneering groups had been founded from the earliest days of Zionist settlement activity during the First and Second Aliyahs (1882–1903; 1904–1914). However, larger regional and national frameworks appeared only from 1917 onward, the year of the Balfour Declaration, the Russian Revolution, and the emergence of newly established states in Eastern Europe. The founders of He-Ḥaluts believed that no political or propaganda accomplishment would benefit Zionism in the long run unless it were complemented by deeds of personal fulfillment, which became a primary objective in the organization’s overall ideology. In other words, to actually implement the principles of He-Ḥaluts, the individual was expected both to identify with the Histadrut (Labor Federation) and to live on a cooperative kibbutz in Palestine.

imgDesc: Members of the Kadimah group of He-Ḥaluts, Kwiatuszki Wielkie, Lithuania (now in Poland), ca. 1920. The Hebrew inscription reads, “Work Is Our Life.” (The Institute for Labour Research in Memory of Pinchas Lavon, Tel Aviv)

text: Zionist

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: General Zionist Federation

text: Yosef Trumpeldor

text: Poland

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Gordonia

text: youth movements

text: Holocaust

subconcepts:
He-Ḥaluts in Russia
He-Ḥaluts and Youth Movements


title: OZE

abstract: Organization devoted to the promotion of health, hygiene, and childcare among Jews. Founded on 7 August 1912 in Saint Petersburg as the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, OZE (Obshchestvo okhraneniia zdorov’ia evreiskogo naseleniia; later, Obschestvo zdravookhraneniia evreev; OZE), is now based in Paris and is known as OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) World Union. Its first chair was the physician and rear admiral Semyon A. Kaufmann. Among the committee's early members were prominent Saint Petersburg physicians, including Naum R. Botvinnik, Abram M. Bramson, Moisei M. Gran, Grigori I. Dembo, and Iakov B. Eiger. Other members were attorney Grigori A. Goldberg and transportation engineer Stanislav E. Weisblat.

imgDesc: Members of the OZE (OSE) Committee with their wives. The photo was taken between 1915 and 1917. Standing: Yakov Eiger (3rd from right), Naum Botvinnik (2nd from left), Semen Frumkin (4th from left). Sitting: Grigory Goldberg (3rd, in profile), Abram Bramson (center, in uniform). (Michael Beizer, Evrei Leningrada: Natsional’naia zhizn’ i sovetizatsiia, 1917–1939 (Moscow and Jerusalem, 1999), p. 141.)

text: health

text: hygiene

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Zionists

text: Bund

text: Pale of Settlement

text: World War I

text: Crimea

text: October Revolution

text: Russia

text: Civil War

text: Soviet Union

text: Lithuania

text: Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Źidowskiej

text: Ukraine

text: Gdańsk

text: Kishinev

text: Galaţi

text: Czernowitz

text: Romania

text: Latvia

text: Transnistria

text: Hungary

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Prague

text: Bratislava

text: Košice


abstract: The largest nonpolitical organization dedicated to helping Jews in distress all over the world. Generally known as the JDC or “Joint” and headquartered in New York, the organization (until 1931) was called the Joint Distribution Committee of (the American) Funds for Jewish War Sufferers. It was founded on 27 November 1914 with the aim of centralizing allocations of aid to Jews adversely affected by World War I.

imgDesc: Doctors and nurses from an antityphus team sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Równe, Poland (present-day Rivne, Ukr.), posing with disinfection equipment, 1921 or 1922. (YIVO)

text: World War I

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Warsaw

text: Ukraine

text: Kamenets-Podolski

text: Lvov

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary

text: World War I

text: TOZ

text: Latvia

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: ORT

text: agriculture

text: Soviet

text: shtetl

text: Crimea

text: ghettos

text: Transnistria

text: Beriḥah

text: Holocaust

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland

text: Lubavitch Hasidim

text: Silesia

text: Slánský Trial

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Prague

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Mozes Rosen

text: refuseniks

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Czech Republic

text: Slovakia

text: Riga

text: Vilnius

text: Tallinn

glossary: Neolog get

subconcepts: World War II, the Holocaust, and Displaced Persons

subconcepts: From the End of World War II until the Collapse of the Communist Bloc


title: About this Article (Hasidism)

abstract: To treat the historical rise, beliefs, and practices of the movement known as Hasidism, this entry includes five articles. The first is a historical overview that describes the development of the movement and its geographic expansion from the late eighteenth century to the present. The second article surveys Hasidic teachings and literature. It is followed by a description of the distinctive features of everyday life among Hasidim and successive articles on music and dance in Hasidism. For further and related discussion, see also entries on specific Hasidic dynasties and leaders; Misnagdim; Mysticism and Mystical Literature; and Piety.

imgDesc: Major Hasidic centers, 1740–1815. (Based on a map prepared for the exhibition "Time of the Hasidism." by Elżbieta Długosz, The Historical Museum of Kraków—Old Synagogue)

text: Misnagdim;

text: Mysticism and Mystical Literature

text: Piety


title: Communism

abstract: Karl Marx and most of his followers considered ethnicity a construct of the ruling bourgeoisie in capitalist societies. Ethnicity was designed to divert the attention of the working class away from its economic and political grievances and focus attention on the identities and cultures that divided workers, rather than on the class interests that united them. Thus, the ruling capitalists were said to pit workers of one nation against those of another on the pretext that their primary allegiance should be to the nation, not the class. In World War I, French and British workers on one side, and German and Austrian workers on the other, tried to kill each other out of loyalty to their respective nations. Along with other socialists, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, viewed this as a tragic strategic error that could occur only because of the shortsightedness and lack of class consciousness of the proletariat. As it matured and was educated by the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the more historically conscious intelligentsia that led the socialist movement, the proletariat would come to realize that its common interests transcended national borders and that all workers together should combat the exploiting capitalists, who themselves were a transnational class.

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

text: Rosa Luxemburg

text: Zamość

text: Poland

text: Soviet Russia

text: Communist Party

text: Moscow

text: economic life

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Zionists

text: Land of Israel

text: Bundis

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Russian Jewish Congress

text: Leon Trotsky

text: Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov

text: Lev Borisovich Kamenev

text: Grigorii Evseevich Zinov’ev

text: heder

text: Bund

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Russia

text: Hungary

text: Béla Kun

text: Poland

text: youth movements

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Estonia

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Pogroms

text: ghettos

text: Maksim Litvinov

text: Iakir

text: Gamarnik

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Ana Pauker

text: Romania

text: Slánský Trial

text: Mátyás Rakósi

text: Jakub Berman

text: Lazar’ Moiseevich Kaganovich

glossary:
heder
status quo

subconcepts:
Jews and Radicalism
Jews and Communism
Żydokomuna
The Post–World War II Era


title: Poznań

abstract: City in Wielkopolska province, Poland; known in Hebrew and Yiddish as Pozna and in German as Posen. Poznań’s Jewish community was one of the earliest to be established on Polish soil; the first reference to Jews living in the town comes from 1379. While tradition dates the town’s synagogue to 1367, there is no documented evidence of its existence until 1449 (the cemetery, however, was first mentioned in 1438). In the second half of the fifteenth century, a legend declared that in 1399 some Jews in Poznań had committed a Host profanation. The same period also saw the establishment of Poznań’s famed yeshiva, known as Lomde Pozna.

