title: Pines, Yeḥi’el Mikha’el

abstract: (1843–1913), Torah scholar and early advocate of religious Zionism. Yeḥi’el Mikha’el Pines was born into a well-to-do family in Ruzhany in the district of Grodno, where he received both a traditional and a general education. From his early years, Pines was a prolific essayist and sharp-witted polemicist; as early as 1867–1869 his articles appeared in the pages of the Hebrew periodicals Ha-Melits, Ha-Magid, and Ha-Levanon.

imgDesc: Yeḥi’el Mikha’el Pines (seated, second from right) with his family, Palestine, late nineteenth century. (Central Zionist Archives)

text: Zionism

text: Grodno

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Magid

text: religious reform

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Land of Israel

text: Russia

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Mizraḥi

glossary: Torah halakhah Yishuv


title: Ważyk, Adam

abstract: (Ajzyk Wagman; 1905–1982), poet, prose and essay writer, and translator. The brother of Saul Wagman, a poet and publicist associated with the Zionist journal Nasz Przegląd, and Leon Trystam, an actor, film critic, and screenwriter, Adam Ważyk became one of the leading poets of the Polish avant-garde movement. During World War II, Ważyk was in the USSR, where he joined the Polish Army. After the war, he returned to Poland, where he actively participated in Communist-sponsored literary life as a theorist of socialist realism, laureate of state awards, contributor to Kuźnica (1946–1949), and editor in chief of Twórczość (1950–1954). In 1955, he dramatically settled scores with Stalinism in “Poemat dla dorosłych” (Poem for Adults), which marked a literary and ideological turning point in the political thaw of 1956. In 1957, he quit the party and distanced himself from politics.

text: Zionist

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: USSR

text: Poland

text: Holocaust

text: Warsaw


title: Zygielbojm, Shmuel Mordkhe

abstract: (1895–1943), labor and political leader. Born near Chełm, Shmuel (Artur) Zygielbojm spent his childhood in Krasnystaw. To help support his family, he left heder at age 10 and went to work at a factory. After the outbreak of World War I, he became active in the Bund and before long was assigned a prominent role in the party.

imgDesc: Shmuel Zygielbojm (standing, left) delivering a speech at a small businessmen’s association conference, Warsaw, 1929. (YIVO)

text: Chełm

text: heder

text: Bund

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Judenrat

text: Zionist

text: Holocaust


title: About this Article (Holocaust)

abstract: To treat the history and experience of East European Jews during the Holocaust, this entry includes five articles. The first is an overview that provides context and defines the subject. It is followed by three articles that treat the creative work of Jews under Nazi occupation and in the camps: Holocaust Diaries, which examines personal written accounts; Art and the Holocaust, which surveys works in the visual arts; and Music and the Holocaust, which takes note of musical activity in the ghettos, partisans’ songs, and composers’ activity. The last article, Restitution, Reparation, and Indemnification, discusses the postwar efforts to seek return of Jewish property and reparations payments from European governments.For further discussion, see Armed Resistance; Ghettos; Judenräte and Other Representative Bodies; Killing Centers; and Labor Camps.

imgDesc: Jews gathered for deportation to the Treblinka death camp, Siedlce, Poland, August 1942. (YIVO)


title: Braudes, Re’uven Asher

abstract: (1850–1902), Hebrew author. Active in various East European cities, including Vilna (his place of birth), Lvov, Kraków, Bucharest, and Odessa, and ultimately (after 1896) in Vienna, Re’uven Braudes edited Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals and wrote essays and articles, but is best known as the author of short stories and novels that earned him a reputation as one of the outstanding maskilic Hebrew writers of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. He also published three stories in Yiddish, although his work in that language must be considered marginal to his overall literary output.

text: Vilna

text: Lvov

text: Kraków

text: Bucharest

text: Odessa

text: religious reform

text: assimilation

text: Haskalah

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Ha-Melits

text: yeshiva

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: shtetl

text: pogroms

text: Zionism

text: Hebrew literature

glossary:
Talmud
Haskalah
yeshiva
Shulḥan ‘arukh
maskil


title: Mukacheve

abstract: Located in the present-day Transcarpathian oblast’ of Ukraine, the city of Mukacheve (Cz., Mukačevo; Hun., Munkács; Yid., Munkatsh) was the cultural and spiritual center of Jewish life in the historic region of Subcarpathian Rus’ (Ruthenia). A Hasidic center, it had the highest proportion of Jews among prewar Hungarian and interwar Czechoslovakian cities. Mukacheve is located in a region that changed hands politically several times after World War I. From the eleventh century to 1918, Subcarpathian Rus’ was part of the Hungarian Kingdom; thereafter it was part of Czechoslovakia (1919–1938), Hungary (1938–1944), Ukraine within the Soviet Union (1945–1991), and independent Ukraine (since 1991).

