title: Informers

abstract: Since the Talmudic period, Jewish tradition and law have regarded the denunciation of Jews to non-Jewish rulers, even for deplorable or sinful behavior, as a grave offense, to be condemned and combated. This attitude is already evident in one of the 18 benedictions in the daily Amidah prayer. Informers, referred to in Hebrew and Yiddish as moserim (or moysrim in Ashkenazic pronunciation) or malshinim, were considered not only traitors to their people, but a danger to other Jews’ lives and property. Denouncers were excommunicated, disqualified from giving testimony or swearing an oath, barred from participation in public prayer services, and even denied religious burial. Some informers were defined as rodfim (pursuers), a category of persons who according to Jewish law could be executed even before committing the offense. In some places, particularly pre-Expulsion Spain and Poland, government authorities permitted Jewish courts to imprison informers and even condemn them to death. In modern Eastern Europe, informing was used as a weapon in ideological and religious struggles. Hasidim, Misnagdim, and maskilim, mainly in tsarist Russia and Galicia, slandered one another, ostensibly revealing “secrets,” “crimes,” or other illegal acts that their opponents were trying to conceal.

text: Poland

text: Hasidim

text: Misnagdim

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Vilna

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

text: Sandz

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Zhidachov

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Iakov Aleksandrovich Brafman

text: Minsk

text: Kahal

text: censorship

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Shklov

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Warsaw

text: Judenrät

text: Alfred Nossig

glossary: Misnagdim maskil Kahal


title: Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov

abstract: (Rymanów; 1745–1815), a founder of Hasidism in Galicia. Menaḥem Mendel studied at the yeshiva of Shemu’el Shmelke Horovitz of Nikolsburg (Mikulov) at Ryczywol and later became a disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk (Leżajsk). After marrying the daughter of a well-to-do Jew from Przytyk, he made his home there for a number of years, moving to Rymanów in 1807, where he remained until his death. In 1800, the inveterate Misnaged David of Makev (Maków) included Menaḥem Mendel in a list of Hasidic tsadikim in his anti-Hasidic polemic, Shever posh‘im.

text: Hasidism

text: Galicia

text: yeshiva

text: Mikulov

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Leżajsk

text: Russia

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Yisra’el the Magid of Kozhenits

text: Ropshits

text: Zhidachov

text: Yeḥezkel Paneth

glossary: yeshiva Misnaged tsadik


title: Songs and Songwriters

abstract: The notion of a Yiddish popular song is clearest in an example such as the 1947 hit “Rumenye” [listen to a recording] popularized on stage and through recordings and sheet music by a professional singer, with a text by a professional lyricist and music by a professional composer—in this case all three in the person of Aaron Lebedeff (although here the music was reworked rather than composed by him). Before all these elements of a mass musical culture were present, however, the second half of the nineteenth century brought the appearance of something different from the traditional East European Yiddish folk song. Although folk songs presumably originate as products of individual creativity, as they spread, they lose connections with their creators and become anonymous. What was new in Austrian Galicia, Romania, and Russia was the development of a group of professional or semiprofessional songwriters and performers who produced songs that began to be identified with their authors or performers. Also new was the context of performance, no longer limited to the family circle or to ceremonial occasions such as weddings. Now songs began to be performed to entertain customers—in taverns, wine cellars, and restaurant gardens.

imgDesc: Music from the Yiddish film Der dibek (The Dybbuk). "Badkhones and Dance of Death." Words and music: Traditional/Henekh Kon. From the Yiddish film Der dibek, Poland, 1937. (YIVO)

text: folk songs

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Russia

text: weddings

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Berl Broder

text: badkhonim

text: Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz

text: Haskalah

text: satire

text: Hasidic song

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: theater

text: operettas

text: Mark Varshavski

text: Kiev

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: heder

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Mordkhe Gebirtig

text: Kraków

text: Przytyk

text: Holocaust

text: kleynkunst

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Vilna

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Grodno

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Sabbath

text: Itsik Manger

text: film

text: Soviet Union

text: Litvak

text: humor

text: Passover

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Crimea

text: Odessa

text: dance

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Birobidzhan

glossary: Haskalah heder


title: Zbytkower, Shmul

abstract: (d. 1801), merchant and court supplier; ancestor of the Bergson (Berekson) family. In 1756 or 1757, Shmul Zbytkower (also known as Shemu’el ben Ya‘akov Avigdor; Szmul Jakubowicz) arrived in Warsaw from the nearby village of Zbytki, where he was a leaseholder. He worked in commerce and by 1766 had received the title of purveyor to the court of the Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, and from 1771 performed similar services for the Prussian monarch Frederick II.

text: Bergson

text: Warsaw

text: pigs

text: banking

text: Yehudis Halevi Jakubowicz

text: trade


title: Revista Cultului Mozaic din R.P.R.

abstract: Romanian trilingual journal. Revista cultului mozaic din R.P.R. (Periodical of the Mosaic Religion in the Romanian People’s Republic) was started as an irregular monthly on 19 October 1956 and was published twice a month from 1965. In 1991 its production again became sporadic and its last issue was dated December 1991.

text: Romania

text: Mozes Rosen

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Itsik Manger

text: pogroms

text: Ovid Crohmălniceanu

text: Henri Wald

text: antisemitic

text: Holocaust


title: Klemperer, Gutmann

abstract: (1815–1882), rabbi, historian, and essayist. Gutmann (Gumpel) Klemperer was born into a family that had been in Prague for several generations. His father was a leader of the Zigeuner Synagogue, and his mother stemmed from the family of Yom Tov Lipmann Heller. Klemperer studied at yeshivas in Prague and Bratislava (Pressburg), at the Piarist gymnasium in Prague, and finally at the faculty of philosophy at Charles University. His first wife was the daughter of his teacher Rabbi Elias Bunzelfedern (1799–1843). In 1843, Klemperer became a preacher in Tábor, and then served as the local rabbi from 1845 until his death. Begining in 1868, he also held the title of district rabbi.

text: Prague

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Bratislava

text: Bohemia

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Guido Kisch

text: Shelomoh ben Yeḥi’el Luria

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: David Gans

text: health care

text: mysticism


title: Bessarabia

abstract: Historical name of the region between the Dniester and Prut Rivers and the lower reaches of the Danube. Today, most of Bessarabia is in the Republic of Moldova, with northern and southern districts in Ukraine. Before 1812 it was part of the Principality of Moldova and its southernmost district, Budzhak, was under direct Ottoman rule. Bessarabia was within the Russian Empire from 1812 to 1918, though from 1856 to 1878 Budzhak was under Romanian rule. Between 1918 and 1940 Bessarabia formed part of Romania; from 1940 to 1991 it was in the USSR.

imgDesc: Bessarabia. Boundaries shown are ca. 1914.

text: Republic of Moldova

text: Ukraine

text: Russian Empire

text: Romania

text: USSR

text: military service

text: Pale of Settlement

text: pogroms

text: agriculture

text: industry

text: crafts

text: Hasidism

text: Tighina

text: Sadagora

text: yeshiva

text: Kishinev

text: Haskalah

text: Bălți

text: Odessa

text: Yehudah Steinberg

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: antisemitism

text: Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants

text: Yehudah Leib Zirelson

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Zionist

text: Bund

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Transnistria

text: Soroca

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
yeshiva
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Migdal, Arkadii Benediktovich

abstract: (1911–1991), theoretical and nuclear physicist. A member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1966, Migdal was born in Lida, Belarussia. He began his studies at the Leningrad State University Department of Physics in 1929, only to be expelled in 1931 because of nonproletarian origins. He completed his university studies in the evening division. From 1931 to 1936, while working as an engineer at a factory, Migdal was able to carry out some scientific work. In 1936 he became a graduate student at the Leningrad Physics and Technical Institute, where he wrote and defended his dissertation for the degree of candidate of sciences.

text: USSR

text: Lev Landau

text: Moscow


title: Gombiner, Avraham Abele ben Ḥayim ha-Levi

abstract: (1635–1682), author of commentaries on the Shulḥan ‘arukh (Oraḥ ḥayim) and Yalkut Shim‘oni. He was born in Gombin, Poland (hence his family name), where his father was martyred in 1655, in the aftermath of the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres of 1648–1649. At a young age Gombiner became a dayan (judge) at the rabbinical court of Yisra’el ben Natan Shapira in Kalisz and directed his own yeshiva. Not yet 30, he began writing his commentary on Oraḥ ḥayim, the first section of the Shulḥan ‘arukh. From the praise this work received, we learn that he lived a difficult life, possibly suffering from illness before dying young. Among his associates were his son-in-law Mosheh Yekuti’el Kaufman (rabbi of Kutno and author of the commentary Leḥem ha-panim on the Yoreh de‘ah section of the Shulḥan ‘arukh) and Eliyahu Shapira of Prague (author of Eliyahu raba and Eliyahu zuta), a friend from the period when both men studied in Kalisz.

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Poland

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres

text: Kalisz

text: yeshiva

text: Prague

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
yeshiva
Torah


title: Einsatzgruppen

abstract: As operational units of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) and Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; Sipo), the Einsatzgruppen (Action Squads) accompanied the German army during the Nazi conquests of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Their main task was to eliminate political opposition.

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Ukraine

text: Crimea

text: L’vov

text: Luts’k

text: Brest-Litovsk

text: Pinsk

text: Kiev

text: Babi Yar

text: Kharkov


title: Brandys, Kazimierz

abstract: (1916–2001), writer. While studying law at the University of Warsaw (1934–1939), Kazimierz Brandys, the younger brother of writer Marian Brandys, worked in socialist youth organizations and wrote for leftist journals. He spent World War II in Warsaw, hiding on the Aryan side. After 1945, as a member of the Writers Union and of the editorial boards of Kuźnica and Nowa Kultura, he promoted socialist realism, a new literary doctrine sponsored by the Communist regime.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: communism

text: Holocaust


title: Kertész, Imre

abstract: (1929– ), writer and translator. The first Hungarian writer to receive the Nobel Prize, Imre Kertész was conspicuous for winning it as a Jew who wrote about the Holocaust. Kertész identifies himself as a Jew without adherence to Judaism, Jewish tradition, or Jewish nationhood. He wrote his major work, Sorstalanság (Fateless; 1975), about the experience of Auschwitz. Although the novel is written in Hungarian, Kertész in other ways saw his residence in Hungary as a kind of internal exile. He explains in his novel Kudarc (Fiasco; 1988) that he returned to Hungary from Buchenwald by chance, and that the only reason he did not leave in 1956 was because he could write Sorstalanság only in Hungarian; afterward, however, he had no reason to remain. For 35 years, he lived with his first wife in a 28-square-meter apartment, in which he shut himself off from the country’s social, intellectual, and political affairs. This self-exiled existence lies behind the dramatic strength and spiritual independence that can be felt in his work.

