title: Meisel, Eliyahu Ḥayim

abstract: (1821–1912), rabbi of Łódź. Born in Horodok in Vilna guberniia, Eliyahu Ḥayim Meisel attended the Volozhin yeshiva, where his fellow students included Yosef Ber Soloveichik of Brisk and Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor. Meisel received rabbinic ordination at the age of 13 from Yitsḥak of Volozhin.

text: Łódź

text: Vilna

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Soloveichik

text: Brisk

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Łomża

text: Łódź

text: Litvak

text: Hasidic

text: approbation

text: pogroms

text: Bund

text: Revolution of 1905

glossary: yeshiva Talmud Torah


title: Shtif, Nokhem

abstract: (1879–1933), linguist, literary historian, and political activist. Born in Rovno (mod. Rivne) to a prosperous family, Nokhem Shtif received both a Jewish and a secular education. Even as a student at a Russian secondary school and, later, at Kiev Polytechnic University (where he was enrolled between 1899 and 1903), he continued studying religious and modern Hebrew literature. He was the cofounder of a Zionist student group, Molodoi Izrail’ (Young Israel), and also participated in the 1902 Minsk Zionist Conference.

imgDesc: A gathering of Jewish intellectuals in Kulautuva, Lithuania, 1920 or 1921. Those identified in the photograph include journalist Reuven Tsarfat (2, in fedora); Bal-Makhshoves (4, wearing white boater); Dovid Bergelson (6, on ground with his head on his neighbor’s knee), his wife (10, seated, second from left), and son (5, small child to Bergelson’s left); Zelig Kalmanovitch (7, with striped tie, center); Jakob Lestschinsky (8, to Kalmanovitch’s right); and Nokhem Shtif (9, to the left of Bergelson’s wife). (YIVO)

text: Rivne

text: Kiev

text: Hebrew literature

text: Zionist

text: Minsk

text: Russia

text: Bund

text: Vilna

text: Vitebsk

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yiddish literature

text: Kletskin

text: February 1917 Revolution

text: Folkspartey

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Zelig Kalmanovitch

text: Kaunas

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Max Weinreich

text: YIVO

text: Soviet Union

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Di yidishe shprakh

text: Yoysef Liberberg

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Avrom Goldfadn


title: Pryłucki, Tsevi

abstract: (Hirsh-Sholem Prilutski, 1862–1942), journalist, editor, and early Zionist. Born and raised in a merchant family in Kremenets, Ukraine, Tsevi Pryłucki was educated in the spirit of the Haskalah by his father, a personal friend and pupil of Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon.

imgDesc: Staff of Der moment, Warsaw, 1920s. (Back row, left to right) Mordkhe Spektor, A. Almi, Yoysef Tunkel, Moyshe Bunem Yustman, Tsevi Pryłucki, D. Druk,  Sh. Janowski, Yisroel Khayim Zagorodski (front), Bentsion Chilinowicz, Yisroel Khayim Zagorodski, and Hillel Zeitlin. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Ukraine

text: Haskalah

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Kiev

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Ha-Melits

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Shmuel Yankev Yatskan

text: Ha-Yom

text: Der moment

text: Haynt

text: Folkspartey

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Folks-shtime


title: Ginsburg, Sha'ul

abstract: (1866–1940), founder and editor of Der fraynd; political and cultural historian of Russian Jewry. Sha’ul (Saul Moiseevich) Ginsburg was born to a wealthy merchant and industrialist family in Minsk. He received a Jewish education from private tutors and a general education at gymnasium and the law faculty of the University of Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1892. Ginsburg began his journalism career quite young as a correspondent for the moderate maskilic and proto-nationalist Hebrew newspaper Ha-Magid.

text: Der fraynd

text: Minsk

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Magid

text: Voskhod

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidism

text: folk songs

text: Der fraynd

text: Warsaw

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

glossary:
Magid
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Asif, Ha-

abstract: Annual Hebrew publication, issued between 1884 and 1889, and again in 1893. Ha-Asif (The Harvest) was published in Warsaw and edited by Naḥum Sokolow. The yearly journal focused on discussions and reviews of Jewish studies while attempting to avoid complete identification with the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. Although Sokolow felt a certain ideological affinity with that movement, he stressed, in his introduction to the 1884 edition, that Ha-Asif was not established to fulfill the needs of any single party or the needs of the hour, but was aimed at the Jewish nation as a whole. Throughout its existence, the publication focused on Jewish history and historiosophy as the basis of nationalism, an approach emphasized by Sokolow in his major essays.

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: Warsaw

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Otsar ha-sifrut

text: Prose

text: David Frishman

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mordekhai Tsevi Mane


title: Aḥi’asaf

abstract: Hebraist-Zionist publishing house. Aḥi’asaf was founded in Warsaw in 1893 by Hebrew writer and publisher Avraham Leib Shalkovich (known as Ben-Avigdor, who soon left to found the rival publishing house Tushiyah), Eli‘ezer Kaplan, and other activists of Bene Mosheh, a secret society within the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement devoted to the national-cultural revival ideals of Ahad Ha-Am. Ahad Ha-Am himself served as editor and exerted substantial ideological influence on the press. Aḥi’asaf is considered the first modern Hebrew publishing house—the first to solicit, publish, and distribute works of individual authors. Early successes gave way to relative inactivity after 1904, with a brief attempted revival by Zionist leader Ozjasz Thon in 1923.

text: Warsaw

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Tushiyah

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Shim‘on Bernfeld

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Avraham Shalom Friedberg

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Ha-Dor

text: David Frishman

text: Der yud

text: Y. H. Ravnitski

text: Zionism

text: Tushiyah

text: Hebrew literature

text: literary journals


title: Rónai, János

abstract: (1849–1919), lawyer and Zionist leader. Born in the Hungarian city of Gyulafehérvár (Rom., Alba Iulia), János Rónai completed his legal studies at the University of Budapest. Working first as a vice notary public in Győr, he then started his own legal practices in Fogaras (Rom., Făgăraş) and in Balázsfalva; he also organized branches of the Independence Party of 1848 in several towns in Transylvania. Rónai’s writings include his 1875 doctoral dissertation, “Nacionalizmus és kozmopolitizmus különös tekintettel a zsidóság mai helyzetére” (Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism with special consideration of the Jewish Situation in Our Time).

text: Zionist

text: Alba Iulia

text: Budapest

text: Făgăraş

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary


title: Bernstein, Ignatz

abstract: (1836–1909), folklorist, bibliophile, philanthropist, and compiler of the largest published collection of Yiddish proverbs. Born into a well-to-do maskilic family in Vinnytsa, Podolia (Ukraine), Ignatz Bernstein moved with his parents to Warsaw in 1856. During a visit to Berlin in 1859, he came across a small German book of Jewish proverbs, which inspired his lifelong preoccupation with collecting Yiddish proverbs and assembling a paroemiological library. The fruit of his labor was the still unsurpassed 1908 volume, Yidishe shprikhverter un rednsartn (Yiddish Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions), containing 3,993 entries, and a personal collection of more than 6,000 titles dealing with proverbs in more than 100 languages.

text: proverbs

text: Ukraine

text: Warsaw

text: Samuel Adalberg

text: Kraków

text: Mordkhe Spektor


title: Yud, Der

abstract: Yiddish Zionist periodical. Launched by the Hebrew publishing company Aḥi’asaf in January 1899 to promote the political and cultural program of the newly founded Zionist Organization, Der yud (The Jew; pronounced Der yid) was edited in Warsaw but published in Kraków to avoid tsarist censorship. Under editor Yehoshu‘a Ḥana (Yoshue Khone) Ravnitski, it appeared bimonthly, then became a weekly by mid-November of that year, edited by Yoysef Lurie. The periodical served an appreciative readership in the absence of a Yiddish daily press and stopped publication in December 1902 when the Russian censor granted long-sought permission to Saul Ginsburg to start up the Yiddish daily Der fraynd.

imgDesc: Masthead of Der yud, vol. 1 (5 February 1899), “For all Jewish interests.” (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: censorship

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana (Yoshue Khone) Ravnitski

text: Saul Ginsburg

text: Der fraynd

text: Yiddish literature

text: Shimen Shmuel Frug

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: David Frishman

text: Yehudah Steinberg

text: Rokhl Brokhes

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: prose

text: Sholem Asch

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Mark Varshavski

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russia

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Land of Israel


title: Persov, Shmuel

abstract: (1890–1950), Yiddish writer. Shmuel Persov was born in the shtetl of Pochep, Ukraine, to the family of a religious teacher. In addition to receiving a traditional Jewish education, he read secular books at a private library organized with the assistance of the Hebrew writer Uri Nisan Gnessin. Persov was a member of the Bund in 1905 and 1906. Later, he moved to the United States, where he published short stories in the anarchist newspaper Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Workers’ Voice).

text: shtetl

text: Ukraine

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Khayim Gildin

text: Moyshe Taytsh

text: Kharkov

text: Di royte velt

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Yashe Bronshteyn

text: Ber Orshanski

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt


title: Rivne

abstract: City in Ukraine; capital of the Rivne region. Before 1793 and between 1920 and 1939, Rivne (Pol., Równe; Rus., Rovno) belonged to Poland. Its first Jews, and probably the town’s earliest organized Jewish community, appeared there in the mid-sixteenth century.

imgDesc: Moyshe Khone Yekls, a water carrier, Równe (now Rivne, Ukraine), ca. 1924. He was also a celebrity in local sports circles as a prizefighter. (Forward Association / YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres

text: Ostróg

text: Dov Ber

text: Hasidim

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Russia

text: Zionist

text: 1905–1907 Revolution

text: Bund

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: 1917 Revolution

text: Civil War

text: pogroms

text: Tarbut

text: yeshiva

text: Judenrat

text: Holocaust

text: Soviet Union

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
Magid
Gaon
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
yeshiva


title: Radek, Karl

abstract: (1885–1939), international revolutionary activist and publicist. Born in Lwów, Karl Radek (originally surnamed Sobel’son) grew up in Tarnów, in his mother’s family, where the German culture was dominant. In gymnasium he was attracted by the ideas of Polish nationalism, which influenced his choice of pseudonym. The surname Radek was adopted after the name of the hero of a novel about Polish students’ revolutionary struggle. Later Radek became acquainted with German social-democratic literature and launched social-democratic propaganda in his gymnasium, which led to his expulsion from school in 1901.

text: Lwów

text: Tarnów

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Warsaw

text: World War I

text: Zinov’ev

text: Russia

text: February 1917 Revolution

text: Petrograd

text: Trotsky

text: Moscow

text: USSR


title: Perlmutter, Avraham Tsevi

abstract: (1844/46–1930), rabbi, Polish Sejm deputy. A child prodigy, Avraham Tsevi Perlmutter was ordained as a rabbi at age 14 and was a disciple of some of the leading rabbis of his era, including Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz (Nowy Sącz), Shim‘on Sofer of Kraków, and Dov Berush Meisels of Warsaw. At first Perlmutter served as rabbi in a series of small communities, including Osięciny, Pabianice, and Raciąż. While officiating in Raciąż, he learned Russian at the urging of the provincial governor, but only after receiving the approval of his father and of the rebbe of Gostynin, to whom he was close even though Perlmutter was not a Hasid.

imgDesc: Avraham Tsevi Perlmutter (second from right) and other members of the Warsaw rabbinate during a demonstration in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Polish Constitution of 1791, Warsaw, 1916. Photograph by Marjan Fuks. From a postcard printed by B. Wierzbicki, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Sandz

text: Kraków

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: Warsaw

text: Radom

text: Shemu’el Mohilewer

text: Lublin

text: Agudas Yisroel


title: Vurke Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Line of Polish rabbinic leaders. The Vurke (Pol., Warka) Hasidic dynasty was established by Yitsḥak Kalish (1779–1848), whose activities as an intercessor (shtadlan) with the government signaled the predominance of Hasidism among Jews in the Kingdom of Poland.