imgDesc: Great Synagogue, Poznań, Poland, early 20th century. (Tomasz Wisniewski, www.szukamypolski.com)

text: Poland

text: yeshiva

text: pogroms

text: Poland

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Prague

text: Mordekhai ben Avraham Yafeh

text: shtadlan

text: Leszno

text: Haskalah

text: Akiva Eger

text: reform

text: Orthodoxy

text: rabbinate

text: labor camps

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah


title: Land of Israel

abstract: As early as the eighteenth century, Jews in Eastern Europe constituted the largest Jewish community in the world. By the early twentieth century, they were the absolute majority, and 90 percent lived in regions that had been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth several generations earlier, or were among communities of immigrants created elsewhere by Jews from those regions. At the same time, only 0.3 percent of Jews worldwide lived in the Land of Israel (ca. 26,000 in 1881), though Jews of the Diaspora mentioned the Land daily in prayers and commemorated it in festivals and fasts.

imgDesc: Map of the Land of Israel attributed to the Gaon of Vilna. From Aderet Eliyahu, a collection of commmentaries by Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman, the Vilna Gaon (d. 1797).   The map was added to an edition published after the author's death. (Moldovan Family Collection)

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Galicia

text: charity

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: Haskalah

text: Sephardim

text: Misnagdim

text: Hasidim

text: Warsaw

text: Kalisz

text: Ashkenazic

text: Belorussia

text: Vitebsk

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Orthodoxy

text: kahal

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionist movements

text: Misnagdim

text: Yiddish

text: Łomża

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Soviet Union

text: communism

text: Crimean peninsula

text: Revisionist Zionism

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Odessa

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: poetry

text: Haskalah

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Yehudah Leib Pinsker

text: Aharon Shemu’el Lieberman

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

glossary:
Diaspora
Yishuv
Pale of Settlement
halakhah
agadah
Torah
Talmud
Haskalah
Misnagdim
Congress Poland
kolel
kahal


title: Ponevezh, Yeshiva of

abstract: The Ponevezh yeshiva was founded by Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Rabinovich (Reb Itsele Ponevezher; 1854–1919) in 1908 in the Lithuanian town of Panevėžys (Rus., Ponevich). As a youth, Rabinovich had been a study partner of Ḥayim Soloveichik, later a rosh yeshivah in the Volozhin yeshiva. Rabinovich himself began his teaching career in 1889 at the Slobodka yeshiva. He remained there for five years but was not a firm believer in the importance of formal study of musar (ethics) and was uncomfortable with the school’s intense dedication to that area.

imgDesc: Students and/or instructors from the Ponevezh yeshiva, Ponevezh (now Panevėžys, Lith.), 1914. The Hebrew inscription at the lower left says, “1855 years of exile.” (YIVO)

text: yeshiva

text: Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Rabinovich

text: Panevėžys

text: Ḥayim Soloveichik

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Slobodka yeshiva

text: Eliyahu David Rabinowitz-Te’omim

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: Telz yeshiva

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Moscow

text: Kalonymus Wissotzky

text: Yosef Shelomoh Kahaneman

text: musar

text: Lithuania

glossary: yeshiva musar kolel Talmud


title: Nemyriv

abstract: (Pol., Niemirów; Rus., Nemirov), town on the Ustia River, a tributary of the Southern Bug, the district center of the Vinnytsya region of Ukraine. From 1569, the town belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, from 1649 it was within the region of Cossack autonomy, and from 1678 to 1699 it was under the rule of the Turkish governor-general, who resided in the city in 1678–1681 and 1683–1685. From 1793, it belonged to Russia and from 1920 to the Soviet Union.

text: Ukraine

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Hasidism

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Bratslav Hasidim

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Zionist

text: Bund

text: crown rabbi

text: pogroms

text: Kultur-lige

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
Talmud
Torah


title: Markuze, Moyshe

abstract: (1743–?), physician and medical writer. Born in Słonim, Moyshe Markuze (or Marcuse) received a thorough Talmudic education. From 1766 to 1768, he studied medicine in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and then traveled to Holland and England. Returning to Eastern Europe in 1774, he worked as a physician in the estates of the Lubomirski family in Kapust (Kopyś) near Szkłów (Shklov), an area that had been annexed to Russia two years earlier. By 1782 he had moved to Trisk (Turyjsk) in Volhynia, where he served as a government-licensed physician. It is said that he was physician to Poland’s King Stanisław August Poniatowski and to some members of the commission of the crown treasury.

text: Kaliningrad

text: Shklov

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: hygiene

text: ba‘ale shem

text: Haskalah

text: heder

glossary: Haskalah heder


title: Prostitz Family

abstract: Printers active in Kraków in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yitsḥak ben Aharon of Prostitz (Yid., more properly Prostits; d. 1612) was born in Prossnitz (Prostějov) and apparently learned the printing craft in Venice. There he became acquainted with the editor and scholar Shemu’el Böhm (d. 1588), whom Prostitz persuaded to join in establishing a Hebrew printing house in Kraków. Though Böhm’s function was listed on title pages as magihah (proofreader), in the sixteenth century the work of the magihah also included helping to choose, prepare, and print manuscripts. The press bought its types, printing ornaments, and other implements in Venice. In an effort to compete with the great Italian printing houses, Kraków’s rabbis in 1590 encouraged Polish rabbis to use Prostitz rather than Italian printers; alternatively, they ruled that if a Polish rabbi choose to publish in Italy, his sales in Poland would be delayed.

imgDesc: Upper portion of a page from a commentary on Rashi by Rabbi Eliyahu Mizraḥi (1450–1526), published by Yitsḥak ben Aharon Prostitz (Kraków, 1595). (Gross Family Collection)

text: Kraków

text: Prostějov

text: Poland

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: censorship

text: Prague

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Tsene-rene

glossary:
Talmud
Shulḥan ‘arukh
heder
halakhah
yeshiva
Torah
Zohar
Maimonides
musar


title: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

abstract: (Taz; 1586–1667), rabbi, author, and head of yeshiva. The life of David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi, better known as Taz (after the initial letters of his Ture zahav [Rows of Gold], commentary upon the Shulḥan ‘arukh), spanned the peaceful zenith as well as the violent decline of seventeenth-century Polish Jewry. He was witness to both the bloody uprising of Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi and the messianic aspirations of Shabetai Tsevi. In Taz’s lifetime the Shulḥan ‘arukh achieved recognition as the authoritative code of Jewish law. His renowned and oft-reprinted commentary on that work remains his principal scholarly achievement.

text: yeshiva

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Ukraine

text: Yo’el Sirkes

text: Kraków

text: Poznań

text: Ostróg

text: Gzeyres Takh Vetat

text: Moravia

text: Lwów

text: Tarnopol

text: Brest Litovsk

text: Shabetai Tsevi

text: Passover

text: Sabbath

glossary:
yeshiva
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Arba‘ah turim
Gzeyres Takh Vetat
Council of Four Lands
responsa
Rashi
Diaspora


title: Servants

abstract: Jewish employment of Christians as servants was widespread in Eastern Europe by the Middle Ages. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, most Jewish-owned businesses and leaseholds hired such servants, as did families and organizations at all levels of Jewish society. Indeed it was the rare Jewish family, including those in the lower social strata, that did not employ them.