text: Holocaust

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Joseph Roth


title: Kon, Feliks

abstract: (1864–1941), revolutionary politician in Poland and the Soviet Union. Feliks Kon (known by many pseudonyms, including Bolesław Janowski, Feliks Bolesławski, and F. C. Stożyński) was born in Warsaw into a wealthy merchant family with strong Polish patriotic traditions. Kon became involved with the socialist movement while still in high school. In 1882, he joined the group Proletariat, the first major socialist movement in the Kingdom of Poland, which called for a struggle of the united working classes against the ruling order and the bourgeoisie in the tsarist empire.

imgDesc: Feliks Kon (second from left) and other exiled members of the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party, PPS), Kara, Russia, ca. 1900. Others (left to right): H. Dulembar, T. Rekhniyevski, Nikolai Luriye, and M. Mankovski. From a postcard printed by the Jewish Section of the PPS in London. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Warsaw

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kharkov

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Białystok

text: Moscow


title: Satire

abstract: The earliest stage in the development of Jewish satire is exemplified by the Purim play, based typically on subjects related to the biblical Book of Esther. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these plays were presented in a festive atmosphere of thanksgiving for the miracle of Jewish survival. In this spirit, Jews permitted themselves to poke fun at their humiliated persecutors. A limited time frame of one or two days annually at the holiday of Purim moderated the meanest of the satires, as did rabbinical supervision. Over time, however, the objects of satire shifted from gentile oppressors to Jewish communal leadership.

imgDesc: Yitsḥak Erter. Postcard printed by Verlag Hatchijah, Stanisławów. The harp, the feather pen, inkwell, and books were symbols often used on postcards featuring writers. (YIVO)

text: Purim

text: Haskalah

text: Galicia

text: Hasidism

text: Orthodox

text: Tuviah Feder

text: Yehudah Leib Mieses

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: Tuviah Feder

text: Hebrew literature

text: Czernowitz

text: Yosef Perl

text: Hasidism

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: Russia

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Poland

text: I. J. Singer

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Ḥayim Hazaz

glossary: Haskalah Tsadik melamed Maimonides


title: Tynianov, Iurii Nikolaevich

abstract: (1894–1943), literary scholar and fiction writer. Born in the town of Rezhitsa in Vitsebsk province (mod. Rēzekne, Latvia), Iurii Tynianov studied at the University of Petersburg from 1912 to 1918. From 1921 to 1930 he lectured on Russian poetry at the division of literary history of the Petrograd Institute of Art History. In 1918 he joined Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Iazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language; Opoiaz), and soon became one of the most influential and articulate exponents of the Formalist position.

text: literary scholar

text: Latvia

text: Roman Jakobson

text: Viktor Shklovskii


title: Lotman, Iurii Mikhailovich

abstract: (1922–1993), scholar of literature, culture, and semiotics. Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman founded the Tartu school of semiotics and was the author of numerous important works on the semiotics of culture, and the structure of poetic and literary texts.

text: Tartu

text: Petrograd

text: Estonia

text: Prague

text: Moscow


title: Lewite, Leon

abstract: (1878–1944), Zionist leader in Poland. Born in Warsaw, Leon Lewite joined Kadimah, the association of Jewish students at the University of Warsaw and at the Technikum (Polytechnic College). As an active Zionist, he devoted himself to acquiring pledges for shares in the Jüdische Kolonialbank (Jewish Colonial Trust).

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Zionist movement


title: Rubin, Hadasah

abstract: (1912–2003), Yiddish poet, editor, and cultural activist. Hadasah Rubin was born into a poor family in Iampol’, Ukraine. In 1921, her family moved to Zbarazh in Galicia and later to Kremenets, where she finished high school. In her youth Rubin was an ardent member of the Communist Party, and consequently spent a few years in a Polish prison. She emerged with her revolutionary zeal intact and a bundle of poems under her arm. Traces of this youthful restlessness, which pervaded her early political sensibilities, stayed present in her work throughout her literary career. Even though she later renounced communism, she maintained her original ideals, namely freedom, equality, and friendship among nations.

imgDesc: Trit in der nakht (Steps in the Night), by Hadasah Rubin (Warsaw: Farlag Yidish Bukh, 1957). Illustration by L. Mergszylski. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Galicia

text: communism

text: Vilna

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Holocaust

text: poetry

text: Dovid Sfard

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Dovid Hofshteyn


title: Hourwitz, Zalkind

abstract: (1751–1812), maskil, political activist, journalist, and author. As a young man, Zalkind Hourwitz left his village near Lublin and set out for Berlin. There he tutored children of wealthy families—perhaps even coming into contact with the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn—before making his way to Metz and ultimately to Paris in 1774. Whether hawking used clothing or eking out a living teaching foreign languages to the young, he avoided starvation only with the support of his friends. In his spare time he studied Ovid, Molière, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

text: Lublin


title: Ukraine

abstract: Although Jews have had a long history in ethnolinguistically Ukrainian territory, by the turn of the twenty-first century only a small remnant of this once commanding population remained. In 2001, Ukraine had a population of 48 million, approximately 75 percent of which was of Ukrainian ethnicity, with a large Russian minority (some 21%, or 10 million). The exact number of Jews is a matter of some controversy: the 1989 census listed 487,300 Jews, but only 104,300 were recorded in the first post-Soviet census of 2001, a figure that is questioned by some but that certainly reflects the massive emigration of Jews in the 1990s.

imgDesc: Ukraine, ca. 2000.

text: Kiev

text: Khazar kingdom

text: Karaism

text: Lithuania

text: trade

text: innkeeping

text: Gzeyres takh vetat

text: Uman

text: Russian Empire

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: agriculture

text: Khar’kiv

text: Odessa

text: Hasidic movement

text: Belz

text: Bratslav

text: Chernobyl

text: Ruzhin

text: Misnagdim

text: Haskalah

text: Galicia

text: pogrom

text: emigration

text: Zionism

text: Lev Pinsker

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Mendel Beilis

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Folkspartey

text: Simon Dubnow

text: World War I

text: civil war

text: economic life

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Revisionist Zionism

text: Moscow

text: Leon Trotsky

text: Communist Party

text: USSR

text: Khar’kiv

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: communism

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

text: Einsatzgruppen

text: Babi Yar

text: Poland

text: L’viv

text: Ghettos

text: Holocaust

text: Holocaust

text: Babi Yar

text: L’viv

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

glossary:
arenda
Gzeyres takh vetat
Misnagdim
Haskalah
Uganda Plan
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Diaspora


title: About this Article (Talk)

abstract: To treat the many types of talk characteristic of Jews of Eastern Europe, this entry begins with a general overview, which discusses speech in relation to the multilinguism of East European Jewish culture, followed by four more specific articles: Storytelling; Professional Talkers; Blessings, Curses, and Other Expressions; and Argots. For further general discussion, see Language; for sermonizing, see Preachers and Preaching; for jesters, see Badkhonim. See also Humor, article on Oral Tradition; Proverbs; and Riddles.

imgDesc: Di platshkis (Professional Mourners). Professional mourners accompany a funeral bier to the cemetery. Mayer Kirshenblatt. Acrylic on canvas, ca. 1996. Memory painting by a native of Opatów, Poland. (Courtesy Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett)

text: Language

text: Preachers and Preaching

text: Badkhonim

text: Humor

text: Proverbs

text: Riddles


title: Belz Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: A Hasidic sect originally located in the town of Belz (Pol., Bełz) in eastern Galicia. The Belz Hasidic Dynasty was founded by Rabbi Shalom Rokeaḥ (1783–1855), a devoted disciple of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz, the so-called Seer of Lublin. Rokeaḥ established his famous court in Belz around 1817, attracting many followers from Poland, Galicia, and Hungary. He was known as both a miracle worker and a Talmudist, and maintained a close relationship with the Galician non-Hasidic rabbinate of his time. His everyday life was simple, and he was the first rebbe who did not dress in white (as was common for kabbalists and early Hasidic leaders).

imgDesc: Yisakhar Dov Rokeaḥ, the third Belzer Rebbe (center, in fur hat) out for a walk with his Hasidim during a visit to a spa, Marienbad (Mariánské Láznĕ), Czechoslovakia, 1926. (Forward Association / YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: rabbinate

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: Kraków

text: Ruzhin Hasidic Dynasty

text: Orthodoxy

text: Zionism

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Hungary

text: Mukačevo

text: Budapest


title: Schwefelberg, Arnold

abstract: (1896–1979), jurist. Arnold Schwefelberg grew up in Brăila, Romania, where his father, Isac, was a teacher and headmaster of the Romanian-Israelite school, which Arnold and his four brothers attended. Schwefelberg’s paternal grandfather, Iancu Pecetaru Schwefelberg, originally from Galicia, was a well-known engraver (seal maker) in Iaşi. Arnold’s maternal grandfather, Velvl Stein, had been a melamed (teacher) in Galați.

text: Brăila

text: Romania

text: Galicia

text: Iaşi

text: Galați

text: Bucharest

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary

text: communism

text: Veronica Porumbacu


title: Dik, Ayzik Meyer

abstract: (1807/14?–1893), the first professional and best-selling Yiddish author. Born in Vilna, Ayzik Meyer Dik (generally known by his pseudonym Amad) received a traditional Jewish education and married young, settling in the Lithuanian town of Zupran where he lived a rowdy life. (Although probably born in 1807, Dik himself gave the year 1814, perhaps to avoid military conscription.) When his first wife died childless, he married the daughter of a wealthy Hasid from Nesvizh (Nezyvius) who supported the couple despite Dik’s aversion to Hasidism. Dik considered both Hasidism and lack of Western education to be the most destructive influences on the advancement of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

imgDesc: Ayzik Meyer Dik (center) and other maskilim; (clockwise from top) Mikhl Gordon, Yehudah Leib Gordon, Tsevi ha-Kohen Rabinovich, and Eli‘ezer Zweifel. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Hasidism

text: dress

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Warsaw

text: Romm

text: parody

text: satire

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Shmuel Niger


title: Shapiro, Konstantin Abba

abstract: (1839–1900), Hebrew poet. Konstantin Abba Shapiro was born in Grodno and was raised in a strict and religious home in which his authoritarian father tried to divert him from an interest in secular literature. To discourage Shapiro from following the Haskalah, his parents married him off at the age of 15. Shapiro’s marriage was shortly annulled, and in an effort to free himself from his restrictive family environment, he moved briefly to Białystok and Vienna, eventually settling in Saint Petersburg. The first phase of his life there was marked by financial hardship and illness, but he overcame these difficulties with the help of a gentile Russian family, whose daughter he married. It was under these circumstances that he converted to Christianity—a decision that continually tormented and embarrassed him greatly, even though he never repudiated it in practice. Paradoxically, it was his conversion to Christianity that was responsible for the strengthening of his national Jewish identity. He retained fond recollections of Jewish experiences and traditions, so much so that toward the end of his life he described himself as one of the anusim (forced converts).