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

text: shtadlan

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Lelov

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Pshiskhe

text: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

text: Temerl Sonnenberg Bergson

text: Warsaw

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: Sabbath

text: dress

text: agriculture

text: Gerer

text: Aleksander dynasty

text: Land of Israel

text: crown rabbinate

glossary: rebbe halakhah Tsadik


title: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

abstract: (Gaon of Vilna; 1720–1797), Torah scholar, kabbalist, and communal leader. The Gaon of Vilna (known also by the acronym Gra, for Gaon Rabbi Eliyahu) was a spiritual giant, a role model and source of inspiration for generations, and the central cultural figure of Lithuanian Jewry. Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman was born into a rabbinical and scholarly family, and following a short period of study in a heder, studied Torah with his father. At age 7, he was sent to study with Mosheh Margoliot, rabbi of Keydan (Lith., Kėdainiai). Soon thereafter, he began to study on his own, and at 18, left Vilna to go into “exile”—a period of wandering through Jewish communities of Poland and Germany.

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: heder

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Sabbatian

text: yeshiva

text: rabbinic literature

text: piety

text: Hasidism

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Lithuania

text: Misnagdim

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: Haskalah

text: Maharal of Prague

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Gaon
Torah
heder
yeshiva
Talmud
Zohar
Misnagdim
Haskalah
Mishnah
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Tsoref, Yehoshu‘a Heshel ben Yosef

abstract: (Heshel Tsoref; 1633–ca. 1700), Sabbatian prophet. Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref was born in Vilna and had little formal education, earning his living as a silversmith. During the Polish–Swedish war, he sought refuge in Amsterdam, where he learned of the advent of Shabetai Tsevi. After returning to Vilna in 1666, Tsoref became the most important personality of the Sabbatian movement in Lithuania; he particularly advocated urgent ascetic acts of penance. In contrast to other Sabbatian leaders, Tsoref’s claim to leadership was based not on personal learning or the development of novel theological doctrines, but on his personal charisma as expressed in prophecy. He had a number of visions, and was known to impart profound interpretations of the Torah despite his lack of rabbinic learning.

text: Sabbatian

text: Vilna

text: Lithuania

text: Mikulov

text: Yehudah Ḥasid

text: Land of Israel

text: Kraków

text: kloyz

text: Brody

text: Chernobil

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Karlin

text: Efrayim Zalman Margoliot

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov


title: Dror

abstract: The name of two different youth organizations, disconnected geographically, but related to each other ideologically and politically. The term dror means “freedom.” The Zionist Socialist Federation “Dror” originated in Kiev, where a group of Jewish youth began to evolve into an organization on the eve of World War I. The group chose the name ‘Et Livnot (A Time to Build) in 1914; among its leaders were Ze’ev Zelikin and Yesha‘yah Pisarevski.

imgDesc: Members of Frayhayt, a founding organization of the Dror movement, at a summer camp, Byten, Poland (now Byten’, Bel.), 1932. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Zionist

text: Kiev

text: Russia

text: land of Israel

text: Poland

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: youth movements

text: Galicia

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Romania

text: Hungary


title: Sephardim

abstract: Sephardic Jews were a marginal element in Eastern Europe with the exception of Romanian lands, where because of their relatively larger numbers, they played a somewhat more significant role. Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, and conversos leaving those lands in later periods, did not settle in Eastern Europe. Those who did move to the region did so after settling first in Ottoman or, much less often, Italian territories. Nevertheless, some Sephardim are established as having resided in various areas of Eastern Europe, arriving from the Balkans and other regions of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Along with Iberian Jews, there were Italian, Greek or Romaniot, and Arabic- and Persian-speaking Jews who were often identified as Sephardim in Eastern Europe. In addition, Ashkenazic Jews sometimes married and assimilated into the group. (“Ashkenazi” became a common Sephardic surname.)

imgDesc: The Navons, a family of Sephardic Jews with ties to Bulgaria, on the occasion of the engagement of Ernestina (third from right), Constanța, Romania, 1919. (Centropa)

text: Ashkenazic Jews

text: trade

text: Gdańsk

text: Budapest

text: Bratislava

text: Kraków

text: Moldavia

text: Lwów

text: Kiev

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Sabbatianism

text: Land of Israel

text: Alba Iulia

text: Făgăraş

text: Târgu Mureş

text: Bohemia

text: Galicia

text: Timişoara

text: Lugoj

text: Zamość

text: Lublin

text: crafts

text: Calahora family

text: blood libel

text: Piotrków

text: Crimea

text: Bucharest

text: Craiova

text: Brăila

text: Karaite

text: Cernăuți

text: Siret

text: Suceava

text: Iaşi

text: Ploieşti

text: Kahal

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: Romania

text: Assimilation

text: Zionist

text: Holocaust

glossary:
Kahal
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Korn, Rokhl

abstract: (1898–1982), Yiddish poet and short-story writer. Raised on a farming estate called Sucha Gora (Dry Mountain) in eastern Galicia, Rokhl Korn was tutored in the classics of Polish literature. Polish was the language of her household, her neighbors, and her education. She began her literary career writing in that language in 1918, publishing two short stories, one in Nowy Dziennik, a Zionist newspaper, and another in Głos Przemyski, a socialist journal.

imgDesc: Rokhl Korn, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Przemyśl

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Yiddish literature

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Galicia

text: Russia


title: Surits, Iakov Zakharovich

abstract: (1882–1952), Soviet diplomat. Born in Dvinsk (Lat., Daugavpils), Iakov Surits became involved in revolutionary activities as early as 1899. A Bundist in 1902 and 1903, he was a Menshevik from 1903 to 1914 and an Internationalist from 1914 to 1917. Repeatedly arrested, he spent 1907 to 1910 in Siberian exile. He then emigrated abroad and studied philosophy at Berlin University. A member of the Bolshevik Party from 1917, in 1918 and 1919 he was a deputy plenipotentiary of the Bolshevik regime in Denmark and, for a short time, a member of the State Control Collegium, a body that controlled the activities of the Soviet state apparatus.

text: Soviet

text: Daugavpils

text: Bundist

text: Moscow


title: Mugur, Florin

abstract: (Mugur Legrel; 1934–1991), journalist, editor, and writer. The son of a journalist with democratic anticommunist political leanings, Florin Mugur worked as a journalist and radio editor at the beginning of his career. While his father faced difficult times when the Communist regime came to power in Romania after World War II, Mugur made his literary debut at 19, sincerely believing in the potential of the new political regime and its leftist ideology (he had already started publishing poems at the age of 14). Under the impact of the 1956 anticommunist revolution in Hungary, he protested the Romanian regime; as a result, with other young writers, he was prevented from publishing until the mid-1960s.

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Bucharest


title: Braude, Markus

abstract: (1869–1949), rabbi, educator, Zionist leader, and parliamentarian. Born in Brest-Litovsk (Brisk), Markus Braude (Mordekhai Ze’ev Broda) was raised in Lwów (Lemberg) where his maternal grandfather had been the city’s rabbi. In 1890, he enrolled at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin and at the University of Berlin, ultimately earning his doctorate in 1898 at the University of Freiburg.

text: Zionist

text: Brest

text: Lwów

text: Hildesheimer

text: Stanisławów

text: Galicia

text: Łódź

text: Tarbut

text: Warsaw

text: Poland


title: Sofer Family

abstract: Hungarian Orthodox rabbinical family. Upon the death of Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer, 1762–1839) of Pressburg (Bratislava), the community fulfilled his deathbed wish to have his eldest son, the 24-year-old Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer (also known by the German translation of his surname, Schreiber [“scribe”] and called Ketav Sofer; 1815–1871) appointed to fill his positions as rabbi and rosh yeshivah. Although Avraham’s mother was the daughter of the renowned Rabbi Akiva Eger of Posen, Ḥatam Sofer himself was quite the self-made leader, having stemmed from pious but not particularly distinguished Frankfurt lineage.

imgDesc: Visitors to the tomb of Ḥatam Sofer, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), 1974. Photograph by Jacob Roth. (YIVO)

text: Orthodox

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Bratislava

text: Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer

text: Akiva Eger

text: Posen

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Land of Israel

text: Mosheh Glasner

text: Cluj

text: historiography

text: Hungary

text: rabbinate

text: Kraków

text: Galicia

text: Hasidic

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Orthodoxy

text: Avraham Sofer

glossary: responsa kolel yeshiva Torah


title: Budapest

abstract: After 1873, the capital of Hungary. Before they were united in 1873, the city’s sections of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda were independent towns.

imgDesc: Budapest, ca. 1890.

text: Hungary

text: Yitsḥak ben Mosheh

text: Imre Szerencsés (Fortunatus)