imgDesc: Gentile wet nurse and Jewish child, Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukr.), 1921. (YIVO)

text: Sabbath

text: Poland

text: purim-shpil

text: leaseholders

text: councils


title: Bloshteyn, Oyzer

abstract: (1840–1898), Yiddish author. Born in the Latgale region of Latvia in the Russian Empire to a working-class family, Oyzer Bloshteyn spent his early teenage years studying at a yeshiva. At 15, he was attracted to Enlightenment ideas and began studying German and Russian; after briefly becoming a teacher, he subsequently devoted himself to a career as a writer. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Bloshteyn was among the most prolific and popular authors of popular Yiddish works in Eastern Europe, publishing more than 50 novels and short stories, generally with the Matz publishing house in Vilna. Although Bloshteyn died in Warsaw in 1898, his work was read widely by Yiddish readers well into the interwar period, particularly in Galicia.

text: Latvia

text: yeshiva

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Galicia

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Ha-Tsefirah


title: Berekhyah Berakh ben Yitsḥak

abstract: (d. after 1665), prominent preacher in Kraków. Berekhyah Berakh ben Yitsḥak was a student of the noted kabbalist Natan Spira; Berakh’s wife’s brother was the son-in-law of the celebrated Talmudist and communal leader Yom Tov Lipmann Heller.

text: preacher

text: Kraków

text: Natan Spira

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: cantors

text: liturgy

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Sabbatian

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Poland

glossary: pilpul Torah arenda


title: Naḥman of Bratslav

abstract: (1772–1811), founder of a unique school of Hasidic thought and practice; single master of the Bratslav (or “Breslov,” as pronounced by its members) Hasidic sect, which continues to flourish down to the present day. Naḥman ben Simḥah was the great-grandchild of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov (ca. 1700–1760), the first central figure of Hasidism, through the maternal line. His paternal grandfather was Naḥman of Horodenka (d. 1772), also a well-known figure in early Hasidic circles. As the offspring of such lineage, Naḥman, who grew up in the years when the new movement was just adopting a hereditary dynastic model, was expected to become a Hasidic leader. Naḥman at first refused, showing considerable disdain for the popular Hasidism of his uncle, Barukh of Mezhbizh (ca. 1750–1811), and others.

imgDesc: Hasidim in town to visit the grave of Rabbi Naḥman, Uman, Ukraine, 1995. Photograph © Gueorgui Pinkhassov. (Magnum Photos)

text: Bratslav

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Hasidism

text: pilgrimage

text: Franz Kafka

text: Uman

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov


title: Wehle Family

abstract: Followers of Sabbatianism in Prague. The earliest reference to the Wehle family is on the tombstone of Mordekhai bar Yisra’el Wehle (d. 1614), in the Prague Jewish cemetery. The Wehles were among the richest and most prominent Jewish families in Prague. The brothers Efrayim (ca. 1710–1770) and Hersh (d. 1796) engaged in the silk trade and held many important posts in the community. A series of well-arranged marriages cemented the position of the family. Hersh’s son, Aharon Beer (1750–1825), married Esther, the daughter of the leader of Bohemian Jewry, Shim‘on Frankel-Spira; his brother Yonah Beer (1752–1823) married a daughter of the president of the Prague community, Ofner; their sister Rösel married the rich merchant Shim‘on Eger. By the 1770s, the Wehles were the unquestioned secular leaders of Prague Jewry.

text: Sabbatianism

text: Prague

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: conversion

text: Poland

text: Jakub Frank

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: El‘azar Fleckeles

text: orthodoxy


title: Dobruschka-Schönfeld Family

abstract: Prominent Moravian family that took its name from its patriarch, Jacob Moses Wimer (d. 1763), who came from Dobruschka, a small town near Königgrätz (Hradec Králové) in Bohemia. In 1730 Wimer moved to Brünn (Brno) as a widower with two children, and despite the fact that Jews were forbidden to live in that city, was given permission to settle and to deal first in precious stones and jewelry, and later in spices and tobacco. In 1750 he was granted a monopoly on the tobacco trade for the royal cities of Moravia. Dobruschka’s daughter Esther married Adam Oppenheimer of Vienna, a relative of the court purveyor Samuel Oppenheimer. Dobruschka’s son Solomon (1715–1774) married Schöndl, daughter of Löbl Hirschl of Rzeszów and Güttel Jacobi of Prossnitz.

text: Brno

text: Moravia

text: Rzeszów

text: Prossnitz

text: Prague

text: Sabbatian movement

text: Frankists


title: Poliakov Family

abstract: Nineteenth-century Russian entrepreneurs whose activities included railway construction, banking, commerce, and philanthropy. The family included three brothers, Ya‘akov (Yakov), Shemu’el (Samuil), and Eli‘ezer (Lazar); they came from a merchant family in Dubrovna (near Vitebsk) and received traditional Jewish as well as modern educations.

text: banking

text: philanthropy

text: Vitebsk

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Romania

text: ORT

text: Vilna

text: Bobruisk

text: Moscow

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Poland


title: Luxemburg, Rosa

abstract: (1870–1919), political writer, activist, and economist. Born in Zamość to a maskilic family, Rosa Luxemburg was the daughter of Elia Luxemburg, a wood merchant, and Lina Loewenstein. In the mid-1870s, the family moved to Warsaw where in 1888 Luxemburg graduated from a Russian high school, in which she belonged to student underground groups that studied Polish literature and history. In 1888, she joined the Polish socialist underground organization Proletariat. Pursued by the police, she escaped to Zürich, where she studied first natural sciences, and, from 1892, political science and economics. There, in 1890, Luxemburg met Leo Jogiches, a Jewish Russian revolutionary from Vilna who became her partner. Although their liaison lasted only until 1907, he remained her political mentor for the rest of her life.

imgDesc: Rosa Luxembourg delivering a speech at a rally, Stuttgart, Germany, 1907. (Left) portrait of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), socialist leader and a founder of the predecessor of the Social Democratic Party. (Archiv der Friedrich Ebert-Striftung)

text: Zamość

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Poland

text: Russian Empire

text: Bund

text: Moscow

text: 1905 Revolution

text: antisemitism

text: 1917 Revolution

text: Breslau

text: USSR


title: Grade, Chaim

abstract: (1910–1982), Yiddish poet and novelist. Chaim Grade ranks among the most important Yiddish writers of the post-Holocaust period. His unsentimental depictions of rabbinic high culture and life on the Jewish streets of Vilna both describe memorable characters drawn from different strata of society, and dramatize the contest of ideas and moral impulses that defined his community in the interwar period. Though today Grade is best remembered for the richness of his prose, he is also the author of nine volumes of poetry.

text: prose

text: poetry

text: Vilna

text: yeshiva

text: Avraham Yesha‘yahu Karelits

text: Musar movement

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Yiddish literature

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Holocaust

text: Kielce

text: memory

text: piety

text: charity

glossary: maskil Musar yeshiva Torah


title: Litvak, A.

abstract: (1874–1932), pseudonym of Khayim Yankl Helfand, socialist, Yiddish writer, translator, and editor. Helfand was born in Vilna to a strictly observant Jewish family. He went to heder until the age of 12 and subsequently studied at a yeshiva and taught himself Russian. At the age of 19, he joined an illegal study group in Vilna organized by the Jewish Social Democratic Group in Russia, the organization that later established the Bund in 1897.

text: Vilna

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Russia

text: Bund

text: Warsaw

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Russia

text: TSYSHO

text: Kultur-lige

glossary: heder yeshiva


title: Gozhansky, Shmul

abstract: (1867–1943?), political leader and Bundist theorist. Shmul Gozhansky (sometimes spelled Gozshansky; also known by his pseudonyms Lonu or Der Lerer [the teacher]) was born in Grodno to a middle-class family and graduated from the Vilna Teachers’ Institute in 1888. He then taught in Kovno, Białystok, and Vilna. Gozhansky participated in revolutionary activities as a young man and in 1889 helped to organize the tailors’ strike in Vilna. In the 1890s, he was a Russified intellectual who led the revolutionary circles of Jewish workers that gave rise to the Jewish Labor Bund.