text: Grodno

text: Haskalah

text: Białystok

text: Saint Petersburg

text: conversion

text: photography

text: Hebrew poetry

text: Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki

text: Mordekhai Tsevi Mane

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: satire

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

glossary: Haskalah melamed


title: Kaganovski, Froyim

abstract: (1893–1958), author and storyteller. Froyim Kaganovski was born in Warsaw, but few facts about his background and early years are available. It is known that he displayed an aptitude for painting and studied at an art school. He published his first story, “Bay nakht” (At Night), when he was just 16, in the weekly Teater velt. In the same year (1909), Kaganovski became acquainted with Y. L. Peretz and was honored by having another story, “In der alter mil” (At the Old Mill), included in the literary collection that Peretz edited, Yidish (1910). This recognition enabled Kaganovski to become a regular guest at the Peretz home.

imgDesc: Letter from Froyim Kaganovski to Leo Finkelshteyn, 1947. From Froyim Kaganovski in Łódź, Poland, to Leo Finkelshteyn, 8 July 1947. Kaganovski writes that it is hot and that it would be nice to get out of the city, but "one has no desire to travel to unfriendly strangers, to an alien forest, to alien meadows." The "association" has been discussing a possible upcoming visit of Finkelshteyn to Łódź. Kaganovski's situation is not good. Most of his friends have left for America but he languishes in Łódź without an income. He asks Finkelshteyn to contact the Yiddish author Melech Ravitch on his behalf: "I consider him the only person who has a brotherly bond with us." Yiddish. Typed. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Odessa

text: Hebrew literature

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: David Frishman

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists

text: Poland

text: shtetl

text: Białystok

text: Soviet Union

text: Łódź

text: Holocaust


title: Daniel, M.

abstract: (1901–1940), Yiddish prose writer and playwright. Born in Dvinsk (mod. Daugavpils), Latvia, M. Daniel (born Mordekhai [Mark] Meyerovitsh) lived in several places as a child, and then was employed as a worker, clerk, and teacher. In 1921 he went to Moscow, where he studied at the Academy of Education and, later, the Yiddish department at the Second Moscow State University, from which he graduated in 1924.

text: prose

text: Daugavpils

text: Latvia

text: Moscow

text: Der shtrom

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Kiev

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Perets Markish

text: Iulii Daniel’

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Vilna

text: Salomon Maimon


title: Gaster, Moses

abstract: (1856–1939), scholar, rabbi, Zionist, folklorist. Moses Gaster was born in Bucharest to a renowned Jewish family; his grandfather Asriel Gaster had been a community leader and synagogue founder, and his father Abraham Emanuel Gaster was the consul of the Netherlands in Bucharest.

text: Bucharest

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

text: Romania

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionist movement

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Naḥum Sokolow


title: Singer, Isaac Bashevis

abstract: (1904–1991), Yiddish writer; in translation, among the most widely read authors of the twentieth century. The son and grandson of rabbis on both sides of his family, Isaac Bashevis Singer was born to strictly observant parents in the village of Leoncin, near Warsaw. With the outbreak of World War I, his mother (from whose first name he later derived his pseudonym Bashevis) took her children back to the village of Biłgoraj, where her rabbi father ruled with iron discipline. There, in a place untouched by modernity, Bashevis, who was educated in traditional religious schools, acquired the profound knowledge of religious observances, folk customs, and rich range of Yiddish idioms that shaped his fiction. At the age of 17, he enrolled for one year in Warsaw’s Taḥkemoni Rabbinical Seminary, after which he taught modern Hebrew in private homes.

imgDesc: Isaac Bashevis Singer (right) with two other writers, Warsaw, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Israel Joshua Singer

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Globus

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres

text: Holocaust

text: Poland

text: Sholem Asch

text: Haskalah

text: sexuality

text: Demons

glossary: Haskalah Torah


title: Spektor, Mordkhe

abstract: (1858–1925), writer and editor. Born to a prominent family in Uman, Ukraine, Mordkhe Spektor received a traditional education, although according to his own account he preferred the outdoors over home and heder. As a teenager, Spektor met writers Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski and Avrom Goldfadn and began to read contemporary Yiddish Haskalah literature. At the age of 19, he moved to Odessa and became acquainted with the Jewish writers of that city.

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: Uman

text: Ukraine

text: heder

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Der yud

text: Kraków

text: Kishinev

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Tsevi Pryłucki

text: Poland

text: Der moment

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Haynt

text: Kultur-lige

text: Soviet Union

text: newspapers and periodicals

glossary: heder Haskalah


title: Rabinovich, Yitsḥak Ya‘akov

abstract: (1854–1919), yeshiva head and rabbinic scholar. Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Rabinovich (Reb Itsele Ponevezher) was born in Shereshevo, Belorussia, the son of a wealthy merchant. After receiving private instruction in Talmud, at the age of 14 he went to study with Yeruḥam Perlman—later a noted rabbi in Minsk—in nearby Selets, and a few years later studied in Brest-Litovsk with Ḥayim Soloveichik (who became the “Brisker rov”) under the tutelage of the latter’s father, Yosef Dov Soloveichik.

text: yeshiva

text: Belorussia

text: Minsk

text: Brest

text: Ḥayim Soloveichik

text: Slobodka yeshiva

text: Panevėžys

text: Kalonymus Wissotzky

text: Ponevezh yeshiva

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Latvia

text: Ukraine

glossary: yeshiva Talmud pilpul Musar Torah responsa


title: Rubinstein, Akiba

abstract: (1882–1961), chess grand master, often called the greatest player not to have become a world champion. The youngest of 12 children born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Stawiski, Russian Poland, Rubinstein learned chess moves relatively late, at about age 16. Most notable players learn to play at a significantly earlier age, and Rubinstein’s delayed start was blamed for the number of major blunders he occasionally made.

text: chess

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: Saint Petersburg


title: Reception, Law of

abstract: Although the Hungarian parliament emancipated Jews as individuals in 1867 (Act Seventeen), it was only later legislation, Act Forty-Two of 1895, that made Judaism equal to other received religions (religiones receptae). The Law of Reception was deemed necessary because in the nineteenth century the legal standing of various religions was defined by their position in the hierarchical structure as either received, recognized, or tolerated. Received religions benefited from protection of the state.

text: Mór Mezei

text: Mór Wahrmann

text: Vilmos Vázsonyi

text: Miksa Szabolcsi

text: Orthodoxy

text: conversion


title: Gottlober, Avraham Ber

abstract: (1811–1899), maskil, poet, translator, historian, and publicist. Born in Starokonstantinov, Volhynia guberniia, Avraham Ber Gottlober married the daughter of a Hasidic family at the age of 14. With the encouragement and guidance of his father, and notwithstanding his attraction to Hasidism, he showed an interest in Jewish philosophical and Haskalah literature, along with Hebrew grammar, while still quite young.

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: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Tarnopol

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Yosef Perl

text: Odessa

text: Kishinev

text: Dubno

text: Mezhirichi

text: Warsaw

text: Berdichev

text: Simḥah Pinsker

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Karaite

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Zhitomir

text: Romania

text: Dubno

text: Rivne

text: Białystok

text: Pogroms

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: poetry

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: assimilation

text: Odessa

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Asif

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Ha-Boker or

text: Eli‘ezer Zweifel

text: Shelomoh Mandelkern

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: David Frishman

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

glossary: maskil publicist Haskalah Talmud Kabbalah


title: Cantors

abstract: The cantor, or ḥazan, is (usually) the professional prayer leader in the synagogue. In addition to chanting the service, he—until modern times cantors were invariably male—also functioned as an intermediary for the Jewish community in their prayers.

imgDesc: Ticket to a concert by “the famous Rovno cantor” Mordkhe Shvartsenberg in the “Butchers’ Synagogue,” Brody (now in Ukraine), n.d. (YIVO)

text: liturgy

text: Hungary

text: folk songs

text: piety

text: Lwów

text: Hasidic movement

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Russia

text: Bratislava

text: Ashkenaz

text: Budapest

text: Moscow

text: Passover

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Budapest

text: Odessa

text: Pressburg

text: Lwów

text: Kishinev

text: Berdichev

text: Kiev

text: Barukh Schorr

text: Avrom Ber Birnboym

text: Sabbath

text: Gershon Sirota

text: Gershon Sirota

text: Rovno

glossary: halakhah Torah haftarah

subconcepts: Dissemination of East European Cantorial Music

subconcepts: East European Cantorial Music in the United States


title: Cartoons

abstract: Humorous illustrations or cartoons, as a critical visual element of the popular press, appeared in East European Jewish journals relatively late as compared to non-Jewish coterritorial language publications. The small number of Yiddish periodicals that were permitted in the Russian Empire from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century generally contained few, if any, illustrations.

imgDesc: “The Messiah Has Arrived.” Satirical postcard with a cartoon by Leyb Brodaty, depicting Yiddish writers as figures from Isaiah 11:6: “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them.” From right to left: Sholem Asch, David Frishman (snake), Alexander Mukdoyni, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (lion), Hillel Zeitlin, and Shmuel Yatskan, editor of the Yiddish newspaper Haynt. Number one in a series called “The Satirical Post.” (Warsaw: Ferlag Satira, ca. 1910). (YIVO)

text: Russian Empire

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: 1905 Russian Revolution

text: Der fraynd

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Der fraynd

text: Warsaw

text: Di bin

text: satire

text: humor

text: satire

text: censorship

text: Warsaw

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Łódź

text: Riga

text: Czernowitz

text: Warsaw

text: Lwów

text: Soviet Union


title: Kasztner, Rezső

abstract: (Also known as Rudolf Kasztner; his Hebrew name was Yisra’el; 1906–1957), Zionist activist in Hungary during the Holocaust; later accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Born in Cluj (Kolozsvár), Kasztner worked for the leading Zionist newspaper of Transylvania, the Új Kelet (New East), between 1925 and 1940. A leader of the Zionist youth movement Aviva-Barissia during the 1930s when Transylvania was under Romanian rule, he became the secretary of the National Jewish Party in the Romanian Parliament. The president of this party was his father-in-law, Dr. József Fischer, head of the Neolog Jewish Community in Cluj. Kasztner moved to Budapest in 1940 after Hungary, an independent ally of Nazi Germany, annexed northern Transylvania. There he worked in the office of Keren Hayesod, and in 1943 became the deputy chairman of the Hungarian Zionist Association.

text: Zionist

text: Hungary

text: Holocaust

text: Cluj

text: Transylvania

text: Budapest

text: Slovakia

text: Poland

text: Auschwitz Protocols


title: Munk, Me’ir Avraham

abstract: (1830–1907), Hebrew author. Me’ir (Adolf) Munk’s autobiography, Sipure korot ḥayai (My Life’s Histories), completed in 1899, is a unique document in the history of Hungarian Jewry. Few book-length autobiographies or memoirs written by Jews in nineteenth-century Hungary have come down to us, and Munk’s composition is additionally the only extant example of the genre to have been written in Hebrew.