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: Vilna

text: Sabbatianism

text: Prague

text: Edict of Toleration

text: Mosheh Kunitz

text: Mosheh Münz

text: Brody

text: trade

text: Normalschule

text: Bratislava

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: Leningrad

text: Galicia

text: Holocaust

text: crafts

text: Moritz Ullmann

text: Sámuel Wodianer

text: guilds

text: industry

text: Mosheh Münz

text: Haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Mosheh Kunitz

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Arad

text: religious reform

text: Gabriel Ullmann

text: Sabbath

text: yeshiva

text: Löw Schwab

text: Orthodox

text: Johanna Bischitz

text: Ḥayim Sofer

text: Koppel Reich

text: seminary

text: József Patai

text: Múlt és Jövo

text: Zionism

text: assimilation

text: conversion

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Moritz Bloch (Ballagi)

text: Rosenthal

text: assimilation

text: Sámuel Kohn

text: Meir Kayserling

text: Tiszaeszlár blood libel

text: Warsaw

text: Béla Kun

text: Vilmos Vázsonyi

text: Kamenets Podol’skii

text: Poland

text: Slovakia

text: Rezso Kasztner

text: Yisakhar Shelomoh Teichthal

text: Belzer

text: Auschwitz protocols

text: ghettos

text: Alexander (Sándor) Scheiber

text: Múlt és Jövo

text: Mátyás Rákosi

text: Imre Kertész

glossary: Beth Hatefutsoth, Photo Archive, Tel Aviv

subconcepts:
Early History
Population
Settlement and Residential Clustering
Occupations
Community and Religious Life
Acculturation
Politics, Power, Antisemitism
The War Years
Postwar and Contemporary Jewry


title: Tartu

abstract: (Ger., Dorpat; Rus., Derpt, also Yurev [1893–1917]), Estonian city in the province of Livonia (Ger., Livland; Rus., Lifliandiia). Tartu has traditionally been an educational and cultural center, and after 1917 it was the second largest city in the Republic of Estonia. The city had a population of 100,800 in 2005.

imgDesc: Postcard with view of the synagogue and (inset) a portrait of one of its oldest congregants, J. A. Jacobson, Tartu, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Estonia

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Russian Empire

text: Lithuania

text: Zionist

text: Holocaust

text: USSR

text: Iurii Lotman


title: Holländer, Leó

abstract: (1806–1887), community leader. Leó Holländer’s father, Mark, originally from Tarnopol, immigrated to Hungary and was the first Jew to settle in Eperjes (Prešov), a royal free city, in 1780. The wealthy merchant was elected as rosh medinah, the head of Sáros county Jewry, in which capacity he served as an influential intercessor with local and Viennese authorities. Leó was instructed by private tutors from abroad; later, he completed eight years of gymnasium studies at the famous Eperjes College. It was here that Holländer formed close ties with the local gentry, which would serve him in good stead later. In 1833, he joined Ferenc Pulszky, the budding liberal politician and future president of the Hungarian Academy, for a five-month grand tour to visit sites of antiquarian interest in Italy, where they also received the pope’s blessing. Holländer’s hobby was antiques, and he came to own one of the most important coin collections in the country, later donated to the National Museum.

text: Tarnopol

text: Hungary

text: Kraków

text: Jewish Congress

text: Pápa

text: rabbinate

text: Orthodox


title: Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna

abstract: (Jewish Social Democratic Party; ŻPS) was a political party that operated in Galicia from 1905 until 1920. Often called the “Galician Bund,” its foundation capped more than a dozen years of Jewish socialist activity in the province. Activists had formed the first Jewish Workers Party in Galicia in 1892, which though short-lived was followed by other local Jewish workers’ organizations throughout the decade, most calling themselves Brotherhood. By the time the Galician socialist party was renamed the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Silesia (PPSD) in 1897, the group (especially its assimilationist Jewish members such as Herman Diamand) had begun to oppose all forms of Jewish “separatism.” Other Jewish voices within the PPSD favoring the establishment of an autonomous Jewish division to meet the particular needs of Jewish workers were persistently defeated.

imgDesc: Delegates to the first convention of the Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna, Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now L’viv, Ukr.), 9–10 June 1905. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Silesia

text: Herman Diamand

text: Bund

text: Kraków

text: Lemberg

text: theater

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Zionist

text: Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference


title: Wawelberg, Hipolit

abstract: (1843–1901), banker and philanthropist. Hipolit Wawelberg was born in Warsaw to a banking family and graduated from the Institute of Agronomy in Marymont. In 1863, he joined the January insurgents, but after his father, Tsevi Hirsh Wawelberg, intervened he was sent to study in Berlin. When Wawelberg returned to Warsaw, he married Ludwika Bersohn (1852–1927), the daughter of industrialist Me’ir and sister of the banker and art patron Mathias Bersohn. Continuing his father’s financial activities, Wawelberg established a bank in Saint Petersburg, becoming one of the wealthiest people in the Kingdom of Poland. His financial institution, known from 1913 as Bank Zachodni, existed until 1939.

imgDesc: Group portrait on the occasion of a visit by Ignacy Mościcki, president of the Polish Republic, to a summer camp for Polish and Jewish children named after banker and philanthropist Hipolit Wawelberg, near the Kampinos Forest, Poland, 1930. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: banking

text: Mathias Bersohn

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kingdom of Poland

text: Yankev Shatzky

text: Janusz Korczak

text: Lwów

text: Vilna

text: pogroms

text: Russia


title: Museums and Exhibitions

abstract: The history of Jewish exhibitions, both of ceremonial objects and memorabilia (generally known as Judaica) and of Jewish painting and sculpture, begins in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Essentially a postemancipation phenomenon, the founding of Jewish museums housing permanent collections, as well as the periodic display of Jewish exhibits, started in Western Europe. A portion of Isaac Strauss’s collection of Judaica was displayed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878 and, 10 years later, at the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, opened at Royal Albert Hall as well as at three other London venues. Praised by the Russian art critic V. V. Stasov in a review published in the literary journal Evreiskaia biblioteka (The Jewish Library), these forays into what the historian Richard Cohen has called “self-exposure” came to have special significance for East European Jewish culture, associated even by Western Jews with the institutionalization of memory that Jewish museums came to exemplify. Although the phenomenon of Jewish museums and exhibitions remained limited prior to World War II, it expanded considerably in the West after 1945 and moved eastward after 1989; in the twenty-first century nearly every East European capital and regional center will have its own Jewish museum.

text: painting and sculpture

text: memory

text: Gdańsk

text: Prague

text: Salomon Hugo Lieben

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Budapest

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Hungary

text: Miksa Szabolcsi

text: Ignác Goldziher

text: Mark Matveevich Antokol’skii

text: Russia

text: David Gintsburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Maksim Vinaver

text: S. An-ski

text: Kultur-lige

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Warsaw

text: Marc Chagall

text: Natan Al’tman

text: Robert Fal’k

text: Aleksandr Tyshler

text: Galicia

text: Odessa

text: Minsk

text: Budapest

text: Alfred Nossig

text: Lemberg

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Szmul Hirszenberg

text: Vilna

text: Bucharest

text: Ukraine

text: memory

text: ghettos

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Belarus

text: Marc Chagall

text: Vitsyebsk

text: Czech Republic

text: Prague

text: Hungary

text: Archives

text: Budapest

text: Latvia

text: Riga

text: Lithuania

text: Vilnius

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Kraków

text: Warsaw

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Slovakia

text: Bratislava

glossary: Diaspora Gaon


title: Wiadomości Literackie

abstract: An extremely influential literary journal, Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) appeared in Warsaw between January 1924 and September 1939 under the editorship of its founder, Mieczysław Grydzewski. Quickly outgrowing its French prototype Les Nouvelles littéraires, and evolving from a narrowly literary journal into a periodical covering a wide range of cultural, social, and political issues, both domestic and international, Wiadomości Literackie established itself as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions of interwar Poland. Although its circulation never exceeded 15,000 copies, its impact on the country’s literary, artistic, and intellectual elites can hardly be overestimated. Its standing was also enhanced by its annual literary awards, which successfully competed with state-sponsored prizes.

text: Warsaw

text: Mieczysław Grydzewski

text: Poland

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Antoni Słonimski

text: Józef Wittlin

text: Marian Hemar

text: Leo Belmont

text: Bruno Schulz

text: Szymon Askenazy

text: Marceli Handelsman


title: Pineles, Samuel

abstract: (1843–1928), Zionist leader. Samuel Pineles was born in Brody, Galicia; his father was the Hebrew writer Hirsh Mendel Pineles (1806–1870). After graduating from high school in 1860, Pineles moved to Galați, joining his family and working at a business. In 1864 he became secretary of the local committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a position he held until 1900. Hoping the organization would support the emancipation of Romanian Jews, he welcomed its diplomatic success at the Congress of Berlin (1878), but was disappointed when decisions failed to be implemented.

text: Zionist

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Galați

text: Focşani

text: Romania

text: Russia

text: Brăila

text: Chaim Weizmann

glossary:
Yishuv
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Uganda plan


title: Maxy, Max Hermann

abstract: (1895–1971), painter, set designer, and teacher. Max Hermann Maxy was born in Brăila, Romania, but grew up in Bucharest, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1916. Among his teachers were Frederic Storck and Camil Ressu.

text: Brăila

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Iaşi

text: Marcel Iancu

text: Victor Brauner

text: Ion Călugăru

text: Ilarie Voronca

text: Beniamin Fundoianu

text: Romania

text: theater

text: Prague

text: Moscow

text: Warsaw

text: Budapest

text: Ilarie Voronca


title: Debts, Communal

abstract: Jewish public bodies (communal and supracommunal councils) accumulated enormous debts running into hundreds of thousands of Polish zlotys in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were unique to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Though members of the aristocracy were sometimes lenders, the main creditors were overwhelmingly institutions of the Roman Catholic church, and some Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox bodies lent money to Jewish institutions as well. Jewish public bodies were also among the church’s most important debtors; the numerous account books specifically for Jewish debts that many monastic orders held testify to this.

text: charity

text: councils

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth


title: Shapira, Ḥayim Naḥman

abstract: (1895–1943), historian of Hebrew literature, author, and translator. Ḥayim Naḥman Shapira was born in Minsk. His father was the chief rabbi of Kovno (Lith., Kaunas) and his mother came from a distinguished family of rabbis. Shapira received his education at a heder and at several yeshivas. In 1921 he began to study Semitic philology in Vienna, earning his doctoral degree in 1925. That year, he began lecturing in that field at the University of Kaunas, and was promoted to professorial rank in 1931. He was also involved in Lithuanian Zionist activities and served on the boards of numerous cultural and literary societies. In 1935, he was a delegate to the Zionist Congress.

text: Hebrew literature

text: Minsk

text: Kaunas

text: heder

text: yeshivas

text: Zionist

text: Mapu

text: Lithuania

text: Holocaust

text: Haskalah

text: Judenrat

glossary: heder Haskalah


title: Mints, Isaak Izrailevich

abstract: (1896–1991), historian and Communist Party activist. Isaak Mints was born in the village of Krinichki, Ekaterinoslav province. As a youth, he participated in the revolutionary movement and circulated propaganda to workers in Verkhnedneprovsk and Ekaterinoslav. In 1917, he joined the Bolshevik Party and became a Red Guard, joining the Red Army in 1918. He finished the war as a commissar of the Chervonnii Cossack corps.