text: Kovno

text: Białystok

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Arkadii Kremer

text: Russia

text: Romania

text: John Mill

text: Communist Party

text: Soviet Union


title: Fuenn, Shemu’el Yosef

abstract: (1818–1890), a leading figure of the Russian Haskalah. Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn (or Fünn) taught at the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, was founder and editor of the journal Ha-Karmel, and was one of the leaders of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement.

imgDesc: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn, Vilna, ca. 1890s. Fuenn’s signature (right) has been reproduced on this mass-produced portrait, which was intended for sale and distribution to his admirers. (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: yeshiva

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Pale of Settlement

text: seminary

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Katowice

glossary:
Haskalah
yeshiva
Pale of Settlement
Magid
Talmud
maskil


title: Lebensohn, Mikhah Yosef

abstract: (1828–1852), Hebrew poet and translator. Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn (Mikhal), son of Avraham Dov Lebensohn (Adam ha-Kohen), was born in Vilna. In addition to receiving a traditional Jewish education, he was encouraged by his father to study Russian, Polish, German, and French, and began writing and translating at an early age. In 1845, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and subsequently traveled to sanatoria in Germany (Reinerz, Salzbrunn, and Berlin) in search of a cure. In Berlin, he was introduced to German culture, including the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, and befriended the prominent Jewish scholar Shneur Sachs. In 1850, Lebensohn returned to Vilna. Attempts to cure his disease failed and he died at age 24.

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: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Vilna

text: poetry

text: Passover

text: Haskalah

glossary: maskil Haskalah


title: Gintsburg, Mordekhai Aharon

abstract: (1795–1846), Hebrew writer, translator, and educator; a leader of the Haskalah movement in Lithuania. Born in the provincial town of Salantai (near Kovno), Lithuania, Gintsburg was first educated at his parents’ home. His father, who wrote articles on Hebrew grammar and mathematics, influenced his predilection for the Hebrew language and the Bible. When he was 14, Gintsburg married a considerably older woman and moved into his father-in-law’s home in the town of Shavli, north of Kovno. There he broadened his general education, studied German, and developed a keen interest in classical and contemporary German literature.

imgDesc: Frontispiece of a book (title unknown) with portrait of Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg. Engraving by Avner Grilivesh. Gintsburg’s birth and death dates are noted. (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: Lithuania

text: Kovno

text: Shavli

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: assimilation

text: Vilna

text: Uman

text: Russia

text: prose

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Lithuania

glossary: Haskalah Mishnah


title: Shimshon ben Pesaḥ of Ostropolye

abstract: (d. 1648), kabbalist. Shimshon of Ostropolye’s name suggests that he may have been born, or else lived for a time, in the Volhynian town of Ostropolye (Ostropol). Little is known about his life beyond the fact that he died a martyr’s death in July 1648, during the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacre in the town of Polnoye (Pol., Połonne), where he served as resident preacher. According to Natan Hannover’s contemporary account of the event, Yeven metsulah (1653), a heavenly teacher (magid), who used to appear to Shimshon regularly and instruct him in the secrets of the Kabbalah, had warned him in advance of the impending catastrophe and advised him to call on the community to repent in order to avert it—which they did, but to no avail.

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacre

text: Natan Hannover

text: Poland

text: Natan Spira

text: Kraków


title: Fayvesh Family

abstract: (Also spelled Phoebus), printers active in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Their descendants included the Madpis, Rosanes, and Letteris families of printers.

text: printers

text: Poland

text: Żółkiew

text: Lwów

text: Me’ir Letteris

glossary:
Talmud
Council of the Four Lands
halakhah
Kabbalah


title: Bak Family

abstract: Printers active in Hebrew and Yiddish publishing. The Bak family apparently originated in Venice, where Ya‘akov ben Gershon Bak (1574–1619) followed his father, Gershon ben Mosheh, in training as a printer. After Ya‘akov Bak had printed Maharal of Prague’s Tif’eret Yisra’el (1599), the latter evidently persuaded him to move to Prague. When Bak arrived in that city, he was associated in business with the brothers Avraham ben Mosheh and Yehudah Leib Shidel; by 1605, Yitsḥak ben Aharon Bak had joined them. From the time of the death of Ya‘akov Bak to 1767, the Bak family firm printed 213 texts. Between 1767 and 1788, they and their partners published another 21 books.

imgDesc: Woodcuts depicting Mordekhai, Haman, and jesters, from Akta Ester mit Akhashverosh (Prague: Sons of Yehudah Bak, 1720). Among the illustrated Yiddish books published in Prague were purim-shpiln (Purim plays), whose woodcuts were often made from existing plates that had been used in earlier publications. For instance, the illustrations of Mordekhai and the jesters appeared earlier in Seder birkat ha-mazon (Grace after Meals), printed by the same publishers in 1708. In purim-shpiln, the custom was to print stage directions in oysyes meruboes (square Hebrew characters) and the text in meshit (cursive Yiddish characters). (Avidov Lipsker)

text: publishing

text: Maharal of Prague

text: liturgy

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Lublin

text: Kraków

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Prague

text: Sabbath

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Prague

text: Yisakhar Ber Teller

text: Tkhines

text: yeshiva

text: David Oppenheim

text: Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
Kabbalah
yeshiva
halakhah
Zohar


title: Tkhines

abstract: (Yiddish, from Heb. teḥinot, meaning supplications), private devotions and paraliturgical prayers usually in Yiddish, primarily for women, published beginning in the early modern period. Tkhines were written by both women and men, and the constant reprinting of tkhine booklets demonstrates the extraordinary popularity of the genre.

text: pietism

text: Hasidism

text: Sabbath

text: liturgy

text: angels

text: Prague

text: Slovakia

text: childbirth

text: Galicia

text: Ya‘akov ben Volf Kranz

text: Dubno

text: Zhovkva

text: Leah Horovitz

text: Sore bas Toyvim

text: gender

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Chaim Grade

subconcepts:
Literary Setting
Characteristics and Early History
A Changing Role for Later Tkhines


title: Food and Drink

abstract: The distinctiveness of East European Jewish foodways arises from local understandings of ritual requirements, the historical legacy of early Western Ashkenazic traditions, a symbiotic relationship with local culinary practices, regional variations specific to Eastern Europe, and the central role of Jews in the food and beverage economy of the region.

imgDesc: Yiddish menu for Bar Bristol, a kosher restaurant, Łódź, 1931. The menu is printed in Polish on the reverse and is divided into three headings: Soup, Meat, and Dessert. Featured breakfast items include “cabbage soup with potatoes” and “meatballs with kasha.” (YIVO)

text: Sabbath

text: Passover

text: Hasidic

text: Shelomoh Kluger

text: Brody

text: holiday observance

text: Poland

text: weddings

text: circumcisions

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: money

text: Minsk

text: Rzeszów

text: Purim

text: Opatów

text: Belorussia

text: Ukraine

text: Courland

text: Hungary

text: Pinsk

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: Ashkenaz

text: Kraków

text: Prague

text: Kol mevaser

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Zamość

text: Bacău

text: heder

text: Zabłudów

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Christmas

text: Yeshiva

text: Volozhin

text: Poland

text: Holocaust

text: chess

text: pigs

text: Czernowitz

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Soviet Union

text: Assimilation

text: cookbooks

text: Russia

text: Riga

glossary: Torah rebbe heder Yeshiva

subconcepts: Ritual Requirements and Customary Practices


title: Dov Ber of Mezritsh

abstract: (1704–1772), Hasidic leader. Dov Ber, the Magid (preacher) of Mezritsh (Pol., Międzyrzecz; mod. Ukr., Mezhyrichi), sometimes known as the “great Magid,” was the foremost leader within Hasidic circles after the death of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (Besht) in 1760. It was under Dov Ber’s leadership that the followers of Hasidism first came to see themselves as constituting a new religious movement and set out to preach and spread their teachings throughout East European Jewry. It is not known to what degree Dov Ber actually organized this process, but his leadership and teaching certainly provided the inspiration for it, both during his lifetime and afterward.