text: autobiography

text: Hungary

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Burgenland

text: Oradea

text: Bernát Munkácsi

text: Tiszaeszlár affair

text: Orthodox

text: Budapest

glossary: heder yeshiva Neolog


title: Hebrew Literature

abstract: The tradition of Hebrew belles lettres in Eastern Europe began with anti-Hasidic satires by Galician maskilim in the 1820s and ended with desperate attempts to preserve the remnants of Hebrew literary activity in Poland on the eve of World War II. The intervening period witnessed 120 years of intense creative activity, during which modern Hebrew literature flourished in various geographic centers as a highly stratified and ramified system that laid the foundations of its canon.

imgDesc: Hebrew writer Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik (center) surrounded by Jewish teachers and children during his visit to Kaunas, 1932. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Haskalah

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Lwów

text: Me’ir Letteris

text: prose

text: Hasidism

text: satires

text: Yosef Perl

text: parody

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Orthodoxy

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Russian Empire

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Lithuania

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: poetry

text: Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Land of Israel

text: Avraham Uri Kovner

text: Avraham Ya‘akov Paperna

text: Lithuania

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mordekhai David Brandstetter

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Ha-Melits

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Ha-Boker or

text: pogroms

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Aleksander Ziskind Rabinovitz

text: Hebrew poetry

text: Mordekhai Tsevi Mane

text: Konstantin Abba Shapiro

text: Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Yitsḥak Kaminer

text: Meshulam Zalman Goldbaum

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: David Frishman

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: David Frishman

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Shim‘on Bernfeld

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Ha-Yom

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Asif

text: Otsar ha-sifrut

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Tushiyah

text: Warsaw

text: Hebrew children’s literature

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Odessa

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Russian Revolution

text: World War I

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: Aharon Avraham Kabak

text: Asher Barash

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Ya‘akov Steinberg

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Devorah Baron

text: Yiddish literature

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: childhood

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: shtetl

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Ya‘akov Steinberg

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Ya‘akov Lerner

text: David Shimonovitz

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Ha-Dor

text: David Frishman

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Fishel Lachower

text: Avraham Yosef Stybel

text: David Frishman

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Ḥayim Hazaz

text: Eli‘ezer Steinman

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Yokheved Bat-Miriam

text: Yokheved Bat-Miriam

text: Ḥayim Lenski

text: Tsevi Preigerzon

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Yehoshu‘a Thon

text: Kolot

text: Eli‘ezer Steinman

text: Malki’el Lusternik

text: Tsevi Zevulun Weinberg

text: Ba-Derekh

text: Re’uven Fahn

text: Malki’el Lusternik

text: Matityahu Shoham

text: Berl Pomerantz

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ba-Derekh

text: Bialik

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Asch

text: M. A. Gintsburg

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: yeshiva

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: Yiddish Literature

text: Misnagdim

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Otsar ha-sifrut

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Ha-Melits

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Voskhod

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Haynt

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Yom

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Yiddish Literature

text: Ba-Derekh

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Sholem Aleichem

glossary: Haskalah tsadik Magid Diaspora yeshiva Ḥabad maskil Misnagdim rebbe Torah

subconcepts: The Generation of Transition (1880–1900)


title: Breitbart, Zishe

abstract: (1883–1925), popular entertainer, circus strongman, and folk hero. Billed as “the strongest man in the world” in the 1920s, Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart was better known to his Yiddish-speaking audiences as Shimshn-hagibr (Samson the Mighty). Breitbart was born into a family of blacksmiths in Łódź. According to his autobiography, he began casting iron in his father’s workshop at the age of four. Breitbart eventually embarked upon a career as a circus acrobat and strongman, as well as an actor on the Yiddish stage.

imgDesc: Zishe Breitbart being escorted in to perform at a sports ground, where he bent bars of metal and demonstrated other feats of strength, Kraków, 1920s. (Beth Hatefutsoth, Photo Archive, Tel Aviv)

text: entertainer

text: Łódź

text: Prague

text: Warsaw


title: Shaḥar, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew monthly publication, issued between 1868 and 1884. Edited by author Perets Smolenskin, Ha-Shaḥar (The Dawn) was printed in Vienna. Twelve annual volumes were issued, the ninth and tenth of which appeared irregularly. The contents of the periodical, as stated by Smolenskin in an introduction, included articles on Jewish thought, history, and literature; prose, poetry, and essays; interpretations and explanations of biblical passages; news from Eastern Europe and the Jewish world; reviews of Hebrew books; and information about recently published books.

imgDesc: Title page of Ha-Shaḥar, September/October 1876, Vienna. (YIVO)

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: prose

text: poetry

text: Haskalah

text: assimilation

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Ha-Boker or

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: Mordekhai David Brandstetter

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Shelomoh Mandelkern

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yitsḥak Kaminer

text: David Frishman


title: Halevy, Meyer Abraham

abstract: (1900–1972), rabbi, historian, and philosopher. Meyer Abraham Halevy was born in Piatra Neamț, Romania, into a religious family; his father was a rabbi and his mother also came from a rabbinic family. After completing his heder education, Halevy studied at the Beit Israel yeshiva in Buhuşi.

imgDesc: Jakob Lestschinsky (second from right), historian Simon Dubnow (center), Meyer Abraham Halevy from Bucharest (left), and other delegates to the YIVO Conference pose at the grave of Tsemaḥ Szabad, a physician, leader of the Folkist party, and founder of YIVO, Vilna, 1935. (YIVO)

text: Piatra Neamț

text: Romania

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Buhuşi

text: Iaşi

text: Bucharest

text: Egalitatea

text: Curierul Israelit

text: Bucharest

glossary: heder yeshiva


title: Egalitatea

abstract: Weekly publication issued in Bucharest from 1890 to 1916, and again from 1919 to 1940. The longest-enduring Jewish periodical in Romania, Egalitatea (Equality) started out as an emancipationist newspaper, “dedicated exclusively to Israelite interests within the country,” as was stated in its platform article. Over the extensive era in which it was issued, Egalitatea analyzed the political, cultural, social, and economic situations of Romanian Jews, as had its predecessor and model publication, Fraternitatea (Fraternity).

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Schwarzfeld

text: Iacob Isac Niemirower

text: Isac Peltz


title: Bin, Di

abstract: Illustrated humorous weekly published in Warsaw from March through August 1906. Di bin (The Bee) represented the first attempt by Shmuel Yankev Yatskan (1874–1936) to publish a popular Yiddish newspaper, two months before he launched his successful daily Idishes tageblat. Di bin’s copublisher and editor was Eleazar David Finkel (1862–1918), a talented journalist and translator.

text: Warsaw

text: Shmuel Yankev Yatskan

text: Yaknehoz


title: Crohmălniceanu, Ovid S.

abstract: (1921–2000), critic, literary historian, and writer. Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu (originally Moise Cahn) was born in Galați, attended high school in the same town, and began his studies at the Polytechnical University of Bucharest. He was compelled to suspend his education because of the antisemitic legislation in force in Romania between 1940 and 1944, but he ultimately graduated in 1947 with an engineering degree. He began publishing literary criticism in newspapers and reviews in 1944.

text: Galați

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Romanian literature


title: Yehudah Ḥasid ha-Levi

abstract: (ca. 1650–1700), popular mystical preacher. Yehudah Ḥasid ha-Levi was born in Dubno (according to other sources, in Siedlce), and went to Italy to study Kabbalah around 1678. Returning to Poland, he became the rabbi of Szydłów. In 1696, he and Ḥayim Malakh became leaders of a group of ascetics who intended to immigrate to the Land of Israel in order to await the messiah’s coming in Jerusalem.

text: Dubno

text: Poland

text: Ḥayim Malakh

text: Land of Israel

text: Lithuania

text: piety

text: Sabbatianism

text: Czech lands

text: David Oppenheim

text: Mikulov

text: Sephardim

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref

text: Jakub Frank

glossary: Kabbalah Torah Diaspora


title: Lajta, Béla

abstract: (1873–1920), architect. Born in Budapest-Óbuda to a traditional Jewish family of tailors, Béla Lajta (originally Leitersdorfer) became the most important protomodernist architect in Hungary, bridging the art nouveau of Ödön Lechner and modernism proper. With Joseph Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, and Ian Kotěra, Lajta was one of the most significant architects between 1900 and 1920 in Habsburg lands. Talented in music, drama, sculpture, and painting, he ultimately graduated from Budapest Technical University in 1896 as a student of Alois Hausmann and Imre Steindl; he then was awarded a travel grant to Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and Russia. Lajta worked in the offices of Alfred Messel in Berlin, Norman Shaw in London, and Ödön Lechner in Budapest.

imgDesc: Entrance to the synagogue of the Jewish Institute for the Blind, designed by Béla Lajta (1905–1908), Budapest. (YIVO)

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania


title: Seini

abstract: Town in northern Romania in the county of Maramureş, on the Someşului Plain at the southwestern foot of the Gutîi Mountains and on the Seinel River, 48 km northwest of Baia Mare. The first documented reference to Seini (Hun., Szinyérváralja or Szinérváralja) dates to 1334, and the first indication of a Jewish population comes from the second half of the eighteenth century. A census of Jews in Maramureş in 1768–1769 recorded 2 Jewish families with 6 people living in Seini. In 1839–1840 there were 151 Jews; a century later, the census of 1930 counted 673 Jews (13% of the total town population). The Jewish community was established by the end of the 1700s, with its own rabbi, and it later affiliated strongly with Orthodoxy. In 1885, it became the administrative center for the surrounding rural communities.

text: Romania

text: Baia Mare

text: Orthodoxy

text: Transylvania

text: poetry

text: Hungary


title: Beck, Moritz

abstract: (1845–1923), rabbi, biblical scholar, and educator. Moritz (Me’ir) Beck was born in Pápa, Hungary, where he attended Jewish elementary school, Catholic secondary school, and Protestant high school. At the same time, he studied Hebrew, Torah, and the Talmud with a private tutor, Salomon Iosef Goldberg. In 1865, Beck left for Breslau to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary established by Zacharias Frankel, as well as the faculty of philosophy at the University of Breslau. In 1868, he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation in biblical studies and in 1872 became a rabbi.

text: Pápa

text: Hungary

text: Breslau

text: Seminary

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Orthodoxy

glossary: Torah Talmud


title: Nossig, Alfred

abstract: (1864–1943), writer, sculptor, musician, and public activist. Alfred Nossig came from a wealthy family in Lemberg (Lwów), where his father served as secretary of the Jewish community and was an activist for Jewish rights in Galicia. Exposed to German culture by his father, Nossig was in favor of Polish-Jewish assimilation and gravitated toward Polish romanticism, which inspired him in the early 1880s to formulate ideas about liberating Jewish culture from the constraints of tradition. He expressed these ideas in the periodical Ojczyzna (The Fatherland) and in an organization that he himself founded, called Przymierze Braci (Union of Brothers).