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Moscow

text: Russian Civil War

text: anticosmopolitan campaign


title: Iaşi

abstract: (Eng. and Fr., Jassy; Yid., Yos; Heb., Yas), town in Moldavia (northeastern Romania) on the Bahlui River; an important trading center with links to Bucovina, Bessarabia, Ukraine, and Russia; capital of the former principality of Moldavia (1565–1862). The largest and most important Jewish community of Moldavia lived in Iaşi. The presence of Jews was first documented in the late sixteenth century when Sephardic Jews arrived accompanying the new rulers appointed by the Turkish sultan. The oldest tomb inscription in the local cemetery probably dates to 1610.

imgDesc: Students in a locksmithing course sponsored by ORT, Iaşi, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Moldavia

text: Romania

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Sephardic Jews

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: trade

text: crafts

text: pogroms

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Walachia

text: banking

text: servants

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: guilds

text: Hasidic Jews

text: Opatów

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: censorship

text: Haskalah

text: dress

text: Beniamin Schwarzfeld

text: Shemu’el Shmelke Taubes

text: Orthodoxy

text: Iacob Isac Niemirower

text: Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein

text: Karpel Lippe

text: theater

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Yiddish literature

text: Max Wexler

text: Litman Ghelerter

text: Iacob Groper

text: Horia Carp

text: Brociner

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Iacob Groper

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Karpel Lippe

text: Russia

text: Bucharest

text: Yosef Şafran

text: yeshiva

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Zionist organizations

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Itsik Manger

text: Isac Ludo

text: Beniamin Fundoianu

text: Transnistria

glossary:
gzeyres takh vetat
Haskalah
maskil
Rebbe
Yishuv
Talmud
yeshiva
Torah
Talmud Torah


title: Jedwabne

abstract: (Yedvabneh) is situated in the Mazowsze region of Poland, 20 kilometers northeast of Łomża and 45 kilometers west of Tykocin (Tiktin). Jews first came to Jedwabne from Tykocin and were initially subject to that town’s Jewish communal authority. In 1770, when the wooden synagogue of Jedwabne was built, 387 Jews out of a total population of 450 lived in the community, a place known for its shoemakers.

imgDesc: Yiddish map of Jedwabne. From Sefer Yedvabneh, edited by Julius L. Baker and Jacob L. Baker (Jerusalem; New York: Yedwabner Societies in Israel and the United States, 1980). (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Łomża

text: Tykocin

text: pogroms

text: Soviet Union


title: Margolis, Osher Leibovich

abstract: (1891–1976), Soviet historian and literary critic. Margolis (later Margulis) was born in Rovno (Rivne), Ukraine. He graduated from the history department of Kiev University and taught Jewish history at the Jewish Pedagogical Institute in Kiev in the early 1920s. At the end of the 1920s, he headed the historical section of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. At this time, he was also affiliated with the Jewish Section of the Moscow-based Communist University of the Peoples of the West, known in Yiddish as the Mayrevke.

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

text: Rivne

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Haskalah

text: kahal

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Eynikayt

text: USSR

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Meir Wiener

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

glossary: Haskalah kahal


title: Orshanski, Ber

abstract: (1883–1945), Yiddish writer and literary historian. Born in Horodok, Belorussia, Ber Orshanski received a traditional education until the age of 16. From 1902 to 1906 he lived in Riga, where he joined the Bund. Subsequently he moved to Vilna, where he wrote and published his first Yiddish plays. Between 1910 and 1913, Orshanski worked as a proofreader at a number of Vilna-based newspapers, including Vilner vokhnblat (Vilna Weekly), edited by Lipman Levin. Orshanski also edited an almanac, Der shnayder (The Tailor), in 1913.

text: Riga

text: Bund

text: Vilna

text: Lipman Levin

text: Vitebsk

text: Moscow

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Yashe Bronshteyn

text: Der Nister

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Yiddish literature

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

text: Poland

text: State Yiddish Theater

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Brokhes, Rokhl

abstract: (1880–1942), Yiddish prose writer. Rokhl Brokhes was born in Minsk. With the encouragement of her father, Volf Brokhes, a maskil, she learned Hebrew and could read modern literature in that language. Her father died when she was nine, and soon after his death, Brokhes went to work as a seamstress. Later she taught needleworking at the Minsk Jewish Vocational School for Girls.

text: prose

text: Minsk

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Kraków

text: Der yud

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Russia


title: Adalberg, Samuel

abstract: (1868–1939), paremiologist (collector of proverbs), Polish state official, and advocate for assimilated Jews. Born in Warsaw, Samuel Adalberg received his elementary education at the Szkoła Realna (1878–1888), the first modern school widely attended by Warsaw Jews. There he was regarded highly by the principal, Samuel Dickstein, and also formed a friendship with Shemu’el Poznański, who later became rabbi of a progressive synagogue and a social activist.

text: proverbs

text: Warsaw

text: Samuel Dickstein

text: Shemu’el Poznański

text: Ignatz Bernstein

text: Hipolit Wawelberg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews

text: Poland

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Zionists


title: Făgăraş

abstract: Town in central Romania, in the Făgăraş Depression on the Olt River, and northwest of Braşov. The first documented reference to Făgăraş (Ger., Fogarasch; Hun., Fogaras) dates to 1291; in the second half of the seventeenth century it was the seat of the Transylvanian legislative assembly. At the end of the same century (1694–1700), the first factory in Transylvania was established near Făgăraş (the glassworks in Porumbacul de Sus), and was leased to the Jews Iacob Fincz, Abraham Veider, Abraham Naphtali, and Solomon.

text: Romania

text: Braşov

text: Transylvania

text: János Rónai

text: Zionist movement

text: Lemberg

text: Sibiu

text: Congress of Jews from Hungary and Transylvania

text: Orthodox

text: charity

text: Holocaust


title: Yom, Ha-

abstract: Russia’s (and the world’s) first Hebrew daily. In 1886, Ha-Yom was founded, published, and edited by the veteran journalist and author Yehudah Leib Kantor, who felt a daily newspaper was necessary and possible in addition to the weeklies Ha-Melits (then published in Saint Petersburg) and Ha-Tsefirah (published in Warsaw). Ha-Yom was published in Saint Petersburg beginning on 31 January (12 February, according to the Gregorian calendar) 1886.

text: Russia

text: Yehudah Leib Kantor

text: Ha-Melits

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Warsaw

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: David Frishman

text: Yehudah Leib-Binyamin Katzenelson

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon


title: Shtrom, Der

abstract: Yiddish literary journal published in Moscow from 1922 to 1924. The Moscow School for Yiddish Printers, founded in 1922, issued all but the first February issue of Der shtrom (The Stream), which featured a cover designed by Marc Chagall. The journal’s motto cited the Kiev poet Osher Shvartsman, killed in action as a Red Army soldier: “but I can hear that under the cliff / a stream is running and flowing.” Although it was not an official organ of a Soviet organization, Der shtrom became the first Soviet Yiddish literary periodical. Its ideology was marked by the iconoclastic orthography introduced by Communist language planners, such as Ayzik Zaretski, in 1920.

imgDesc: Der shtrom, no. 2 (1923). Illustration by Marc Chagall. The Museum of Modern Art. (Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Donation of Elaine Lustig Cohen, 158.2001.B. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Marc Chagall © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.)

text: literary journal

text: Moscow

text: Marc Chagall

text: Kiev

text: Ayzik Zaretski

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Der emes

text: Der Nister

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Shmuel-Nisn Godiner

text: Itsik Kipnis

text: M. Daniel

text: Avrom Vevyorke

text: Shmuel Persov

text: Izi Kharik

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Ukraine

text: Kharkov

text: Di royte velt


title: Wojdowski, Bohdan

abstract: (1930–1994), prose writer, publicist, and critic. Bohdan (originally Dawid) Wojdowski was the founder, in 1991, of the Masada Cultural Foundation for Jewish culture and editor of its journal, Masada (its only issue appeared in 1991). A member of the editorial boards of Przegląd Kulturalny and Współczesność, he also wrote for Teatr. After studying Polish literature in postwar Warsaw, Wojdowski made his literary debut in the 1950s. A Warsaw ghetto survivor, he committed suicide in 1994.

text: Warsaw

text: Holocaust

text: ghetto life

text: memory


title: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

abstract: (Przysucha; 1765–1827), important Hasidic leader in Poland. Simḥah Bunem was born in Wodzisław, where his father was a magid. Simḥah Bunem studied in the yeshivas of Mattersdorf (in Hungary; now Mattersberg, Austria) and Nikolsburg (Mikulov, Moravia), and his first Hasidic mentors were Mosheh Leib of Sasov (1745–1807) and Yisra’el the Magid of Kozhenits (Kozienice; ca. 1737–1814).

imgDesc: Tomb of Hasidic leader Simḥah Bunem of Pshishke, Przysucha, Poland, ca. 1928. Photograph by L. Dnedecki. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Mikulov

text: Moravia

text: Mosheh Leib of Sasov

text: Yisra’el the Magid of Kozhenits

text: Bergson

text: Gdańsk

text: Hasidism

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Pshiskhe

text: Yehudah Leib

text: Prague

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: Ger

text: Aleksander

text: Izhbits

text: Chekhanov

text: Vurke

glossary: magid rebbe tsadik Torah Talmud Maimonides


title: Mandelsberg-Schildkraut, Bella

abstract: (1901–1943), teacher and historian. Bella Mandelsberg-Schildkraut (or Szyldkraut) was one of the few women among the nearly 70 students who earned masters’ degrees with dissertations on Polish Jewish history at the University of Warsaw between 1919 and 1939. An economic historian who studied with Jan Kochanowski, Mandelsberg wrote her thesis, “The Socio-economic and Public-legal History of Lublin’s Jews in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century, with Emphasis on the Reign of Władysław IV,” between 1926 and 1928; the manuscript remains at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

text: Warsaw

text: Lublin

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: TSYSHO

text: YIVO

text: Russia


title: Zjednoczenie

abstract: Assimilationist student group in Poland. Organized activity of groups of “assimilationist” Jewish students and academicians had taken place in the major cities of Congress Poland and Galicia as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. The members of these groups called themselves “Polish youth of Jewish origin.” One such group, called Zjednoczenie (Union), operated in Lwów, and a similar group called Żagiew (Torch) operated in Warsaw. Both groups maintained that the patriotism of Polish Jews had been undermined by the rise of Zionism. They explained that they would attempt to resolve the “Jewish problem” by seeking equal political rights for Jews and through economic changes, and voiced their objection to the extensive use of Yiddish as well as to Hebrew.