text: Mezhyrichi

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Hasidism

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Pinḥas of Korets

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Chernobil

text: Lithuania

text: Karlin

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Ḥayim Ḥaykl of Amdur

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak of Lublin

text: Yisra’el of Kozhenits

text: Salomon Maimon

glossary: Magid Kabbalah tsadik Torah


title: Magic

abstract: Magic is often defined as the exercise of control over nature with the assistance of unseen powerful forces. Belief in magic was an integral part of daily life in Eastern Europe, among Jews and non-Jews alike. Magic was expressed in Jewish life in a variety of ways: there were experts in the use of magic, known as ba‘ale shem (masters of the [Holy] Name); objects infused with magical powers (amulets); magical entities (demons); and literature devoted to magic, such as folk-remedy and charm literature. There was almost no facet of Jewish life that did not include some aspect of magic; and in certain matters, mainly related to health issues, magic was particularly important.

text: ba‘ale shem

text: amulets

text: demons

text: names

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: ba‘ale shem

text: ba‘al shem tov

text: demons

text: Chełm

text: golem

text: Maharal

text: Prague

text: Tsevi Hirsh Koidanover

text: Shabetai ha-Kohen

text: dybbuk

text: Hasidism

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: amulets

text: An-ski Ethnographic Expedition

text: Russian Pale

glossary:
Talmud
Maimonides
Kabbalah
Naḥmanides
ethical will
Torah
tsadik


title: Karaites

abstract: The first testimony about a Karaite presence in the Crimean peninsula, dating to 1278, was supplied by the Karaite scholar Aharon ben Yosef (Ha-Rofe), who mentioned a dispute over the calendar between Karaites and Rabbinites (those who follow rabbinic tradition; also spelled Rabbanite) in Solkhat (Eski Krim). Karaites apparently migrated to the peninsula with the Tatar conquerors of Crimea in the mid-thirteenth century. The major centers of Karaite settlement were Kefe (Feodosiia), Solkhat, Chufut-Kale (or Chufut-Qaleh), Mangup, and, later, Gözleve.

imgDesc: Areas of Karaite settlement.

text: Crimean peninsula

text: Luts’k

text: Trakai

text: Lithuania

text: Panev

text: ė

text: Lwów

text: Kiev

text: Lithuania

text: Yitsḥak ben Avraham Troki

text: Riga

text: Simḥah Yitsḥak Luzki

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Avraam Firkovich

text: Holocaust

text: USSR

glossary: Karaites Torah halakhah Talmud Kabbalah


title: Councils

abstract: Two major types of Jewish regional councils existed in Eastern Europe. The first encompassed all the communities in any particular region or state, such as Great Poland, Lithuania, or Moravia; the second was the Polish Council, sometimes known as the Jewish Sejm (Pol., Sejm Żydowski), which represented Jews in each region of the Polish Kingdom. Jews referred to this latter formation as the Council of the Four Lands (i.e., the four regions of which it was originally composed). Jewish councils did not develop in other regions of Eastern Europe in this period. Attempts to establish Jewish councils and congresses in later centuries resulted only in the creation of short-lived bodies that lacked the influence and prestige of their predecessors.

imgDesc: Jewish councils of Crown Poland, eighteenth century. (Adapted from material provided by Judith Kalik)

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Moravia

text: Lithuania

text: Poznań

text: economic life

text: Poznań

text: Kraków

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Lwów

text: Ostróg

text: Pinsk

text: Brest

text: Hrodna

text: Slutsk

text: Poland

text: shtadlan

text: rabbinate

text: sumptuary laws

text: yeshivas

text: Lublin

text: Poland

text: Poznań

text: Kalisz

text: Kraków

text: Sandomierz

text: Lublin

text: Przemyśl

text: Chełm

text: Rzeszów

text: Tykocin

text: money

text: Yehoshu‘a Falk ha-Kohen

text: credit

text: Sabbath rest

text: Sabbatian

text: approbations

text: Frankist

text: money

text: Jewish Congress

text: Hungary

text: Simon Dubnow

glossary:
Council of the Four Lands
wojewoda
Council of Four Lands
va‘ad arba‘ aratsot
Diaspora

subconcepts: The Decline and Disappearance of the Councils


title: Klaipėda

abstract: Port city on Lithuania’s western border with Germany. After World War I, Klaipėda (Ger., Memel) and its surrounding district were severed from Prussia by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1923, Lithuania annexed the entire area, most of whose population (141,000 persons) was German. The town became part of an autonomous region until it was captured by German troops in 1939 and turned into a military port.

text: Lithuania

text: Sabbath

text: trade

text: Isaak Rülf

text: Kovno

text: Holocaust


title: About this Article (Printing and Publishing)

abstract: To survey the history of Jewish publishing activity in Eastern Europe, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first covering the period up to 1800 and the second from 1800 until 2000. For further discussion, see also Book Design and Illustration.

imgDesc: Printer’s mark of Kalonimos ben Mordekhai Yafeh and Sons, Lublin, 1604–1628. (Jewish National and University Library)

text: Book Design and Illustration


title: Prochownik, Abraham

abstract: Legendary Jewish merchant (the name signifies a gunpowder merchant) who supposedly was declared king of Poland. The story is set in the ninth century, when the legendary king, Piast, ascended to the Polish throne (ca. 860), thus establishing a medieval dynasty.

text: Poland

text: Grigorii Bogrov

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Sha’ul Wahl


title: Frankl-Grün, Adolf

abstract: (1847–1916), rabbi and historian. Born in Kromĕříž (Ger., Kremsier) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Adolph (Abraham) Frankl-Grün attended yeshiva in Lipník nad Bečvou (Leipnik), where he studied with Moses Bloch (1815–1909). Thereafter he attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, where his teachers included Zacharias Frankel and Heinrich Graetz.

text: Moravia

text: yeshiva

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

text: Uherský Brod

text: Prague


title: Liturgy

abstract: The liturgy of East European Jewry, though by the twelfth century dominated by the overall prayer-book prototype bequeathed by the Babylonian centers, retained traces of the rites of premedieval Palestine along with those of early medieval Italy and Germany. In this way it differed from its equivalents in Spain and France, but the resulting variations were generally limited to rare occasions and special circumstances and concerned detailed wording within benedictions, such as the use of “Ve-te‘erav” in the Birkat ha-kohanim, or priestly benediction. This lyrical formulation (“May our plea be as sweet as once were our Temple offerings”), occurring in the third benediction from the end of the ‘Amidah (‘Avodah), had been part of the daily version of the central prayer service (‘Amidah or Shemoneh ‘esreh) in premedieval Palestine.