text: Lemberg

text: Galicia

text: assimilation

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Zionism

text: Judenrat


title: Gordon, Shemu’el Leib

abstract: (Shalag; 1865–1933), Hebrew writer, editor, and educator. Shemu’el Leib Gordon was born in Lida (Vilna province; now in Hrodna, Bel.) and received a traditional education. He was self-taught in secular studies and became a Hebrew teacher from a young age.

text: Hrodna

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Ger tsedek

text: land of Israel

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Warsaw

text: heder

text: Hebrew children’s literature

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich


title: Ferenczi, Sándor

abstract: (1873–1933), neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. Sándor Ferenczi was born and raised in Miskolc, though his family had roots in Galicia. His father, Bernát (Baruch) Fraenkel, who changed the family name to Ferenczi in 1879, ran a well-known bookshop and publishing house. Ferenczi graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Vienna and settled in Budapest in 1895. There he worked as a physician at several hospitals, opening a private surgery practice in 1900. As a physician, Ferenczi developed ideas that went beyond the dominant, purely positivistic, and reductionist biological and medical thinking of his age, and sought philosophical and psychological explanations for the “secrets” of life and matter, as well as for unconscious phenomena. In 1903, he opened a neurological practice at the outpatients’ clinic of the Workers Health Insurance Association.

text: Miskolc

text: Galicia

text: Budapest

text: psychoanalysis

text: Béla Kun


title: Aktion Reinhard

abstract: Operation to murder Jews of the Generalgouvernement in Poland. From March to December 1942 nearly two million Jews were murdered, including most Jews of the Generalgouvernement together with approximately 135,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia, Holland, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Aktion (Operation) Reinhard was headed by Odilo Globocnik, who was Lublin District SS and Police Leader. The aktion received its name in the summer of 1942, apparently in memory of Reinhard Heydrich, who had been assassinated by Czech resistance fighters in late May of that year.

text: Poland

text: Lublin

text: Einsatzgruppen

text: Warsaw

text: ghettos


title: Keleti, Ágnes

abstract: (Klein; 1921– ), gymnast, five-time Olympic champion, and coach. Ágnes Keleti won 10 Olympic medals, including 5 gold, in gymnastics over three Olympic Games. In 2000, she ranked third all-time among women athletes for most Olympic medals and fourth all-time as a winner of Olympic gold medals. Keleti is the most successful Jewish female athlete in Olympic history and was ranked among the world’s top five gymnasts from 1952 until 1956. Between 1947 and 1956, she won the All-Around Hungarian Championships 10 times.

imgDesc: Ágnes Keleti demonstrating gymnastics at the Fifth Maccabi Games, Israel, 1957. (Pierre Gildesgame Maccabi Sports Museum, Israel)

text: Budapest

text: Hungary


title: Goldin, Ezra

abstract: (1868–1915), Hebrew writer. Ezra Goldin was born in Luna, a town in the Grodno region. In 1886 he moved to Warsaw, and a year later published his first book, Shire no‘ar (Poetry of Youth). This was an anthology of both original and translated poems from Russian, with nationalist themes and emotional tones that were typical of Ḥibat Tsiyon poetry. He soon abandoned poetry and turned his attention to prose, publishing stories and articles in Hebrew and Yiddish in the local press.

text: Grodno

text: Warsaw

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: prose

text: Łódź

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Riga

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature

text: Haskalah

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

glossary: Torah Haskalah


title: Goldbaum, Meshulam Zalman

abstract: (1836–1915), Hebrew poet and playwright. Born in Lwów, Meshulam Goldbaum was inspired to write poetry by the revolutions of 1848 (his initial pieces have not survived). His earliest remaining poem is “Be-hakifi pe’ot roshi” (When My Sidelocks Surround Me), written when he was 15; the work protests against external marks that set Jews apart from gentiles.

text: Lwów

text: Yosef Kohen-Tsedek

text: Iaşi

text: Haskalah

text: Romania

text: Prague


title: Manger, Itsik

abstract: (1901–1969), Yiddish poet, playwright, prose writer, and essayist. Born Isidor Helfer in the multiethnic city of Czernowitz (then capital of the Habsburg province of Bucovina; now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Itsik Manger attended heder and later the Kaiser-Königlicher Dritte Staats-Gymnasium. When he was expelled for bad behavior, his formal education came to an end. By then, however, he had fallen under the spell of German Romantic poetry, and his knowledge of world literature was henceforth to be gleaned in German translation.

imgDesc: Jewish cultural figures at a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Czernowitz Yiddish conference, Cernăuți, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukr.), 1928. Pictured are (standing, left to right) artist Shloyme Lerner, actor Herts Grosbart, theatrical director Mordkhe Goldenberg, (seated, left to right) writer Itsik Manger, historian Noah Pryłucki, journalist Zalmen Reyzen,  and pedagogue and linguist Yisroel Rubin. Photograph by Jacob Brüll. (YIVO)

text: Bucovina

text: Chernivtsi

text: Ukraine

text: heder

text: Iaşi

text: Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Warsaw

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Purim

text: Yiddish literature

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: movie industry

text: Poland

text: Rokhl Oyerbakh

text: Yisroel Rabon

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

text: operettas

text: purim-shpil

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Bund

text: shtetl

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Perets Markish

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Yiddish poetry

text: prose

glossary: heder Torah Diaspora


title: Frug, Shimen Shmuel

abstract: (1860–1916), Russian and Yiddish poet and essayist. Once considered a shining star of Russian Jewish literature, Shimen Frug is remembered now mostly as a Zionist sympathizer and an inspiration for the Hebrew-language writers Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Leib Jaffe (Leyb Yaffe), and Yosef Klausner. By contrast, Simon Dubnow viewed Frug as a singer of negativism and despair. Frug, in fact, was a loner who, in an age of ideologies, had no ideology, belonged to no group, and was deeply contradictory. While often seen as a sympathizer of Zionism, Frug held an equally powerful passion for Diaspora Jewry. Lauded as a great friend of Yiddish, in truth Frug was ambivalent at best, launching a cruel attack against the language in 1899. Finally, although he served Jewish causes with his pen, he ultimately sullied his own reputation by selling out his muse and writing for Saint Petersburg’s gutter papers, including some that were mildly antisemitic. In short, the image of the monochromatic lover of Zion, master of Yiddish, and even melancholic singer of the Jewish people needs revision.

imgDesc: Rosh Hashanah greeting postcard with portrait of Shimen Shmuel Frug. Hebrew Publishing Company, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1905. (YIVO)

text: Russian Jewish literature

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Zionism

text: Saint Petersburg

text: heder

text: crown rabbi

text: Voskhod

text: Russia

text: Semen Nadson

text: S. An-ski

text: David Aizman

text: Odessa

glossary: Diaspora heder Talmud


title: Bar Kochba Association

abstract: A student organization that played a decisive role in shaping the Zionist movement in the Czech lands before World War I. The history of the group can be traced to 1893, when the Maccabi Association was founded at the German university in Prague.

imgDesc: Leaders of the Bar Kochba Association, Prague, 1910. (Central Zionist Archive)

text: Zionist

text: Czech lands

text: Maccabi

text: Prague

text: Ludvík Singer

text: Hilsner

text: Hugo Bergmann

text: Robert Weltsch

text: Felix

text: Hugo Herrmann

text: Leo

text: Hans Kohn

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Prague

text: Selbstwehr

text: World War I

text: Židovská Strana

text: Max Brod

text: Angelo Goldstein

text: Emil Margulies

text: Felix Weltsch

text: Friedrich Thieberger


title: Stryjkowski, Julian

abstract: (1905–1996), writer, playwright, and translator. Born Pesaḥ Stark to an Orthodox family in the town of Stryj, Julian Stryjkowski studied Polish literature in Lwów, earning a doctorate in 1932. He later worked as a teacher in Płock and as a canvasser in Warsaw. Initially associated with the Zionist youth movement Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, he joined the Communist Party in 1934 and was briefly jailed for political activism in 1935–1936.

text: Lwów

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: USSR

text: Poland

text: communism

text: Chwila

text: shtetl

text: Galicia

text: Yiddish literature

text: Artur Sandauer

text: Holocaust


title: Art Education

abstract: The first generation of Jewish artists in Eastern Europe (beginning with Mark Antokol’skii, Maurycy Gottlieb, and their younger contemporaries) received professional training at state art academies and private schools in Warsaw, Vilna, Saint Petersburg, Odessa, and Kraków. By the end of the nineteenth century, Jews had become a visible group in these institutions, and it was already possible to discern signs of ethnic solidarity among them. This tendency was first articulated in Russia in the 1880s, when, goaded by antisemitic sentiment expressed by administrative personnel and attacks by fellow students, Jewish artists were brought together not only by their exceptional position but also by their understanding of their particular artistic and social challenges.

imgDesc: Members of the Kultur-lige Art Department, Kiev, 1918: (left to right) Solomon Nikritin, Boris Aronson, and Yisakhar Ber Rybak. (Hillel Kazovsky)

text: Mark Antokol’skii

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Odessa

text: Kraków

text: Russia

text: Il’ia Gintsburg

text: Pale of Settlement

text: ORT

text: crafts

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Vitebsk

text: Marc Chagall

text: El Lissitzky

text: Minsk

text: painting and sculpture

text: Kiev

text: expeditions

text: Isaak Brodskii

text: Natan Al’tman

text: Kharkov

text: Tarbut

text: Ukraine

text: Kultur-lige

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Yisakhar Ber Rybak

text: Aleksandr Tyshler

text: El Lissitzky

text: Evsektsiia

text: photography

text: stage design

text: Belarus

text: tombstone

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Latvia

text: Poland

text: Riga

text: TSYSHO

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
get


title: Agudas Akhim

abstract: (Association of Brothers; Pol., Przymierze Braci), cultural and social organization. Founded in Lemberg (Lwów) in 1882, Agudas Akhim aimed to sever the traditional connection of Galician Jewry to German language and culture and to strive for integration within the Galician Polish sphere. Behind Agudas Akhim was a group of youths in their last years of high school as well as university students; its most prominent early leaders were Alfred Nossig, Adolf Lilien, Wilhelm Feldman, and Herman Diamand.

imgDesc: Playbill for a benefit performance by a Yiddish troupe under the direction of M. Kowalski, for Agudas Akhim, a charitable organization, Vilna, ca. 1915. Some of the performers would later go on to act in the Vilner Trupe. (YIVO)

text: Lemberg

text: Alfred Nossig

text: Wilhelm Feldman

text: Herman Diamand

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: assimilationist

text: Mikra Kodesh


title: Jewish Congress

abstract: Groundbreaking and contentious interdenominational conference that took place in Pest, Hungary, from December 1868 to February 1869. Having achieved a compromise with Austria that granted Jews independence in domestic affairs in 1867, the new Hungarian government sought to integrate Jews more completely into its general society. To this end, Jews were granted emancipation and the government worked with liberal-minded Jewish leaders to create a consistory-type, autonomous nationwide Jewish organization that could both regulate internal communal affairs and present a unified front in external relations.