text: Assimilationist

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Zionism

text: Land of Israel

text: antisemitism


title: Levin, Yehudah Leib (rabbi)

abstract: (1894–1971), rabbi. Born in Nikopol’, Ekaterinoslav province, Yehudah Leib Levin studied at the Slobodka yeshiva and then in a Jewish teachers’ seminary in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Dnipropetrovs’k). He taught Jewish studies in Ekaterinoslav until 1923, when he was invited to take up the post of rabbi in Grishino (Krasnoarmeiskoe). He remained in that city until the German invasion of the Soviet Union, subsequently evacuating to Uzbekistan and then returning to Krasnoarmeiskoe in late 1944.

text: Slobodka yeshiva

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Soviet Union

text: Solomon Shlifer

text: Moscow

text: Kol Ya‘akov Yeshiva

text: antisemitism

text: Revista cultului mozaic


title: Freund, Samuel

abstract: (1794–1881), rabbi, Torah scholar. Born in Křenice (Krimnitz) near Touškov (Tuschkau) in western Bohemia, Samuel Freund was noted for his keen intellect and unusual memory. He studied at the Triesch (now Ťrešt’) yeshiva under El‘azar Löw (1758–1837), in Leipnik, Moravia under Barukh Fränkl-Te’omim (1760–1828), and in Prague under Betsal’el Ranschburg (1760–1820). While in Prague, he lived in the house of Koppel Frankel, the father of Zacharias Frankel, the latter of whom became the head of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, and whom Freund assisted in Talmudic studies.

text: Bohemia

text: yeshiva

text: El‘azar Löw

text: Fränkl-Te’omim

text: Prague

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

text: El‘azar Fleckeles

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Haskalah

text: Orthodoxy

text: Passover

glossary: Torah yeshiva Haskalah responsa Mishnah Musar


title: Petschek Family

abstract: Industrialists and bankers in Bohemia. The Petschek family, originally based in Kolín in central Bohemia, included captains of industry of Czech lands from the late nineteenth century. Its members reached their pinnacle of success in the period of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938).

text: Bohemia

text: Kolín

text: industry

text: Prague


title: Rostov-on-Don

abstract: Town on the Don River; administrative center of the Rostov province of Russia. In 1761, the Rostov fortress and settlement were founded, and the town gained official status in 1796.

text: Russia

text: trade

text: industry

text: banking

text: transport

text: Poliakov

text: crafts

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Zionism

text: crown rabbi

text: pogrom

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Odessa

text: Lubavitch

text: yeshiva

text: civil war

text: Kultur-lige

text: Soviet

text: Evsektsiia

text: Leningrad

text: Anticosmopolitan Campaign

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Holocaust

text: Joint Distribution Committee

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
numerus clausus
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
rebbe
yeshiva


title: Weizmann, Chaim

abstract: (1874–1952), chemist, president of the World Zionist Organization, and first president of the State of Israel. Born in Motol, Russia, Chaim Weizmann received a typical Jewish education from a private tutor (melamed) and later went to high school in nearby Pinsk. On graduation he went to university in Darmstadt and Berlin, receiving a doctorate from the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, in 1898. Weizmann was initially a practical and cultural Zionist. At the Eighth Zionist Congress in 1907, however, he proclaimed a new position, known as Synthetic Zionism, a form followed in later years by many other East European Zionists. This new approach meant a pragmatic attitude toward the three classic trends in Zionist thought—political, spiritual, and practical—aiming to integrate all three while giving preference to the one or the other, according to circumstances. Cultural activities were particularly dear to Weizmann: in 1913, 1918, and 1925 he participated in steps that ultimately brought about the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in the 1930s he initiated a scientific institute that later became the Weizmann Institute of Science in Reḥovot, Israel. Nevertheless, from 1917 on, Weizmann also embraced political Zionism.

imgDesc: Chaim Weizmann (left) with New York City Mayor John F. Hylan (center), and Albert Einstein during Weizmann and Einstein’s fundraising tour on behalf of the Hebrew University; New York City, ca. 1925. (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Pinsk

text: Zionist


title: Hildesheimer, Esriel

abstract: (1820–1899), rabbi and scholar. German-born Esriel (‘Asri’el) Hildesheimer set out upon his rabbinical career in 1846. By that time he had completed his training under the tutelage of Ya‘akov Ettlinger—the preeminent contemporary German Orthodox halakhist—and received a doctoral degree from the University of Halle. He spent the years 1846–1851 as secretary of the community in his hometown of Halberstadt before being appointed rabbi of Eisenstadt, the well-known Jewish settlement in the Burgenland section of western Hungary. There he founded and developed a famous post–primary school yeshiva that combined intensive Torah learning with a full range of secular studies.

text: Eisenstadt

text: Burgenland

text: Hungary

text: yeshiva

text: Orthodoxy

text: seminary

text: Jewish Congress

text: assimilation

text: Breslau

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

glossary: yeshiva Torah Neolog responsa


title: Bernstein-Cohen, Miriam

abstract: (1895–1991), actor, Hebrew writer, poet, and translator. Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was born in Kishinev. Her father, the physician Ya‘akov Bernstein-Cohen (1859–1929), was a Russian Zionist leader. The images and sounds of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom that shocked Bessarabian Jews were embedded in her memory and recorded in her autobiographical work, Ke-Tipah ba-yam (Like a Drop in the Ocean; 1971). After the pogrom her family moved to Kharkov, where Bernstein-Cohen attended the German gymnasium, and where she acted, for the first time, in plays staged at her school.

text: Kishinev

text: Kharkov

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Habimah

text: theater


title: Krymchaks

abstract: Indigenous Rabbinite Jewish community of the Crimean Peninsula. The term Krymchak (also Krimchak; “inhabitant of Crimea”) was first introduced by Russians following the annexation of Crimea in 1783; the name was chosen to distinguish them from Karaites as well as from the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe. Gradually the members of the community, whose language is Judeo-Crimean Tatar, also began to refer to themselves by this term, their previous self-appellation of Syrael (Israel) surviving residually in their folk poetry. Officially, in Crimean Tatar, both Rabbinite and Karaite Jews were called Yahudiler, but in the unofficial everyday language the pejorative term Chufutlar (“Yids”) was applied to both groups. Rabbinites were called Zülüflü Chufutlar (“Yids” with sidelocks) and the Karaites Zülüfsüz Chufutlar (“Yids” without sidelocks).

imgDesc: Crimea, ca. 2000.

text: Crimea

text: Karaites

text: Ashkenazic

text: Khazars

text: Kiev

text: Society for the Promotion of Culture

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Soviet

text: Yitsḥak Katezenelson

text: Holocaust

glossary:
Karaites
diaspora
Talmud
Torah
Talmud Torah


title: Farbstein, Yehoshu‘a Heshel

abstract: (1870–1948), Zionist leader. Born in Warsaw, Yehoshu‘a Heshel Farbstein was an active member of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and a delegate to the First World Zionist Congress in 1897. Earlier, Farbstein had been involved in ill-fated attempts to gain a commitment from Theodor Herzl that Zionism would not be contrary to Jewish religious law. After the founding of Mizraḥi in 1902, Farbstein participated in its activities and struggled against members of the organization who supported withdrawal from the Zionist Federation.

text: Warsaw

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionism

text: Mizraḥi

text: Poland

text: Land of Israel

text: Folkist Party

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Leon Lewite

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Agudas Yisroel


title: Tarle, Evgenii Viktorovich

abstract: (1874–1955), historian. In 1893, Evgenii Tarle entered the Kiev University Historical-Philological Department. As a young man, he drew close to the Social Democrats and published articles in left-wing newspapers. In May 1900, he was arrested at an illegal gathering. After a month and a half of imprisonment, Tarle was exiled to Kherson province, then to Warsaw. There he finished his master’s degree, having written his thesis on Thomas More’s social views. In 1903, Tarle was appointed privatdocent at Saint Petersburg University, where he became one of the most popular lecturers. In 1913–1918 he held a professorship at Iur’ev University.

text: Kiev

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: anticosmopolitan campaign


title: Gutfreund, Oto

abstract: (1889–1927), Czech sculptor. Oto Gutfreund was born in Dvůr Králové nad Labem. He attended local schools, studied ceramics at Bechyné from 1903 to 1906, and then took up applied arts at Umprum (the school of applied arts) in Prague between 1906 and 1909. While in Paris in 1909–1910, he studied at the Grande Chaumière under Émile Antoine Bourdelle, visiting Belgium, England, and Germany before returning to Prague in 1911.

text: Prague


title: Minsk

abstract: Capital of the Republic of Belarus since 1991. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, Minsk was part of Lithuania; from the mid-sixteenth century it belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1793, the city was annexed to the Russian Empire and became the capital of Minsk province. From 1920 to 1991, Minsk served as the capital of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR).

imgDesc: Members of the Bund on a picnic, Minsk, 1910. (YIVO)

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russian Empire

text: Troki

text: Council

text: Brest

text: trade

text: leaseholding

text: yeshiva

text: Aryeh Leib ben Asher Gintsburg

text: Lithuania

text: Pale of Settlement

text: guilds

text: Misnagdic

text: Hasidism

text: Kloyz

text: heders

text: OZE

text: TOZ

text: Vilna

text: Lev Levanda

text: Haskalah

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Zionist movement

text: Aron Vainshtein

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: USSR

text: Evsektsiia

text: Shtern

text: State Yiddish Theater

text: Zelik Akselrod

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Izi Kharik

text: crafts

text: industry

text: transportation

text: Białystok

text: Hersh Smolar

text: Judenrat

text: Holocaust

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

glossary:
yeshiva
Pale of Settlement
Talmud
Torah
Talmud Torah
maskil
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
kehilah
aktion


title: Wiślicki, Wacław

abstract: (1882–1935), economist, Sejm deputy, representative of the Central Office of the Merchants Association in Poland, a Jewish organization committed to cooperation with the Polish authorities. Born in Warsaw and raised in an acculturated environment, Wacław Wiślicki attended the Leopold Kronenberg High School for Commerce and then studied economics in Brussels. In 1907, tsarist authorities arrested him for supporting the revolutionary youth movement.