imgDesc: Prayer book for a cantor. Poland, sixteenth or seventeenth century. Vellum. This rare example of an illustrated prayer book is opened to a page with a prayer for the welfare of all involved in the life of the synagogue and the community. Collection Isaac Einhorn, Tel Aviv. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

text: Ashkenaz

text: Hungary

text: Romania

text: Poland

text: Czech Republic

text: Slovakia

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: Belarus

text: Przemyśl

text: Prague

text: Natan Note ben Shelomoh Spira

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Żółkiew

text: Lwów

text: Hasidism

text: Sephardic

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres


title: Burgenland

abstract: Region of the federal state of Austria. Burgenland is bordered by the provinces of Lower Austria and Styria (west), Slovakia (northeast), Hungary (east), and Slovenia (south). The name Burgenland is a post–World War I invention that was officially adopted in 1922. Jews experienced a long, continuous history in the region, characterized by their adherence to religion and tradition.

imgDesc: Private synagogue established in Eisenstadt in the late seventeenth century by Shimshon Wertheimer, a prominent court Jew. Today, the synagogue is part of the Austrian Jewish Museum. (Austrian Jewish Museum, Eisenstadt)

text: Slovakia

text: Hungary

text: Eisenstadt

text: yeshiva

text: Ḥatam Sofer

text: Orthodoxy


title: Bohemus, Abraham Judeus

abstract: (d. 1533), tax collector and financial adviser to Polish kings Aleksander Jagiellończyk and Zygmunt Stary. Known as Abraham of Prague, Abraham Judeus Bohemus moved from Bohemia to Poland at the end of fifteenth century. There he lived in the Kazimierz district of Kraków before settling in Lwów. Along with the Fiszel family and Ozer from Opoczno, Bohemus was one of the chief financiers of the Polish court.

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Fiszel family

text: councils

text: trade


title: Righteous Gentiles

abstract: Title bestowed by Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust remembrance authority) on certain gentiles who rescued Jews in opposition to Nazi efforts to annihilate them. The distinction is granted according to stringent criteria requiring conclusive evidence. Depending on the nature and extent of help, special kinds of recognition are bestowed upon Christians who saved Jews. To qualify for any one of the distinctions, Christian actions had to involve “extending help in saving a life; endangering one’s own life; absence of reward, monetary and otherwise; and similar considerations which make the rescuers’ deeds stand out above and beyond what can be termed ordinary help.” In part ambiguous, the criteria leave no doubt that those who saved Jews primarily because of payment do not fit the definition of righteous Christians.

imgDesc: Shlomo Grzywacz (front row, third from left), a Jewish child from Warsaw hidden from the Nazis by gentiles in Dembniki, Poland, performing duties as an altar boy under the name Marek Kaczynski. (YIVO)

text: Holocaust

text: Poles

text: Ukraine

text: Hungary

text: Lithuania

text: Belarus

text: Slovakia

text: Russia

text: Czech Republic

text: Latvia

text: Moldova

text: Romania

text: Estonia

text: ghettos

text: antisemitism


title: Trakai

abstract: A town in southeastern Lithuania, Trakai was home to many Jews as well as to the most ancient and important Karaite community in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The town was founded before 1321 and served as the ancient capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Known as Troki in Polish, and Trok in Yiddish, Trakai (its official Lithuanian name today) was in the Commonwealth until 1795, when it became part of the Russian Empire. Between 1922 and 1939 it belonged to the Polish Republic, and since 1939 it has been part of the Republic of Lithuania. It is located 25 km west of Vilnius.

imgDesc: Karaite school and synagogue (Kenesa), Trakai, Lithuania, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Lithuania

text: Karaite

text: Russian Empire

text: Vilnius

text: Crimea

text: Hrodna

text: Belarus

text: Yitsḥak ben Avraham Troki

text: Holocaust


title: Craiova

abstract: Town in southwest Romania; capital of the province of Oltenia. In the eighteenth century, Craiova was a craft center and a hub for specialists in dressing and tanning skins and hides, as there was demand for such products in the neighboring markets of the Habsburg Empire.

text: Romania

text: craft

text: Sephardic

text: Ashkenazic

text: Bucharest

text: economic life

text: Holocaust

text: Bucovina

text: USSR


title: Makhzikey ha-Das

abstract: (Heb., Maḥazike ha-Dat; Upholders of the Faith), an Orthodox ideological and political organization active in Galicia and Bucovina. After a year of difficult efforts, Makhzikey ha-Das received permission to be formally established in 1878. The primary motivation for the Orthodox to organize was the approval of a new kehiliah statute with a liberal spirit in the city of Lemberg (Lwów) in 1876. Initiated by Shomer Yisra’el—the organization of the liberal Jewish intelligentsia—this statute guaranteed control of the community council to members of means who also had secular education.

text: Orthodox

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Lwów

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: seminary

text: Belz

text: Sofer

text: Kraków

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Hungary

text: Agudas Yisroel

glossary:
kehiliah
kehilah
rebbe
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Chajes, Tsevi Hirsh

abstract: (1805–1855), rabbi and scholar. Tsevi Hirsh Chajes was born in Brody into a wealthy and distinguished family. In 1829, he was appointed rabbi of the Żółkiew district and served in that capacity for more than 20 years. Chajes was active in a circle of Galician maskilic rabbis whose response to modernity in the first half of the nineteenth century was complex. He was the most prominent Galician rabbinic scholar who also engaged in historical research.

text: Brody

text: Żółkiew

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Galicia

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Hasidic movement

text: Hungary

text: Prague

text: Lwów

text: rabbinate

text: Kalisz

glossary: halakhah maskil responsa Talmud Maimonides


title: Schick, Mosheh

abstract: (1807–1879), rabbi, halakhist, and yeshiva head. Known as Maharam Schick (acronym for Morenu ha-Rav Mosheh, “Our Teacher, the Rabbi Mosheh”) after his responsa collection, Mosheh Schick was born in Březové, and from the age of 14 he studied under Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer) in Pressburg. Eventually he was acknowledged to be Sofer’s heir as the leading halakhic decisor of Hungarian Orthodoxy. While throughout his career Schick was outspoken in his opposition to religious and educational reform, during the last years of his life he was particularly intransigent in demanding unequivocal loyalty to a narrow Orthodox position.

text: yeshiva

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: Orthodoxy

text: Eisenstadt

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Jewish Congress

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Hungary

text: Seminary

glossary:
yeshiva
responsa
halakhah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Status Quo
Torah


title: Sátoraljaújhely

abstract: Town in northeastern Hungary and the seat of Zemplén county before World War I. Sátoraljaújhely (also known as Újhely) was a market town that became a commercial center in the second half of the eighteenth century. Its Jewish community was founded in 1771; a burial society was formed a year later. Its first Jewish public school was established in 1785; it was closed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even though in 1807 the town expelled 30 Jewish families (citing immigration from Galicia, which increased the number of poor), the number of Jewish inhabitants reached 1,217 in 1825, 3,253 in 1869 and 5,730 in 1910, making up 18.6, 32.7, and 28.7 percent of the total populations in those years.