imgDesc: Montage of portraits of delegates to the Jewish Congress, Pest, Hungary, 1868–1869. (Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives / Photograph courtesy of Beth Hatefutsoth, Photo Archive, Tel Aviv)

text: Hungary

text: Orthodoxy

text: Ignác Hirschler

text: Eisenstadt

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Yirmiyahu Löw

text: Sabbath

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: seminary

glossary:
Neolog
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Status Quo


title: Belarus

abstract: Established in 1991, Belarus (Yid., Raysn, Vaysrusland) is the successor state of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, with the same borders. The Jews of Belarus belong historically to the branch of Jewry known as Litvaks, a group distinguished by language (the northeast dialect of Yiddish) and by certain cultural attributes. The first mention of Jews in Belarus came in the fourteenth century, when Grand Prince Vytautas of Lithuania granted charters to Jews in Brest (1388) and Grodno (1389). In the sixteenth century Belarus became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Between 1624 and 1764 the majority of Jewish communities in Belarus belonged to the Va‘ad (Jewish Council) of Lithuania. In the mid seventeenth century, 80,000–90,000 Jews lived in the territory that is now Belarus. As a result of the partitions of Poland, Belarus became part of the Russian Empire.

imgDesc: Belarus, ca. 2000.

text: Lithuania

text: Brest

text: Grodno

text: Poland

text: Russian Empire

text: yeshivas

text: Minsk

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Hasidism

text: Lubavitch

text: Karlin-Stolin

text: Koidanov

text: Misnagdim

text: Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak of Volozhin

text: Volozhin

text: Mir

text: Bund

text: Zionism

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Vitebsk

text: Homel’

text: pogroms

text: Fareynikte

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Ukraine

text: Evsektsiia

text: Khaye Malke Lifshits

text: Aron Vainshtein

text: Riga

text: Poland

text: Soviet

text: Ian Gamarnik

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: State Jewish Theater

text: Shtern

text: Zelik Akselrod

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Izi Kharik

text: heder

text: Antisemitism

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Tarbut

text: TSYSHO

text: ghettos

text: Bobruisk

text: Pinsk

text: assimilation

glossary: Misnagdim heder


title: Estonia

abstract: State in the eastern Baltic region created in 1918 out of formerly Russian territories. Under Swedish rule from 1629 to 1721, when it was annexed to Russia, northern Estonia was part of the Duchy of Estland while southern Estonia was part of Livonia. In 1940, Estonia became a republic in the Soviet Union but was occupied by the German army from 1941 to 1944. It regained its independence in 1991.

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

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Tallinn

text: Tartu

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Courland

text: crafts

text: industry

text: Hirsch (Grigori) Eisenstadt

text: General Zionists

text: Tarbut

text: Kultur-lige

text: Bund

text: Zionist movement

text: ghettos

text: Vilna

text: Kaunas

text: labor camps

text: Maccabi


title: Federation of Jewish Communities and Organizations of the USSR

abstract: Known as the Va‘ad (council) of the USSR, the Federation of Jewish Communities and Organizations was founded in late 1989 with the development of an overt Jewish movement under perestroika and glasnost. Unlike the majority of national movements or “fronts” that emerged rapidly between 1988 and 1991, the Jewish movement did not link its aspirations for a national revival with any particular territory in the USSR. It was characterized by two conflicting approaches. One argued that the struggle for aliyah (emigration to Israel) should be its exclusive focus; the other, while insisting on the right to aliyah, also sought a Jewish national and cultural revival in the USSR. After most refuseniks were allowed to depart and mass emigration began, the second position predominated. “Informal” (i.e., unregistered) Jewish clubs and cultural societies arose, like similar groups among other nationalities. By the end of 1989, the number of Jewish organizations exceeded 200. Among these were Evreiskaia Kul’turnaia Assotsiatsiia (Jewish Cultural Association), established in 1988; Soiuz Prepodavatelei Ivrita/Igud Morim (Association of Hebrew Teachers); Evreiskoe Istoricheskoe Obshchestvo (Jewish Historical Society); Obshchestvo Druzhby i Kul’turnykh Sviazei c Izrailem (Association for Friendship and Cultural Ties with Israel); and Irgun Tsiyoni (Zionist Organization), founded in August 1989.

text: USSR

text: refuseniks

text: Riga

text: Congress of Jewish Communities and Organizations of the USSR

text: Moscow

text: Ukraine

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Russia


title: Bergson Family

abstract: Influential Warsaw family of industrialists and financiers. Related to other aristocratic Jewish dynasties, including the Bersohn, Heryng, and Toeplitz families, the Bergson family originated with Shmul Zbytkower, one of whose sons, Ber (1764–1822), was also known as Berek Sonnenberg. Berek’s children subsequently adopted the surname Berekson (later Bergson) from their father’s first name.

text: Warsaw

text: Shmul Zbytkower

text: banking

text: Temerl

text: Hasidism


title: Broder, Berl

abstract: (ca. 1817–1868), early composer and performer of Yiddish popular songs. Born in Podkamen, three miles from Brody in Austrian Galicia, Berl Broder (also Broder-Margulies) began his public career as a folksinger in 1857, when he gave up his job in the pig bristle business and took up entertaining at inns, with two former synagogue choirboys as members of his troupe. The original repertory was sad, the melodies too, and consisted of the individual monologues of a poor shepherd, night watchman, shingler, drayman, moneylender, wanderer, cantor, matchmaker, Hebrew-school teacher, preacher, or water carrier. Once the routine caught on, each monologue-in-song was performed in appropriate costume, followed by a little dance. “I, poor so-and-so” became the universally popular signature of the Broder Singers, semiprofessional entertainers who wandered through Eastern Europe over the following decades.

imgDesc:
Early Yiddish theater song. "Freilech
  Chassid" (Freylekh khasid; Happy Hasid). Words and music: Abraham
  Goldfaden (Avrom Goldfadn). Performed by Ben Bonus with orchestra directed by
  Simón Tenovsky. From Londisc lp RL 28000, Sing Main Folk . . ., Buenos Aires,
  n.d. (YIVO)

text: songs

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: entertainers

text: weddings

text: Purim

text: Mikhl Gordon

text: Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz

text: Elyokem Tsunzer

text: theater


title: Paneth, Yeḥezkel

abstract: (1783–1845), chief rabbi of Transylvania. In the eighteenth century, the Paneth family formed the core of the small Jewish settlement in Bielitz (Bielsko-Biała) in Austrian Silesia; the town was located between Moravia to the west and Galicia to the east. Yeḥezkel Paneth’s father Yosef (as his father before him) was a wealthy leaseholder on the estates of Christian, Graf von Haugwitz. A considerably learned man with good connections to the economic and scholarly elite, Yosef sent his teenage son to study in Moravia and Bohemia. Yeḥezkel spent two years at the Leipnik yeshiva of Barukh Fränkl-Te’omim, and from 1799 to 1802 in Prague, primarily at the yeshiva for advanced students of Yehudah Leib Fischeles. The campaign to eradicate the last vestiges of the Sabbatian movement in Prague was in full swing, led by El‘azar Fleckeles. Furthermore, the Haskalah was flourishing under the moderating influence of Barukh Jeitteles, a member of the Prague’s rabbinical court.

text: Transylvania

text: Bielsko

text: Biała

text: Silesia

text: Moravia

text: Galicia

text: leaseholder

text: yeshiva

text: Barukh Fränkl-Te’omim

text: Prague

text: Sabbatian

text: El‘azar Fleckeles

text: Haskalah

text: Barukh Jeitteles

text: mysticism

text: Familiants Laws

text: kloyz

text: Ropshitz

text: Hasidism

text: Yisra’el the Magid of Kozhenits

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak

text: Lublin

text: Menaḥem Mendel

text: Sandz

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: Sephardim

text: Alba Iulia

text: Ashkenazim

text: rabbinate

text: Sabbath

text: yeshiva

text: Dej

text: Yehudah Kahana

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah tsadik rebbe Talmud Responsa


title: Engel, Yo’el

abstract: (1868–1927), composer, music critic, musicologist, and ethnographer. Born to a middle-class family in Berdyansk, Crimea, Yo’el (Joel; in Russian, Iulii Dmitrevich) Engel received a law degree from the University of Kharkov in 1890, but at the urging of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with the composer Sergei Taneyev (1856–1915). Upon graduation, Engel was offered a position as a music critic and editor at Moscow’s leading liberal newspaper, Russkie vedomosti, a position he held until 1918.

imgDesc: Yo’el Engel leading a choir at a children’s colony, Malakhovka, near Moscow, ca. 1920, where he taught, composed, and lectured. Photograph by Sh. Koldavsky. (YIVO)

text: Crimea

text: Kharkov

text: Moscow

text: Purim

text: operetta

text: folk songs

text: Sha’ul Ginsburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russian Empire

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Mark Warshawski

text: Society for Jewish Folk Music

text: S. An-ski’s Ethnographic Expedition

text: Habimah

text: Theater

text: The Dybbuk


title: Bondy, Bohumil

abstract: (1832–1907), Czech industrialist, political leader, and historian. As the son of one of the most prominent Jewish families in nineteenth-century Prague, Bohumil Bondy himself became a major figure in the economic life of Bohemia and one of the leading entrepreneurs in the metal industry in the Czech lands. He demonstrated his unusual talents in this field during the economic crisis of 1873, when the factory he owned (located in Bubeneč, an industrial suburb of Prague) was the only one in Prague to survive the crisis without dismissing a single employee.

text: Prague

text: economic life

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: historiography

text: Silesia


title: Kisch, Alexander

abstract: (1848–1917), rabbi, educator, and publicist. Alexander Kisch came from an established family in Prague, where his father, Joseph Kisch, was director of the first modern private school in the city’s Jewish quarter. Beginning in 1863, Kisch studied first at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau and later at the local university there. In 1871, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Tübingen. He then lived in Paris, where he attended lectures at the Séminaire Israélite while working as a private tutor to the children of Russian financier and Jewish philanthropist Baron Horace Gintsburg (Günzburg).

imgDesc: Hagadah shel Pesaḥ (Passover Haggadah), translated into German by Alexander Kisch (Prague: Verlag Samuel Pascheles, 1889). (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: Prague