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: antisemitism

text: pogroms

text: Romania

text: Holocaust

text: Soviet Union


title: Martov, L.

abstract: (Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum; 1873–1923), leader and ideologue of the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP). While attending university in Saint Petersburg (1891–1892), Martov became a “propagandist,” conducting political educational work among small circles of workers. Arrested and sent to Vilna (1893–1895), he joined Jewish Social Democrats in developing and practicing the strategy of “agitation,” seeking to use the workers’ own grievances to foment strikes and draw their attention to capitalist exploitation and tsarist repression. Next, he joined Vladimir Lenin and Aleksandr Potresov in founding the Union for the Emancipation of Labor and, after another arrest and three years in Siberian exile, in publishing the journal Iskra (1900), which advocated the creation of a unified, politically disciplined social democratic party. Disagreements among Iskra’s editors over the organization of the party and its role in revolution led to an open confrontation between Lenin and Martov at the Second Congress of the RSDWP (July 1903), which ushered in the historic split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Russia

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Melits

text: Razsvet

text: pogrom

text: antisemitism

text: Bund


title: Galicia

abstract: Region in southeastern Poland and northwestern Ukraine. Galicia existed as a crown land of the Habsburg Empire from the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772 until the end of World War I in 1918. (The name Galicia, or Galizien, was derived from Halicz, a city with nearby salt mines.) It included the districts of Zamość, Sandomierz, and Chełm until these were annexed to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1809. During the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), Austria gained back the regions of Tarnopol (Ukr., Ternopil’) to the east, which it had ceded to the Russian Empire in 1809, and Kraków to the west. Kraków itself gained the status of a free city and remained so until after the Polish uprising of 1846, when it became an Austrian territory.

imgDesc: Galicia. Boundaries shown are ca. 1914.

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Zamość

text: Sandomierz

text: Chełm

text: Warsaw

text: Ternopil’

text: Russian Empire

text: Kraków

text: Hasidic movement

text: Haskalah

text: Belz

text: Sandz

text: Ruzhin

text: Yehudah Leib Mieses

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Me’ir Letteris

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Kraków

text: L’viv

text: Brody

text: Rzeszów

text: Drogobych

text: Tarnopol

text: Buchach

text: Ivano-Frankivs’k

text: Kolomyia

text: reforms

text: crafts

text: industry

text: agriculture

text: kahal

text: Normalschul

text: Herz Homberg

text: Ya‘akov Orenstein

text: Shelomoh Kluger

text: Yosef Sha’ul Natanson

text: Tsevi Hirsh Chajes

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Bucovina

text: satires

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Salomon Buber

text: Abraham Kohn

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: seminary

text: Hungary

text: religious reform

text: Orthodox

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Kraków

text: Agudas Akhim

text: Wilhelm Feldman

text: Alfred Nossig

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Karl Emil Franzos

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Drogobych

text: Nathan Birnbaum

text: Mikra Kodesh

text: Zionist

text: Land of Israel

text: Drogobych

text: Żydowska Partja Socjalno-Demokratyczna

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: industry

text: crafts

text: agriculture

text: banking

text: newspaper

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Yiddish theater

text: World War I

text: Hungary

text: Moravia

text: Kiev

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: pogroms

text: Poland

text: Haskalah

glossary:
Haskalah
kahal
maskil
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Ḥoveve Tsiyon

subconcepts: From Annexation until Emancipation (1772–1867)

subconcepts: From Emancipation through the End of Empire (1867–1918)


title: Wittlin, Józef

abstract: (1896–1976), poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. After serving in the army during World War I, Józef Wittlin studied philosophy and linguistics in Vienna and in Lwów. A follower of expressionism in 1919–1920, he later joined Skamander, a moderately innovative group of poets headed by Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski, and the circle of writers associated with the weekly Wiadomości Literackie.

imgDesc: Józef Wittlin and his wife Halina, on their honeymoon, Lwów, 1924. (YIVO)

text: Lwów

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Antoni Słonimski

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Poland

text: Mieczysław Grydzewski

text: Joseph Roth

text: Holocaust

text: Jakub Appenszlak


title: Lieben, Salomon Hugo

abstract: (1881–1942), Jewish scholar, founder of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Salomon Lieben was born in Prague, studied in Germany and at the German University in Prague, and taught Jewish religion at various secondary schools in Prague. He was actively involved with that city’s Jewish community and in its ḥevrah kadisha’, the burial society.

text: Prague

text: assimilation

text: David Oppenheim

text: El‘azar Fleckeles

text: Bohemia and Moravia


title: Mezei, Mór

abstract: (1836–1926), journalist, lawyer, politician, and member of the Hungarian parliament. Mór Mezei concluded his secondary studies in Pest, where he also studied law. As one of the leading—and perhaps most important—figures and ideologists of the assimilationist movement among Jews in the nineteenth century, he was a founder of the Izraelita Magyar Egylet (National Israelite Magyar Association) in 1861, of which he became the secretary and finally its chairman.

text: Jewish Congress

text: Budapest

text: Mór Wahrmann


title: Lilientalowa, Regina

abstract: (1877–1924), ethnographer, folklorist, and writer. Born in Zawichost near Sandomierz, Regina Lilientalowa settled in Warsaw after her marriage. She was at first self-taught, but completed her education by taking clandestine academic courses at the so-called “Flying University.” Influenced by her teacher, sociologist Ludwik Krzywicki, Lilientalowa developed a particular interest in Jewish folklore and published her early studies in Poland’s leading anthropological journals Wisła (Vistula) and Lud (Folk) from 1898 until 1905. She never held an academic position.

text: Sandomierz

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Majer Bałaban

text: demons

text: Jewish holidays

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Izraelita

text: assimilation


title: Adam

abstract: Monthly journal, issued in Bucharest from 1929 to 1940. Adam followed the traditions of the Jewish cultural press in Romania, and in this sense was similar to the publications Anuar pentru israeliți (Yearbook for Israelites) and Sinai: Anuar de studii judaice (Sinai: Judaic Studies Yearbook). Adam was distinct, however, in that it gave particular attention to literary matters and political issues relevant to Romanian Jews. After 1932, its editors dedicated a significant share of each issue to articles on the rise of antisemitism in Nazi Germany and to similar developments in Romania.

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Isac Ludo

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Horia Carp

text: Felix Aderca

text: Ury Benador

text: M. Blecher

text: Ion Călugăru

text: Emil Dorian

text: Beniamin Fundoianu

text: Litman Ghelerter

text: Meyer Abraham Halevy

text: Moise Ronetti-Roman

text: Schwarzfeld

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Adolphe Stern

text: Ilarie Voronca

text: Iacob Isac Niemirower

text: Şafran

text: Iosif Iser

text: R. Rubin

text: Max Hermann Maxy

text: Marcel Iancu


title: Trunk, Yekhiel Yeshaye

abstract: (1887–1961), Yiddish and Hebrew writer. On his paternal side, Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk was descended from an important Hasidic family; his great-grandfather was the tsadik Shayele Kutner, and his grandfather the rabbi of Kutno. Trunk’s father inherited a fortune from his own father-in-law, and Trunk himself married a grandchild of Y. Prywes, the “iron king” of Poland, from one of the country’s richest Jewish families. Trunk grew up in Łódź and studied with private tutors.

text: Hasidic

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: YIVO

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Yiddish criticism

text: psychoanalysis

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Bund

text: folklore

text: Yiddish literature

text: Chełm

text: Hershele Ostropolyer

text: Shabetai Tsevi

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov


title: Messianism

abstract: The belief in a coming era of ultimate justice and world peace inaugurated by a redeemer who will liberate Jews from their exilic state, a principle of Jewish faith since classical times. Premodern expressions of Jewish messianism include analysis of classical prooftexts or astronomical portents to predict the date or contours of the messianic age; literary apocalyptic writings initiating spiritual, quasi-military, or political actions to pave the way for the messianic era; and fixing on a particular individual as the awaited messiah.

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: communism

text: Zionism

text: Ashkenazic

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: Avigdor Kara

text: David Gans

text: Yesha‘yahu ha-Levi Horowitz

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: pogroms

text: Sabbatians

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Berekhyah Berakh ben Yitsḥak

text: Land of Israel

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

text: Lwów

text: Pinsk

text: Vilna

text: Lublin

text: Eisenstadt

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref

text: Ḥayim Malakh

text: Kalisz

text: Yehudah Ḥasid ha-Levi

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Jakub Frank

text: Hasidic

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Avraham Kalisker

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov

text: Tarniks

text: Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer

text: liturgy

text: religious reform

text: Arkadii Kremer

text: Bund

text: Zionist movement

text: Russia

text: Romania

text: Satmar Hasidim

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: Holocaust

text: Lubavitch

subconcepts:
Medieval Messianism
Early Modern Messianism
Sabbatianism in Eastern Europe
Modern-Era Messianism


title: Yudishe Togblat, Dos

abstract: Orthodox daily published in Warsaw from 20 September 1929 until World War II. Dos yudishe togblat (The Jewish Daily) succeeded where previous attempts to publish an Orthodox daily in Poland had failed. One reason for the earlier failures was the unwillingness of a part of the Orthodox population, especially Hasidim, to read newspapers. The situation changed when the Gerer rebbe, Avraham Mordekhai Alter (1866–1948), accepted the concept of an Orthodox paper to counteract the influence of the Jewish secular and non-Jewish press on Jewish readers.

text: Orthodox

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Hasidim

text: Gerer

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Nathan Birnbaum

text: Yisroel Emyot

glossary: rebbe Torah


title: Askenazy, Szymon

abstract: (1866–1935), Polish historian and diplomat. Szymon Askenazy was born in Zawichost, southwest of Lublin, to a wealthy Orthodox family. He was a descendant of Tsevi Hirsh ben Ya‘akov Ashkenazi (1660–1718), known as Ḥakham Tsevi, who had held positions as a rabbi in Altona, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Lwów. Askenazy studied law at Warsaw University, graduating in 1887, and subsequently took up history at the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate.

text: Lublin

text: Lwów

text: Warsaw

text: assimilation

text: Hipolit Wawelberg

text: Poland

text: Yankev Shatzky

text: Galicia

text: historiography

text: Gdańsk

text: Russia

text: chess


title: Gintsburg, Aryeh Leib ben Asher

abstract: (1695/96–1785), better known as Sha’agat Aryeh (or by his French name, Lion Asser; his surname also spelled Günzberg), Talmudic scholar. Born in Lithuania to a father who was the rabbi of Minsk, Gintsburg was teaching in that city’s yeshiva by 1733. Though he was well respected for his learning, Gintsburg’s severe criticisms of some decisions of his peers were not well received. His debate with Yeḥi’el Heilprin, the rabbi of Minsk and head of the yeshiva, on the role of pilpul (dialectical reasoning) in the teaching of Talmud—Gintsburg practiced it, but refused to mention it in his writings—probably resulted in his having to give up his position in Minsk in 1742.