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Hasidism

text: Galicia

text: yeshiva

text: Orthodoxy

text: Jewish Congress

text: Poland

text: Slovakia

glossary:
yeshiva
Neolog
Status Quo


title: Karlin-Stolin Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: The first Hasidic sect established in Lithuania, and one of the major protagonists in the historic feud between the Hasidim and their rabbinic opponents, the Misnagdim. The founder of the Karlin-Stolin dynasty was Aharon ben Ya‘akov (1736–1772), known by generations of his followers as Aharon ha-Gadol (Aaron the Great). A disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, he founded a Hasidic prayer house in Karlin, a suburb of Pinsk, in 1762, whose devotees disseminated his teachings throughout Belorussia and Lithuania, including in the cities of Minsk and Vilna. The rapid dissemination of Hasidism by the disciples of Aharon of Karlin is what initially aroused the ire of the establishment rabbis (eventually known as the Misnagdim) who, in the early 1770s, began a vociferous campaign against the “Karliners,” as Hasidim were often referred to in the early Misnagdic polemical literature.

imgDesc: The Stoliner Rebbe (either Yisra’el or Mosheh Perlov) and his followers on the way to his son’s wedding, Stolin, Poland (now in Belarus), n.d., ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Lithuania

text: Misnagdim

text: Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh

text: Pinsk

text: Belorussia

text: Minsk

text: Vilna

text: Hasidism

text: Sabbath

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Ludmir

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Zionism

text: Land of Israel

text: Luts’k

text: Holocaust

text: Soviet Union

glossary: Misnagdim tsadik rebbe


title: Khelm, Shelomoh ben Mosheh

abstract: (1715/16–1781), rabbinical scholar. Born in Zamość, Poland, to wealthy parents from well-known families, Shelomoh ben Mosheh was regarded as a prodigy, and showed interest in secular knowledge in addition to his religious studies; he studied mathematics, logic, and a number of foreign languages. In 1742, before he had turned 25, he was elected to the position of rabbi of Chełm (Yid., Khelm or Khelem) and its nine satellite communities. From then on, he was known as Rabbi Shelomoh Khelm.

text: Zamość

text: Poland

text: Chełm

text: Sabbath

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Zamość

text: Lwów

text: Land of Israel

glossary:
Maimonides
Torah
Council of Four Lands
get
responsa


abstract: (1555–1631), rabbinical scholar and interpreter of the Talmud. Known as Maharsha—an acronym for “Our teacher, (the) Rabbi Shemu’el Edels (Adels)”—Edels was born in Kraków. He was a descendant of Yehudah Ḥasid on his father’s side, and was a member of the family of Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el (Maharal of Prague) on his mother’s. He studied Torah in Poznań, where he married the daughter of his uncle, Mosheh Ashkenazi-Halperin (Lifshits), the rabbi of Brisk (Brest Litovsk). His wealthy mother-in-law, Edel, supported his yeshiva for 20 years, in recognition of which he adopted the name Edels.

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

text: Kraków

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Prague

text: Poznań

text: Brest

text: yeshiva

text: Chełm

text: Tykocin

text: Lublin

text: Ostróg

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Sabbath

glossary:
yeshiva
pilpul
Talmud
responsa
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Ba‘ale Shem

abstract: Literally, “masters of [God’s] name” (sg., ba‘al shem); alternatively, ba‘ale shem tov, or “masters of good name.” The terms, which are often interchangeable, signify the ability to manipulate “holy” names, including both the name of God and those of angels, along with the names of Satan and evil spirits, in order to obtain practical results. Anthropologically similar to shamans, ba‘ale shem mediated between empirical reality and divine realms, between this world and the netherworld, and between spirits and living beings, employing both Lurianic and popular Kabbalah, magical remedies and mystical devices, local herbal folk remedies, amulets (Heb., kemi‘im; sg., kame‘a), and contemporary medical recipes to restore social order or provide personal security.

text: angels

text: amulets

text: dybbuks

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Poland

text: Sabbatianism

text: Hasidism

glossary:
Kabbalah
Lurianic Kabbalah


title: Zamość

abstract: (Yid., Zamoch, Zamoshtsh), city in Lublin province. Founded in 1580 by Jan Zamoyski, Zamość became the principal town of his family estate. The first mention of Jews in Zamość dates from 1583; Zamoyski granted them a privilege of settlement in 1588. This privilege was for Sephardic Jews only, with the expectation that they would bring economic benefits—particularly trading contacts. The Jewish quarter was situated in the northwestern sector, where Jews were permitted to build a synagogue and a mikveh. The synagogue was built of brick in the Renaissance style between about 1610 and 1618.

text: Lublin

text: Sephardic

text: Lwów

text: trade

text: Ashkenazic

text: councils

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: credit

text: crafts

text: Poland

text: Haskalah

text: Warsaw

text: Yisra’el of Zamość

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Rosa Luxemburg

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Mizraḥi

text: theater

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: General Zionists

text: Czechoslovakia

glossary: mikveh Haskalah


title: Weddings

abstract: Among the rituals of the East European Jewish life cycle, the wedding (Heb., ḥatunah; Yid., khasene) is the most elaborate. At its fullest, from the making of the match to the celebrations following the marriage ceremony, the process of getting married could extend over a period of years, gathering in intensity and peaking with the ceremony itself. The events associated with getting married were occasions par excellence for Jewish ceremonial creativity and artistic expression, including the central role of musicians, the badkhn (master of ceremonies and jester), and dance. The public character of the festivities was intended to make the marriage binding, not only in contractual but also in emotional terms, which accounts for the intensity of feeling (weeping before the ceremony and joyous celebration after) orchestrated by the musicians and badkhn.

imgDesc: Jewish Wedding. A. Trankowsky, late nineteenth century. Oil on canvas. (The Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California)

text: life cycle

text: marriage

text: musicians

text: badkhn

text: dance

text: sumptuary regulations

text: painting

text: theater

text: The Dybbuk

text: ethnographic expedition

text: Saint Petersburg

text: yikhes

text: demons

text: dress

text: Hasidic

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: Kamenets

text: Chełm

text: Opatów

text: love

text: Warsaw

text: memory

text: Holocaust

glossary: mikveh Torah


title: Gender

abstract: The social and hierarchical construction of the differences between the sexes, gender is also a way of signifying relationships of power. Historically, gender has generally been perceived in binary terms, with masculine traits privileged over feminine ones. Every society is gendered, with different expectations for the social roles of members of each sex; gender prescriptions are also tied to social class, religion, and geographical location, and vary with time. Although gender prescriptions powerfully shape individuals’ behavior, social and economic needs often lead to a relaxation of sharply delineated gender norms.

imgDesc: The Melitser rebetsin, wife of Melekh Horowitz, rabbi of Mielec, Poland, with her four children, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: kahal

text: philanthropy

text: dead

text: sumptuary legislation

text: Sabbath

text: tkhines

text: Sabbath

text: Tsene-rene

text: Yiddish literature

text: Hasidic society

text: Maiden of Ludmir

text: heder

text: Talmud study

text: yeshiva

text: guilds

text: trade

text: Haskalah

text: dress

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Odessa

text: childhood

text: Vilna

text: Der fraynd

text: Sarah Schenirer

text: Kraków

text: Beys Yankev

text: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: heder

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: Pale of Settlement

text: servants

text: Rosa Luxemburg

text: Zionist

text: Bund

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Warsaw

text: youth movements

text: Grodno

text: Białystok

glossary:
Haskalah
halakhah
kahal
Council of Four Lands
Torah
mikveh
rebbe
tsadik
heder
Talmud
yeshiva
maskil
numerus clausus
Pale of Settlement


title: Yisra’el ben Shabetai of Kozhenits

abstract: (ca. 1737–1814), rabbinic scholar and Hasidic leader. Known as the Magid of Kozhenits (Pol., Kozienice), Yisra’el ben Shabetai was one of the founders of Hasidism in central Poland. Born in Opatów, the son of a poor bookbinder, he studied with Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and later with Elimelekh of Lizhensk.