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

text: Horace Gintsburg

text: Bohemian

text: Mladá Boleslav

text: Hilsner Affair

text: Max Brod

text: Franz Werfel

text: liturgy

text: Mordecai Maisel


title: Reyzen, Avrom

abstract: (1876–1953), writer, poet, and editor. Born in Koidanov, eastern Belorussia, Avrom Reyzen received a general and Jewish education. His father, Kalmen Reyzen, was a maskil and a writer, as were Avrom’s brother Zalmen and sister Sore. With the encouragement of Yaknehoz (pseudonym of Yeshaye Nisn Hakoyen Goldberg), Reyzen submitted articles to Dos Yudishes folks-blat in Saint Petersburg at the age of 13 or 14. He began to correspond with Yankev Dinezon and Y. L. Peretz, who published Reyzen’s poem “Ven dos lebn is farbitert” (When Life Is Embittered) in the first volume of Di yudishe bibliotek (The Yiddish Library; 1891).

imgDesc: Portrait of Avrom Reyzen from the frontispiece of Shriftn (Writings), the first volume of his Gezamelte lider (Collected Poems; Kraków: Yosef Fisher, 1908). Reyzen has inscribed the book in Yiddish to Dr. Shmul Ellisberg in New York, “a good friend, a comrade, and lover of Yiddish literature.” (YIVO)

text: Belorussia

text: Zalmen

text: Yaknehoz

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: poetry

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Vilna

text: Minsk

text: Warsaw

text: Zionist

text: Der yud

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Bund

text: Der fraynd

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Czernowitz Conference


title: Wald, Henri

abstract: (1920–2002), philosopher, logician, and essayist. Henri Wald was born in Bucharest, to the family of a small merchant. In 1940, discriminatory legislation forced him to leave high school; however, he was able to pursue his studies at a private college for Jewish students. He was mobilized during World War II, as a Jew, in a forced labor detachment. A radical antifascist, he supported the Communist Party, which was still illegal at the time. After the war, Wald began to publish articles in the leftist press, making his debut in September 1944 in the newspaper Tribuna poporului (The People’s Tribune), and eventually contributing to several periodicals of the same ideological orientation as well as to cultural publications such as Revista fundațiilor regale (The Review of Royal Foundations).

text: Bucharest


title: Fényes, Adolf

abstract: (1867–1945), painter. Born in Kecskemét, Hungary, Adolf Fényes was one of his country’s most distinguished Jewish painters. The motifs of his works can be considered a metonym for the struggle to create a Hungarian Jewish identity, particularly during the decades immediately before and following World War I.

imgDesc: Mákoskalác (Poppyseed Cake). Adolf Fényes, Budapest, 1910. Oil on canvas. (Hungarian National Gallery)

text: Hungary

text: Budapest


title: Botvinnik, Mikhail Moiseevich

abstract: (1911–1995), sixth world chess champion, a title he held from 1948 to 1963. Mikhail Botvinnik became a master in 1927 and a grandmaster in 1935. He was a seven-time USSR champion, and won the special title of absolute champion of that country in 1941. Among his most remarkable victories were Moscow 1935, where he shared first and second places with Salomon Flohr and ranked higher than Emanuel Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca; Nottingham 1936, where he shared first and second places with Capablanca and ranked higher than three world champions; Groningen 1946, where he won first place; and finally the Hague–Moscow 1948, where he became world champion.

text: chess

text: USSR

text: Moscow

text: chess

text: chess

text: chess

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Bund


title: Paşcani

abstract: Town in the Romanian region of Moldavia (known in Yiddish as Peshkan). In 1845, there were 17 Jewish families living in Paşcani. Numbering 85 persons, they were among the founders of the town and were involved in timber, cereal, and the cattle business. Many Jews from neighboring towns attended fairs in Paşcani; and the extension of roads and the building of railways contributed to its economic development. Jews built a synagogue and a ritual bathhouse, as well as a cemetery.

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

text: Moldavia

text: Hasidic

text: Romania

text: Ruzhin-Sadagora dynasty

text: Buhuşi

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionist

text: Transnistria

text: Bessarabia

text: Tighina

text: Dorohoi

text: Botoşani


title: Zederbaum, Aleksander

abstract: (1816–1893), editor and journalist. Aleksander Zederbaum was born in Zamość, Poland. After marrying in 1835, he moved to Lublin, and then in 1840 to Odessa, where he initially worked as a bookkeeper. He soon became a tailor and opened his own shop. In Odessa, Zederbaum associated with local maskilim, was involved in community affairs, and helped to found a school for adults. With Aharon Yitsḥak Goldenblum, he founded Ha-Melits (The Advocate), the first Hebrew weekly periodical in tsarist Russia (eventually it became a daily). The first issue appeared on 11 October 1860, and Zederbaum remained as the paper’s publisher and editor for the rest of his life. In 1871, he moved with the editorial offices to Saint Petersburg.

imgDesc: Masthead of Yudishes folks-blat: A politish-literarishe tsaytung (Jewish People’s Newspaper: A Literary-Political Newspaper), 1.13 (October 1881), St. Petersburg. (YIVO)

text: Zamość

text: Poland

text: Lublin

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Melits

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kol mevaser

text: Razsvet

text: pogroms

text: Zionism

text: Hasidism

text: Berdichev

text: L. (Iulii) Martov


title: Jakubowicz, Yehudis Halevi

abstract: (1749–1829), German–Polish banker and merchant. Born to a wealthy family in Frankfurt an-der-Oder, Yehudis ha-Levi Jakubowicz had an excellent education. At age 30, she became the third wife of Shmul Zbytkower, a successful army provisioner and merchant in Warsaw. She was an active partner in her husband’s business and, based on her contacts, helped expand its scope. After his death in 1801, she led the company alone, continuing to provide supplies to the Prussian, French, and Russian armies. She achieved a leading position among the purveyors to the court of the Duchy of Warsaw, second only to Berek Shmuel Sonnenberg (Bergson), her stepson and competitor. Her company also acted as a purveyor to the Prussian court. Having received unrestricted rights of residence, trade, and manufacturing from the Prussian king in 1798, Jakubowicz saw this privilege recognized by the Kingdom of Poland in 1815, granting her the right to acquire real estate. Moreover, the privilege was heritable by all her descendants.

text: Shmul Zbytkower

text: Warsaw

text: trade

text: Poland


title: Varshavski, Mark

abstract: (1848–1907), Yiddish folk poet and composer. Mark Varshavski (Warshawski) was born in Odessa and as a child moved to Zhitomir, where he attended the state rabbinical school for four years and then studied jurisprudence for a year at Odessa University. He completed his studies in Kiev in 1875 and practiced law for many years, eking out a meager income. In 1903, he was engaged by a Belgian firm to serve as legal adviser but fell sick in 1905 and had to return to Kiev, where he died two years later.

imgDesc: Members of the Bene Tsiyon (Sons of Zion) society with visiting writer Sholem Aleichem (second row from front, fifth from left) and composer Mark Varshavski (third from left), Berdichev (now Berdychiv, Ukr.), 1900. (YIVO)

text: Odessa

text: Zhitomir

text: Kiev

text: folk songs

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Zionist

text: Yiddish literature


title: Ehrenkranz, Benjamin Wolf

abstract: (1823/26–1883), Yiddish and Hebrew poet; maskil. Known as the singer and troubadour of the Jews of Romania, Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz was born in Zbaraż (in Austrian Galicia) and received a traditional education. Under the influence of friends from Tarnopol, he embraced the Haskalah movement. Although Ehrenkranz was married at age 18 to the daughter of a Hasid from his native town, his father-in-law took note of the poet’s irreverent behavior and satiric writings, and forced him to divorce his wife notwithstanding her opposition. Ehrenkranz left for Czernowitz, where he became quite well known among local Jews, and subsequently left for Moldova to work as a tutor. There he began to write Yiddish poetry, occasionally translating or recomposing his works into Hebrew.

imgDesc:
Anti-Hasidic
  satirical song. "Der
  filosof" (Der filozof; The Philosopher). Words and music: Velvel
  Zbarzher (Velvl Zbarzher; Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz). Performed by Joseph
  Winogradoff with orchestra directed by Nathaniel Shilkret. Victor 73164 mx. B
  25750-2, Camden, N.J., 1921. (YIVO)

text: Romania

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: Czernowitz

text: Moldova

text: poetry

text: Botoşani

text: weddings

text: Mihăileni

text: Botoşani

text: Iaşi

text: Piatra Neamț

text: Galați

text: Brăila

text: Bucharest

text: Russia

text: pogroms

glossary: maskil Haskalah


title: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

abstract: (1730?–1788), Hasidic leader and prominent disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh. Considered an outstanding mystical figure in the world of Hasidism, he served as a spiritual leader in Lithuania and Belorussia and founded the Hasidic community in Safed and Tiberias. The writings of the Misnagdim associate him with Minsk, and Ḥabad sources call him Menaḥem Mendel of Horodok, but he is known primarily as Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk.

text: Dov Ber

text: Hasidism

text: Lithuania

text: Belorussia

text: Misnagdim

text: Minsk

text: Ḥabad

text: Vitebsk

text: Avraham of Kalisk

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Vilna

text: Eliyahu

text: Land of Israel

text: messianism

text: Zhitomir

glossary: Misnagdim Magid


title: Katz, Pinḥas

abstract: (1907–1941), Estonian Revisionist Zionist leader. Pinḥas Katz was born in Daugavpils, Latvia. After his graduation from high school in 1923, he worked in several businesses. In 1926, he moved to Estonia to study law at the University of Tartu, an institution famous for liberal academic traditions and a popular place for Latvian Jewish students. He joined Hasmonea, a Zionist Jewish student organization that gradually advocated Revisionism.

text: Daugavpils

text: Latvia

text: Estonia

text: Tartu

text: Tallinn

text: Revisionist Zionists

text: Tarbut

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Soviet Union


title: Brushtein, Aleksandra Iakovlevna

abstract: (1884–1968), Russian playwright, memoirist, and teacher. Aleksandra Brushtein was born in Vilna, where her father, Iakov Vygodskii (Wygodzki; 1857–1941), was a physician and a leading figure in the Jewish community. She graduated from the History–Philosophy Department of the Higher Women’s Courses in Saint Petersburg. After the revolution, Brushtein concentrated on educational work and writing, organizing 173 literacy schools for adults and writing extensively for children and adolescents.