text: Lithuania

text: Minsk

text: yeshiva

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: Vilna

text: Gaon

glossary: yeshiva pilpul responsa


title: Meisel, Maurycy

abstract: (1872–ca. 1942), politican and community leader. Maurycy Meisel completed secondary school in Warsaw, where he worked in a large trading house as a manager. Beginning in 1897, he was a board member of the Association of Trade Workers. In 1905, he took part in the fight for the Polish character of schools, and during World War I he was active on a committee assisting refugees. Elected in 1919 to the city council of Warsaw from the lists of the Orthodox and merchant organizations, he was particularly active in the public health commission. From 1927 to 1934 he again served on the council, this time as a representative of the Jewish National Bloc.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Ukraine


title: Po‘ale Tsiyon

abstract: In the early twentieth century, the Labor Zionist Po‘ale Tsiyon (Workers of Zion) organization evolved from various groups in Eastern Europe that followed the Labor Zionist teachings of Naḥman Syrkin and Ber Borokhov and the secular nationalism of Khayim Zhitlovski. Seeking to base Zionism on the Jewish proletariat, the Po‘ale Tsiyon rejected territorialism, Bundism, and assimilationist Marxism as solutions to the Jewish Question. Straddling the boundaries of revolutionary socialism and Jewish nationalism, the movement then experienced a large number of splits and disagreements over such issues as Palestine versus the Diaspora, Hebrew versus Yiddish, cooperation with nonproletarian Zionists, support for the USSR, and over whether pioneering zeal or objective historical conditions would serve to build a Jewish home in Palestine.

imgDesc: Tearoom of a Po‘ale Tsiyon home for workers in the Praga suburb, Warsaw, ca. 1920s. On the wall are portraits of Karl Marx and Ber Borokhov. (YIVO)

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Zionism

text: Russia

text: Bund

text: Russian Revolution of 1905

text: World War I

text: Russian Revolution

text: Poland

text: TSYSHO

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Raphael Mahler

text: Bella Mandelsberg-Schildkraut

text: Artur Eisenbach

text: Brest

text: Chełm

text: Będzin

text: Kalisz

text: Birobidzhan

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Dror

text: Danzig

text: Warsaw


title: Rachmilewitz, Naḥman

abstract: (1876–1941), politician and public figure. Naḥman Rachmilewitz (Nachmanas Rachmilevičius) was born in Volkovysk, close to Hrodna (now in Belarus). In 1896, he graduated from classical secondary school in Bensheim, south of Hessen, Germany, and from 1896 to 1900 studied humanities and sciences at universities in Königsberg and Heidelberg, receiving his doctorate. After graduation he settled in Vilna, where he was active in Jewish public life.

text: Hrodna

text: Belarus

text: Königsberg

text: Vilna

text: World War I

text: Lithuanian Republic

text: Shimshon Rosenboim

text: Jakub Wygodzki

text: General Zionists


title: Sicher, Gustav

abstract: (1880–1960), rabbi and Zionist activist. Gustav (Benjamin Ze’ev) Sicher was born in Klatovy, in the Czech lands. He studied medicine in Vienna but decided to become a rabbi. Later he completed a doctoral dissertation in philosophy under František Drtina at the Charles University in Prague.

text: Zionist

text: Czech lands

text: Prague

text: Mizraḥi

text: Židovská Strana

text: Białystok

text: Lwów

text: Avraham Kook

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Franz Werfel

text: Max Brod

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Holocaust


title: Wygodzki, Jakub

abstract: (1855–1941), physician, public leader, and Zionist activist. Jakub Wygodzki was born in Bobruisk (Bobruysk). In 1860, his family moved to Vilna, where he received a traditional Jewish education. He completed his high school studies in Marijampole and then attended medical school at the University of Saint Petersburg. Following additional studies in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, he returned to Vilna, where he served as a gynecologist, pediatrician, and medical researcher and writer. He also established and chaired the Society of Jewish Physicians.

imgDesc: Jakub Wygodzki (second from left) as a prisoner of war, Chersk, Russia, 1917. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Bobruisk

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Poland

text: Lithuania


title: Ravitch, Melech

abstract: (Melekh Ravitsh; pseudonym of Zekharye-Khone Bergner; 1893–1976); Yiddish poet, essayist, playwright, and cultural activist. Melech Ravitch was born in Radymno, eastern Galicia, into a home where the main spoken languages were Polish and German. Ravitch received a secular general education, including business school, as well as a limited traditional Jewish education. Influenced by the Czernowitz Language Conference, he began to write in Yiddish; his initial pieces appeared in 1910 in Yiddish publications in Galicia. He lived in Lemberg and Vienna, where he worked in a bank, and during World War I served in the army.

imgDesc: Ruinengroz (Ruin Grass), by Melech Ravitch. (Brno: Jüdischer Buch- und Kunstverlag M. Hickel, 1916 or 1917). (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Czernowitz Language Conference

text: Lemberg

text: poetry

text: Shmuel Yankev Imber

text: Warsaw

text: Perets Markish

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Khalyastre

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw

text: Yiddish literature

text: Poland

text: Israel Joshua Singer

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Folks-tsaytung


title: Gesundheit, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1816–1878), chief rabbi of the Warsaw community, businessman, and Talmudic scholar. The son of a wealthy merchant, Ya‘akov Gesundheit grew up in the Warsaw suburb of Praga. He worked as a merchant and became one of the most outspoken opponents of Hasidism during the period in which the movement grew into the leading force among observant Jews in Warsaw.

text: Warsaw

text: Hasidism

text: yeshiva

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Dov Berush Meisels

glossary:
yeshiva
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud


title: Biała

abstract: Town in southern Poland, from 1945 in the province of Silesia. The development of Biała was closely tied to that of neighboring Bielsko (situated in what was the Austrian part of Silesia), and was mainly related to textile production and cross-border trade. The presence of Jews in Biała was documented in 1697, when a robber from the nearby mountains confessed that about three years earlier he had sold stolen goods to a Jewish broker in Biała. A reference to a Jewish leaseholder is dated 1715.

text: Poland

text: Silesia

text: Bielsko

text: trade

text: kahal

text: Orthodoxy

text: Sandz

text: Mizraḥi

glossary:
de non tolerandis Judaeis
kahal


title: Reifmann, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1818–1894), Hebrew writer and scholar, historian of ancient Jewish literature, the Bible, and Jewish philosophy. Ya‘akov Reifmann was born in Łagów, Poland. He spent his childhood in nearby Opatów, where he acquired a basic religious education, but subsequently spent most of his life—including the days of his extensive and highly diversified scholastic achievements—in Szczebrzeszyn, near Zamość, where he relocated after marrying. There he was introduced to classic Jewish philosophical literature and was profoundly influenced by Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Reifmann, who lived most of his life in poverty, learned German on his own, and, like others who followed the Haskalah, read the writings of German philosophers, which introduced him to scholarly research methods.

text: Poland

text: Opatów

text: Zamość

text: Haskalah

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Passover

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Salomon Buber

glossary: Maimonides Haskalah Talmud


title: Hemar, Marian

abstract: (1901–1972), poet, satirist, and author of cabaret pieces. Born and educated in Lwów, Marian Hemar (born Jan Marian Hescheles), moved to Warsaw in 1924 after fighting on the Polish side in the Polish–Soviet war. He joined the literary circle around the journal Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) and wrote for theater and cabaret. He was a master of sentimental song and comedic routine (shmontses, a genre of cabaret popular in Central Europe particularly associated with Jews), and jointly composed political sketches with poets Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski. In 1939, he left for Palestine but settled in England in 1941.

text: Lwów

text: Warsaw

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: theater

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Antoni Słonimski

text: Poland


title: Rosen, Mathias

abstract: (1804–1865), Polish banker and communal leader. Mathias Rosen was the son of the German-born Isaak Simon Rosen, who had established himself as a banker in Warsaw during the Prussian occupation of Poland (1796–1806). In addition to Mathias Rosen’s activities as a partner in the family’s bank, which he ran alone after his father’s death in 1840, Rosen’s business activities included railway construction, tax farming, tobacco processing, and international trade, often as the partner of Leopold Kronenberg.

text: banker

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: trade

text: Warsaw


title: Christmas

abstract: Yiddish folklore about Christmas exemplifies the complex understanding that East European Jews evolved of their neighbors’ religiosity. Documentation of this lore, while limited, appears in a variety of linguistic and folkloristic sources dating from the early twentieth century. Ignatz Bernstein’s 1908 collection of Yiddish sayings offers a single proverb—Nitl iz a beyzer layd (Christmas is a wicked burden)—and explains that this saying reflects a history of violence against Jews on Christmas Eve from the time of the Middle Ages.

text: Ignatz Bernstein

text: proverb

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: heder


title: Mordekhai ben Ḥayim of Eisenstadt

abstract: (d. 1729), Sabbatian preacher. Mordekhai of Eisenstadt was born in Alsace (according to sources in Prague) around 1650. He was a pupil of Natan of Gaza and Avraham Cardozo. In the 1670s, he came to Nikolsburg, the center of Sabbatianism in Moravia. Thereafter he led an itinerant life, traveling through Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Germany, and Poland. Between 1678 and 1680, he was active as one of the first Sabbatian propagandists in Poland–Lithania. During his wanderings, he acquired the nickname Mokhiaḥ (“Rebuker”) and became famous for his talents as a preacher and for his ascetic conduct.

text: Eisenstadt

text: Prague

text: Nikolsburg

text: Sabbatianism

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: Frank

text: Bratislava


title: Maiden of Ludmir

abstract: (Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher; 1806?–1888?), Hasidic religious leader. Little concrete information is known about the pious Hasidic woman popularly known as the Maiden of Ludmir (Yid., Di Ludmirer Moid). Despite or perhaps because of the lack of historical detail, she has inspired a century of writers who have told and retold her story in fiction (including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Shosha), plays, and articles.

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Hasidism

text: Volodymyr Volyns’kyi

text: Chernobil

text: shtetl

text: Pale of Settlement

text: pilgrimage

glossary:
rebbe
tsadik
Pale of Settlement


title: Antokol’skii, Mark Matveevich

abstract: (1843–1902), sculptor. Born near Vilna, the youngest son in a family of a Jewish tavernkeeper, Mark Antokol’skii went on to distinguish himself as the founder of the realist school in Russian sculpture and as the Russian Jewish artist par excellence.

imgDesc: Mephistopheles. Mark Matveevich Antokol’skii, Paris, 1883. Bronze on granite base. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. (Image courtesy of the State Russian Museum)

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg


title: Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich

abstract: (1876–1951), revolutionary, Communist Party activist, and Soviet diplomat. Born to a Jewish merchant family in Białystok, Maksim Litvinov (also known as Meir-Henekh Moiseevich Wallach) received a traditional Jewish education and graduated from a secondary school. He was a member of the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party) from 1898 and became actively involved in distributing the illegal Communist paper Iskra.

text: Communist Party

text: Białystok

text: Kiev

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Bronshteyn, Yashe

abstract: (1897–1937), Yiddish literary critic. Born in Belsk, Belorussia, Yashe Bronshteyn lived in Warsaw from 1914 to 1918 and went to Russia in 1919 to fight as a Red Army soldier. In 1921 he lived in Orel and worked for the local Russian newspaper Orlovskaia pravda. In the early 1920s he studied in Kiev, where he headed a commune of young Jewish workers and wrote some unremarkable poems.

text: Warsaw

text: Russia

text: Kiev

text: Communist Party

text: Moscow

text: Minsk

text: Avrom Vevyorke

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Yoysef Rabin

text: Yiddish literature

text: Der Nister

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Der emes

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Avraham Uri Kovner


title: Slovakia

abstract: [This entry treats the Jewish community of the current Slovak Republic since the 1990s. For earlier history of Jews in the region, see Czechoslovakia.] The Slovak Republic became an independent state in 1993 following the dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republics. Its constitution guarantees that the country will be a multicultural and multiethnic parliamentary democracy.

imgDesc: Czech Republic and Slovakia, ca. 2000.