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Opatów

text: Dov Ber

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: rabbinic literature

text: Maharal of Prague

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: amulets

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Ger Hasidic dynasty

text: Holocaust

text: Warsaw

text: Zionist

text: Mizraḥi

text: Karlin-Stolin

text: Malkah Hapstein Shapiro

glossary: Magid responsa Kabbalah tsadik


title: Yeḥi’el Mikhl of Zlotshev

abstract: (1726–1781), Hasidic leader in Galicia. Yeḥi’el Mikhl was born in Brody. His father, Yitsḥak of Drohobycz (d. ca. 1760), a scholar and kabbalist, was a magid, rabbi, and dayan in Ostróg, Brody, and other towns. A Hasid of the “old” type, Yitsḥak had contact with the Besht but nevertheless remained independent. Renowned both as a wonder worker and as an uncompromising person, Yitsḥak was undeterred by friction with important contemporary rabbis.

text: Hasidic

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Drohobycz

text: Ostróg

text: Besht

text: Misnagdim

text: Dov Ber

text: Apt

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Land of Israel

glossary: magid melamed Misnagdim kolel tsadik


title: Prossnitz, Yehudah Leib ben Ya‘akov Holleschau

abstract: (ca. 1670–after 1736?), Sabbatian prophet and messianic pretender; central figure in early eighteenth-century Moravian Sabbatianism. Yehudah Leib Prossnitz was born in the southeastern Moravian town of Uherský Brod (Broda), and settled after his marriage in Prossnitz (Prostějov), where his wife’s family lived. Although he was not an educated man, at about age 30 he was drawn to Kabbalah, possibly under the influence of traveling Sabbatian prophets and preachers who visited Moravia at that time, such as Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref, Yehudah Ḥasid, and Ḥayim Malakh. He adopted the ascetic life they preached, began to study the Zohar and other kabbalistic texts, and claimed to receive otherworldly instruction from the deceased Yitsḥak Luria and Shabetai Tsevi. Yehudah Leib soon acquired the reputation of an inspired kabbalistic preacher, attracting a local following and gaining the support of the local rabbi of Prossnitz, Me’ir Eisenstadt (ca. 1670–1744), who was not unsympathetic to Sabbatianism.

text: Sabbatianism

text: Uherský Brod

text: Prostějov

text: Moravia

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref

text: Yehudah Ḥasid

text: Ḥayim Malakh

text: conversion

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Mikulov

text: Hungary

glossary: Kabbalah Zohar Tsadik


title: Malakh, Ḥayim ben Shelomoh

abstract: (d. ca. 1717), Sabbatian preacher. Ḥayim ben Shelomoh was born in Kalisz in the 1650s. Little is known about his background, but it is certain that he acquired an extensive Jewish education. During his youth he was associated with the Sabbatian prophet Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref of Vilna. In 1690, Ḥayim went to Italy, where he studied with the leaders of the Italian Sabbatians, Avraham Rovigo and Binyamin Kohen, and was introduced to the doctrines of Natan of Gaza. Returning to Poland in 1692, Ḥayim was largely responsible for spreading Rovigo and Kohen’s version of Sabbatianism among Polish followers of the movement.

text: Kalisz

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref

text: Poland

text: Sabbatianism

text: Żółkiew

text: Yehudah Ḥasid

text: Mikulov

text: Frankists

text: Kamenets Podolski

text: Avraham Broda

text: Prague

text: Land of Israel

text: Buczacz

text: Poland

text: piety


title: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

abstract: (d. 1783), rabbi and author of the first published Hasidic book. Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye (Pol., Połonne) served as rabbi of Shargorod, the second largest community in the Podolia region. In 1741, after coming under the influence of Aryeh Leib, the preacher of Polnoye, Ya‘akov Yosef began to adopt a pietistic, ascetic path of Hasidism, including seclusion for long periods and particular stringency with regard to the laws of Jewish ritual slaughter.

text: Hasidism

text: Sabbath

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Niemirów

text: Misnagdim

text: messianism

text: Dov Ber

text: Pinḥas of Korets

glossary: Torah . Misnagdim tsadik Magid


title: Ba‘al Shem Tov

abstract: (Yisra’el ben Eli‘ezer, “the Besht”; ca. 1700–1760), healer, miracle worker, and religious mystic; leader of Hasidim in Międzyboż (Yid., Mezhbizh; mod. Ukr., Medzhibizh); recognized as founder of the modern Hasidic movement. Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov was born in tiny Okopy Gory Świętej Trójcy (a town whose name means Hill Fortification of the Holy Trinity, referred to in Jewish sources as Okopy), a then recently civilianized military outpost near the southern border of Ukraine (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). He spent his early life mainly in various towns of Podolia—one of which was the minor commercial center of Tłuste—finally settling in 1740 in the prosperous regional military, administrative, and trade emporium of Międzyboż (owned by the Czartoryski family), whose Jewish community was dominated by wealthy commercial families.

imgDesc: Family tree of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, Warsaw, 1927. (The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary)

text: mystic

text: Medzhibizh

text: Hasidic movement

text: Ukraine

text: rabbinic literature

text: Barukh ben Yeḥi’el of Mezhbizh

text: Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim of Sudilkov

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: ba‘al shem

text: bet midrash

text: amulets

text: Lithuania

text: Land of Israel

text: Pinḥas of Korets

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Dov Ber

text: Hasidism

text: kehilah

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Misnagdim

glossary: Kabbalah Magid kehilah Torah Gaon Misnagdim tsadik Ḥaredi


title: Pilgrimage

abstract: Throughout their history, East European Jews have participated in three types of pilgrimages: (1) pilgrimages to pray and petition at cemeteries in various localities of Eastern Europe; (2) pilgrimages by Hasidim to visit their sages, both living and dead; and (3) pilgrimages to the Land of Israel. After World War II, several of the traditional pre-1939 pilgrimages were revived, and various Jewish communities have embarked on new ones.

imgDesc: Woman at the tombstone of Yehoshu‘a Falk (ca. 1555–1614), rabbi and author of Sefer me’irat ‘enayim, a commentary on a portion of the Shulḥan ‘arukh, Lwów, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Hasidim

text: Land of Israel

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Kraków

text: Hasidim

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Land of Israel

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Latvia

text: Russia

text: Belarus

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Romania

text: Czech Republic

text: Slovakia

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Leżajsk

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Uman

text: Holocaust

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Ḥayim Soloveichik

text: Brest

text: Slobodka

glossary: rebbe Ḥaredi Gaon yeshiva


title: An-ski Ethnographic Expedition and Museum

abstract: From 1912 to 1914, S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) headed ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement. After a limited display of the expeditionary collection in 1914, it was exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Saint Petersburg, which opened briefly in 1917, and then again in 1923, only to be closed in 1929. In 2000, most of the remaining artifacts were located at the Russian Museum of Ethnography in Saint Petersburg, while most of the manuscripts and audio recordings were held in Kiev, at the Vernadskii National Library of Ukraine.

imgDesc: The An-Ski Expeditions; locations visited 1912–1914. Boundaries shown are ca. 1914. (Courtesy Gabriella Safran)

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Gintsburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Solomon Iudovin

text: Yo’el Engel

text: shtetl

text: Luts’k

text: World War I

text: folk songs

text: proverbs

text: tombstones

text: life cycle

text: amulets

text: headgear

text: purim-shpil

text: Il’ia Gintsburg

text: Odessa

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Minsk

text: Moscow

subconcepts:
Expeditions
Museum Exhibits