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Passover

text: Hirsh Lekert

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
numerus clausus


title: Purim

abstract: A minor Jewish festival observed annually on the fourteenth of the Jewish month of Adar (February or March in the Gregorian calendar), Purim (Pirem in Polish dialects of Yiddish) celebrates the survival of the Jews of Persia despite a plot to annihilate them, and is the only Jewish holiday originally established in the Diaspora. The biblical Scroll of Esther recounts the story, including details about the instigation of the plot by a villainous official, Haman, and the Jews’ successful turning of the tables against their enemies.

imgDesc: Purim painting, untitled. Safed, Israel, 19th century. Hasidic Jews celebrating Purim with a Sephardic Jew (left). The inscription is part of a passage from the Talmud urging Jews to imbibe enough alcohol so that they will not know the difference between the phrases “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.” Collection of Isaac Einhorn, Tel Aviv. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource NY)

text: charity

text: yizker-bikher

text: Poland

text: yeshiva

text: money

text: humor

text: purim-shpil

text: Galicia

text: Mezhbizh

text: Ostróg

text: Kovno

text: ghettos

text: Holocaust


title: Izraelita

abstract: Based in Warsaw and published between 1866 and 1915, Izraelita was the longest-lasting Polish Jewish journal. Published in the Polish language by Jewish reformers, the weekly initially described itself as a journal “for the study of Judaism”; later it broadened its self-definition to include “religious and educational” as well as “scientific, social, and literary matters.” Izraelita is recognized as an outstanding source on Jewish thought and modernization during a crucial period of Polish Jewish history. Established at the time of increased hopes for integration, Izraelita’s final years on the Polish cultural scene confronted a rising tide of nationalism and antisemitism, representing a crisis for integrationist Jewish circles.

imgDesc: Izraelita, vol. 1, no. 27 (1866). (The Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: Warsaw

text: Haskalah

text: religious reform

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: assimilationist

text: Zionism


title: Altman, Moyshe

abstract: (1890–1981), Yiddish writer. Born in the shtetl of Lipkan in Bessarabia, Moyshe Altman received a traditional Jewish education and attended the Russian school in Kamenets Podolski. Thanks to his exceptional memory and diligence, he acquired an encyclopedic education and mastered six languages. In 1919, he moved to Chernivtsi, where, beginning in 1921, he worked for the Yiddish Culture Federation of Romania, lecturing on Jewish and world literature in the shtetls of Bessarabia.

imgDesc: “Ovnt khmures,” by Moyshe Altman, n.d. Poem by Moyshe Altman, “Ovnt khmures” (Evening Clouds), n.d. One of two poems with the same title. A note in different handwiriting at the bottom of the page reads: "When Esther visited us during her stay in Czernowitz." Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F5.11. (YIVO)

text: shtetl

text: Bessarabia

text: Kamenets Podolski

text: Chernivtsi

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Kishinev

text: poetry

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Folks-shtime

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yankev Shternberg


title: Yaknehoz

abstract: (Pseudonym of Yeshaye Nisn Hakoyen Goldberg; 1858–1927), Yiddish author. Born to a poor family in the village of Stolbovshchine (on the Neman River in Minsk province), Yaknehoz came from a distinguished lineage: his father, Yekusiel Zalmen, was a grandson of the noted Galician rabbi El‘azar ha-Kalir. Yaknehoz received a traditional Jewish education in Kapulie and Minsk, and, having achieved particular expertise in the Bible, began composing Hebrew poetry under its influence. He also developed a reputation as an inspector of Torah scrolls; still a yeshiva student, he traveled throughout the Minsk region, checking and correcting them. During this period he met the writer and critic Shemu’el Leib Zitron, at whose suggestion he began writing feuilletons in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1878 for periodicals such as Ha-Kol and Kol le-‘am.

text: Minsk

text: Hebrew poetry

text: yeshiva

text: Shemu’el Leib Zitron

text: Kiev

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: shtetl

text: Sabbath

text: Passover

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Yom

text: Hasidim

text: Misnagdim

text: Lithuania

text: Der yud

text: Der fraynd

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: Moscow

text: Avrom Reyzen

glossary: Torah yeshiva Misnagdim


title: Kohner, Zsigmond

abstract: (1840–1908), industrialist, banker, and philanthropist. Zsigmond Kohner’s family moved to Pest from Leipzig. His father, Adolf Kohner, joined Zsigmond’s uncle’s firm, specializing in the produce and feather trade. Zsigmond’s mother, Lujza Sváb, was a member of a distinguished entrepreneurial and landowning family.

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Mór Wahrmann

text: Seminary


title: Birnbaum, Nathan

abstract: (1864–1937), author and publicist. Born in Vienna to moderately Orthodox parents, Nathan Birnbaum (who adopted the pseudonym Mathias Acher) grew estranged from observant Judaism in secondary school, but unlike his peers who felt themselves thoroughly German, Birnbaum declared that the Jews themselves constituted a distinct nation destined to reclaim Palestine as its national homeland. In 1883, with Reuven Bierer (1837–1931) and Moritz Schnirer (1860–1942), he cofounded the academic fraternity Kadimah, an early Jewish nationalist society whose first members consisted mostly of Galician Jewish students studying in Vienna.

imgDesc: Letter from Nathan Birnbaum to "Mr. Cohen," 1908. From Nathan Birnbaum in Czernowitz, Austrian Empire (now Chernivtsi, Ukr.), 11 December 1908, to "Mr. Cohen" about the impossibility of launching a new monthly journal without financial support from America, which he is no longer hopeful of obtaining since receiving a report from Dovid Pinski. Birnbaum complains about his own dire financial situation, noting that he has never been practical about earning a living and has always preoccupied himself with "things that are unpopular." He is in debt, especially to the printer. In considering giving up his present avocation for something more practical, he suggests that Pinski is not doing all he can to find support in America for the journal and for Birnbaum's work and is also allowing him to be excoriated in the American Jewish press. In fact, Birnbaum’s colleagues have abandoned him to the "disgrace and mockery of the rabble." He refers to someone, perhaps Abraham Cahan, as one who "every socialist Ivan considers a god." Birnbaum understands that it is difficult to put one's self on the line in such circumstances, but he cannot understand why Pinski and his friends have not written a word in his defense. In the meantime, he recommends that Cohen take under his wing a young man, [Louis?] Wiesenfeld, who was raised in New York but has spent the last two years in Galicia, and whom Birnbaum considers one of his disciples. Yiddish. Yiddish letterhead: Dr. Birnboym's Vokhenblat. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Zionists

text: Galicia

text: Buczacz

text: Czernowitz Yiddish language conference

text: Orthodox

text: Agudas Yisroel

glossary: publicist Diaspora


title: Eger, Akiva ben Mosheh

abstract: (1761–1837), rabbi and halakhist. Born in Eisenstadt (Burgenland) and educated in Breslau, Akiva Eger was considered one of the nimblest halakhic minds of his generation, as well as a particularly humane individual. He was also known for his bitter opposition to the liberal elements within his own community and beyond.

text: Eisenstadt

text: Burgenland

text: Breslau

text: rabbinate

text: Poznań

text: Vilna

text: Orthodox

text: Reform

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Tosafot
Mishnah
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Guilds

abstract: Merchants’ and artisans’ guilds were introduced into Eastern Europe during the thirteenth century by German immigrants. Taking their cue from West European counterparts, members of East European guilds sought to exclude Jews from the organizations. Despite such restrictions, Jewish artisans continued to work in trades; disputes subsequently erupted between Christian guilds and Jewish artisans.

imgDesc: Banner of the cooperative of Jewish shoemakers, Czechoslovakia, n.d. Klaus Synagogue, Prague, Czech Republic. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: crafts

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: kahal

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Prague

text: Mikulov

text: Uherský Brod

text: Moldavia

text: Russia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Odessa

text: Berdichev

text: Russia

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

glossary:
halakhah
kahal
Pale of Settlement


title: Epstein, Yeḥi’el Mikhl

abstract: (1830–1908), rabbi, scholar, and halakhic authority. Born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, Yeḥi’el Mikhl Epstein was successively the brother-in-law and then the father-in-law of Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin, head of the Volozhin yeshiva. In 1862, Epstein was appointed rabbi of Novozybkov in Chernigov guberniia. From 1874, he served as rabbi of the Novogrudok community in northern Belorussia.

text: Bobruisk

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Passover

glossary:
Torah
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Halkin, Shmuel

abstract: (1897–1960), Soviet Yiddish poet. Born in Rogachev, eastern Belorussia, Shmuel Halkin was a cousin of the brothers Shim‘on Halkin, a Hebrew poet, and Abraham Halkin, a historian and Arabist. Shmuel Halkin later remembered his own father, an employee in a timber business, as a “man of solid Jewish knowledge, of clear sober mind, and of broad dreamy heart.” The youngest of nine children, Shmuel was educated by his elder brother, an enthusiast of Hebrew and Russian literature.

text: Belorussia

text: Kiev

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Perets Markish

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Moscow

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Aron Gurshteyn

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt

text: Holocaust

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: shtetl

text: Hasidism

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

glossary: Talmud Kabbalah


title: Kohn, Jindřich

abstract: (1874–1935), philosopher and lawyer. Jindřich Kohn was born in Příbram, studied law at the Czech University in Prague, where he worked as junior lawyer, and later became an advocate in Pilsen (Plzeň). In 1927 he moved to Prague, where he took over an attorney’s office.

text: Prague

text: Czechoslovakia

text: assimilation

text: Viktor Vohryzek

text: Eduard Lederer

text: Zionism


title: Vergelis, Arn

abstract: (1918–1999), Yiddish poet, novelist, and editor. Born in Lubar, Ukraine, Arn (or Aron) Vergelis received a secondary Yiddish education in Birobidzhan, where his family lived from 1932. He was noted as a local talent in 1934 when his poems began to appear in the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan Star) and the almanac Forpost (Outpost). Upon graduating from a Yiddish school in 1936, he was sent to Moscow to continue his education at the Yiddish department of the Pedagogical Institute. Vergelis graduated in 1940—the same year in which his first book was published. That year, he also joined the Writers Union, and was drafted into the Russian army.

imgDesc: Di yidishe gas (The Jewish Street), no. 1 (1993), Moscow. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Birobidzhan

text: Birobidzhaner shtern

text: Moscow

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Yiddish literature

text: shtetl

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Soviet Union

text: Yoysef Rabin

text: Rivke Rubin

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public


title: Brenner, Yosef Ḥayim

abstract: (1881–1921), Hebrew writer. Yosef Ḥayim Brenner was born in Novy Mlini, a shtetl in the district of Chernigov, Ukraine, and murdered near Tel Aviv on 2 May 1921. From 1894 to 1897 Brenner studied at the Pochep yeshiva. Brenner then spent time in Białystok, returned to Pochep, and eventually went to Gomel to prepare for a gymnasium education, a goal he soon abandoned. Instead, he continued to study Hebrew literature and earned his income by teaching Hebrew. This period of his life is reflected in his first novel, Ba-Ḥoref (In Winter; 1904).

text: shtetl

text: Ukraine

text: yeshiva

text: Białystok

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Bund

text: Warsaw

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Bund

text: Lwów

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Zionist

text: Stybel

text: Land of Israel

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

glossary: yeshiva Diaspora


title: Solodar’, Tsesar’ Solomonovich

abstract: (1909–1992), Soviet poet, playwright, and polemicist. A graduate of the law faculty of the Kiev Institute of Economics (1930), Tsesar’ Solodar’ was a war correspondent during World War II, and joined the Communist Party in 1943.

text: Kiev

text: Zionism

text: Soviet Union