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Holocaust

text: Prague

text: communism

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Bratislava

text: Košice

text: heder


title: Censorship in the Russian Empire (Censorship)

abstract: State censorship of Jewish publications in the Russian Empire began 25 years after Jews became Russian subjects in 1772. From then until 1796, books in Jewish languages were published in Russia (and were imported from abroad) without restriction. Catherine the Great’s 1763 decree on censorship of imported works did not apply to such materials. Officials in charge of maintaining public order—who according to the 1783 Decree on Independent Printing Houses were responsible for monitoring the content of domestic publications—were unable to scrutinize books in Hebrew and Yiddish due to their ignorance of those languages. Moses Hezekil and Ezekiel David Levi were the first state censors of Jewish works; they were assigned to the censorship committee of the customs house in Riga and were appointed on 30 December 1797. Nevertheless, the monitoring of Jewish works, both imported and domestic, remained sporadic and ineffective.

imgDesc: “Bedikes khomets.” Cartoon from Der bezim (The Broom), a supplement to the Yiddish newspaper Dos leben (Life), Odessa, 10 April 1906. It depicts tsarist police conducting a raid looking for contraband literature. The title refers to the evening before Passover, when Jews are obligated to search their homes to rid them of any trace of leavened goods. (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Riga

text: Vilna

text: Jakub Tugendhold

text: Warsaw

text: Shapira family

text: Kiev

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Shapira family

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Odessa

text: Kiev

text: Iakov Brafman

text: Yisra’el Landau

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Warsaw


title: Füst, Milán

abstract: (1888–1967), Hungarian poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and diarist. The descendant of the illustrious Fürst family, he dropped the “r” from Fürst for the more poetic Füst, meaning “smoke” in Hungarian. Milán Füst’s early poems appeared in Nyugat, the premier modernist literary journal in Hungary. His fame as a poet rests on several dozen poems, and he was among the first to introduce free verse into Hungarian poetry, though his poems are a blend of both classical and modern qualities. He produced verses that are universal and timeless expressions of the tragedy of the human condition, conveyed in language that is alternately high-flown and quotidian.

text: Hungary

text: Budapest


title: Zissu, Abraham Leib

abstract: (1888–1956), writer and journalist; Zionist political leader. Abraham Leib Zissu was born in Piatra Neamț, Moldavia, to a Hasidic family, and was familiar with traditional Talmudic and biblical literature. He made his debut as a journalist in the newspaper Egalitatea (Equality; 1914), and eventually edited, with M. Braunstein-Mebashan (Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein), the Hebrew review Ha-Mekits (1912). He contributed as well to the Yiddish language review Likht (1914) before turning to Romanian-language Jewish journalism.

text: Zionist

text: Piatra Neamț

text: Moldavia

text: Hasidic

text: Egalitatea

text: Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein

text: Bucharest

text: Mântuirea

text: Revisionist Zionism

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: assimilation

text: Felix Aderca

text: Beniamin Fundoianu

text: Ion Călugăru

text: Isac Ludo

text: Cluj


title: Lederer, Eduard

abstract: (1859–1944), writer; important figure in the Czech Jewish movement. Eduard Lederer (Leda) began his studies in Czech, German, and history at Prague University before turning to law, the field in which he took his degree in 1884. He then practiced law in Jindřichův Hradec and, from the mid-1920s, in Prague.

text: Prague

text: Tribuna

text: Zionism

text: Orthodox Judaism

text: assimilation

text: Hasidism

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Terezín


title: Childbearing

abstract: Along with a value system that encouraged reproduction, various social and demographic factors prevailing in the East European Jewish community led to an extremely high rate of childbirth (until the nineteenth century). The marriage rate in Jewish society was much higher than that of the surrounding Christian population, as was the rate of remarriage among the widowed and divorced. In addition, the marriage age was relatively low, as was the woman’s age at first birth—most Jewish women had their first child before the age of 20. Books of charms from the period, such as the popular Sefer zekhirah (Book of Remembrance) by Zekharyah ben Ya‘akov Simner, mention a few formulas for avoiding pregnancy. It would appear, however, that even these were reserved for cases in which a woman’s health was at risk and were not intended to limit the birthrate.

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

text: Russia

text: ba‘ale shem

text: demons

text: amulets

text: tkhines

text: Rivke bas Me’ir of Tykocin

text: servants


title: Turkow Family

abstract: Yiddish actors, theater and film directors, and communal activists. Notable members of the Turkow (Turkov) family included Zygmunt (Zigmunt, Shloyme Zalmen; 1896–1970); Jonas (Yonas; 1898–1988); Mark (Marek; 1904–1983); and Yitskhok Ber (who also used the pseudonym Grudberg; 1906–1970).

imgDesc: Zygmunt Turkow as “a stranger” in a VYKT (Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater) production of In goldenem-land (In a Golden Land) by Yankev Pat, Warsaw, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: film

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Habimah

text: Kaminski

text: Kharkov

text: Sholem Asch

text: The Dybbuk

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater

text: Poland

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Lwów

text: Goldfadn

text: operetta

text: dance

text: Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher

text: Yiddish Actors Union

text: YIVO

text: Moravia

text: Alter Kacyzne

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Kraków

text: Holocaust

text: Der moment

text: agriculture

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: kleynkunst


title: Levin, Gershn

abstract: (1868–1939), Yiddish and Hebrew writer, physician, and communal activist. Gershn Levin was born in Lublin and moved to Warsaw, where he completed medical studies in 1896. An energetic promoter of improved hygiene, he collaborated with Yisra’el Ḥayim Zagorodski (1864–1931) to write Ḥayenu ve-orekh yamenu: ‘Etsot ve-ḥukim lishmor beri’ut ha-guf (Our Life and Longevity: How to Stay Healthy; 1898). Levin’s views are particularly expressed in the chapter “Gidul-banim” (Childrearing), a critique of traditional heder education that contained a plea for children’s rights.

text: Lublin

text: Warsaw

text: hygiene

text: heder

text: health

text: TOZ

text: Bar Kochba

text: musical society

text: childhood

text: service in the Russian army

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: humor

text: assimilationism

text: Warsaw

text: Haynt

text: Zionist group

text: parody

text: Yoysef Tunkel

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Poland from 1795 to 1939 (Poland)

abstract: At the conclusion of the Third Partition in 1795, the territories of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were divided among Russia (62% of the area, 45% of the population), Prussia (20% of the land, 23% of the people) and Austria (18% of the land, 32% of the population). Although these borders were not final and would undergo revisions, most notably during the Napoleonic wars and after the Congress of Vienna, Polish independence would not return until 1918. From the time of the partitions onward, the story of Polish Jewry, like the story of Poland itself, became three separate yet often similar stories of adjustment, rejection, and cooperation between the populations of the lands of partitioned Poland and the ruling empires.

imgDesc:
Congress
  Poland.

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Galicia

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Poznań

text: Josephinian Reforms

text: Berek Joselewicz

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: Hermann Lieberman

text: Feliks Perl

text: Zionists

text: Bund

text: industry

text: Łódź

text: Białystok

text: Saint Petersburg

text: trade

text: Brody

text: Tarnopol

text: Drohobycz

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: pogroms

text: Moscow

text: Litvaks

text: credit

text: Sabbath

text: Shmul Zbytkower

text: Leopold Kronenberg

text: Hipolit Wawelberg

text: Herman Epstein

text: shtetl

text: Jutrzenka

text: Izraelita

text: assimilationist

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Asch

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: heder

text: Hasidism

text: Orthodox

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Jan Bloch

text: John Mill

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna

text: Revolution of 1905

text: World War I

text: Folkists

text: Beys Yankev

text: Vilna

text: Białystok

text: economic life

text: TOZ

text: pogroms

text: youth movements

text: Tarbut

text: Beys Yankev

text: TSYSHO

text: yeshiva

text: Lublin

text: YIVO

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Edmund Stein

text: Max Weinreich

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Artur Eisenbach

text: Filip Friedman

text: Bella Mandelsberg-Schildkraut

text: Raphael Mahler

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Der Yud

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Chwila

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Varshever Yiddisher Kunst-teater

text: films

text: theater

text: youth movements

text: Tsukunft

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Gordonia

text: Dror

text: Akiva

text: Betar

text: Tse‘ire Mizraḥi

text: Tseirey Agudas Yisroel

text: Holocaust

text: resistance

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
Congress Poland
heder
Diaspora
numerus clausus
Torah
yeshiva


title: Magyar Zsidó Szemle

abstract: (Hungarian Jewish Review), the foremost Jewish studies periodical in the Hungarian language. Magyar Zsidó Szemle, which was published in 65 volumes between 1884 and 1948, was founded at the initiative of József Simon, a key communal leader of Hungarian Jewry, against the background of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel. In autumn 1883, Simon urged the staff of the newly founded Budapest Rabbinical Seminary to publish a Hungarian-language Jewish studies periodical. Vilmos (Wilhelm) Bacher and József Bánóczi, two young scholars, undertook the editorship; the first volume of about 700 pages appeared in 1884.

text: Tiszaeszlár blood libel

text: Budapest

text: Seminary

text: Vilmos (Wilhelm) Bacher

text: József Bánóczi

text: Ignác Goldziher

text: David Kaufmann

text: Immánuel Löw

text: Henrik Marczali

text: Hungary

text: Lajos (Aryeh) Blau

text: Ferenc Mezey

text: Sándor (Alexander) Scheiber


title: Mayzel, Nakhmen

abstract: (1887–1966), editor, critic, and cultural activist. Born in a village estate near Kiev, Nakhmen Mayzel received a traditional education in his father’s home from private tutors until he was 17. His first story in Hebrew was published in 1905, and in the following years he contributed literary pieces and criticism to a variety of Hebrew periodicals in Eastern Europe. He considered moving to Palestine and taking up agricultural work.

text: Kiev

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Kultur-lige

text: Ukraine

text: Warsaw

text: Bund

text: Haynt

text: I. J. Singer

text: Perets Markish

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Boris Kletskin

text: Poland

text: Yiddish literature