imgDesc: A group of boys outside the Belzer kloyz, Mukačevo, Czechoslovakia (now Mukacheve, Ukr.), ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Hasidic

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary

text: Soviet Union

text: Galicia

text: Orthodox

text: Ḥayim Kugel

text: Minsk

text: Zionism

text: pogroms

text: ghettos


title: Kornfeld, Paul

abstract: (1889–1942), dramatist, expressionist writer and theorist, and stage director. Born and raised in Prague in the generation of Franz Kafka, Paul Kornfeld moved to Germany and made an important contribution to German expressionism on the stage. While he must be considered an assimilated Jew, as was the case with many of his German-speaking Jewish counterparts in the so-called Prague Circle, he and his friends made much of his descent from Orthodox rabbis, including a prominent great-grandfather. Jewish themes and biblical language were central instruments of his universalist, expressionist vision. While he left Prague for Frankfurt at the age of 25 and much of his contribution was made during a career in Germany proper, his background as a Jew from Prague is deeply relevant to that contribution.

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Franz Werfel


title: Wolfowicz, Szymon

abstract: (1755–1830), businessman and public figure. Szymon (Shiml) Wolfowicz was a leading figure among Vilna’s Jews during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Though born into the wealthy elite (into which he also married), Wolfowicz criticized the ways in which organizational leaders and their subordinates operated, and he demanded changes in the administrative system. When a struggle erupted over the appointment of the young Rabbi Shemu’el ben Avigdor, Wolfowicz stood at the head of those who supported the rabbi, against the members of the city’s kahal.

text: Vilna

text: kahal

text: Hasidism

glossary: kahal wojewoda


title: Tarniks

abstract: Appellation for individuals and groups who attributed messianic significance to the Hebrew year 5600 (1840), which is represented in abbreviated form by the Hebrew letters tav, resh, and can be pronounced tar. The “Tarniks” expected that the redemption of the Jews would take place in that year—or, at least, that the process of redemption would begin, continue, and materialize sometime during the seventh century of the sixth millennium of creation.

text: messianic

text: Sephardic

text: Haskalah

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Russian Empire

text: Hasidic

text: Warsaw

text: Ya‘akov Gesundheit

text: Kloyz

text: Minsk

text: Haskalah

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Reform

text: Orthodox

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionist

text: historiography

text: Lithuania

text: Romania

text: pogroms

text: Eliyahu

glossary: Talmud Zohar Diaspora Haskalah Torah tsadik Gaon


title: Emes, Der

abstract: Yiddish social and political newspaper published from 8 March 1918 until 14 September 1938, first in Petrograd and then in Moscow. Known as Di varhayt (The Truth) until 7 August 1918, Der emes (The Truth) was the leading Yiddish newspaper in the Soviet Union in its day. It was at first the organ of the Jewish SDs (Social Democrats), Bolsheviks, and Leftist SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries); from 2 June 1918 of the Bolsheviks only. From 7 November 1920 to 9 March 1930 it was the organ of the Evsektsiia (the Jewish Section of the Russian Communist Party).

imgDesc: Jewish colonists, residents of a collective farm in Stalindorf, a Jewish autonomous subdistrict of the Kherson region (now in Ukraine) reading Der emes, 1937. (YIVO)

text: Moscow

text: Evsektsiia

text: Bund

text: Semen Dimanshtein

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Perets Markish


title: Wahl, Sha’ul

abstract: (d. early 1600s), merchant; legendary king of Poland for a day. Sha’ul Wahl was the son of Shemu’el Yehudah Katzenellenbogen, rabbi of Padua. Sha’ul’s grandfather, Me’ir, commonly known as Maharam (“our teacher, the rabbi Me’ir”) Padua, was born in Hesse-Nassau in the city of Katzenellenbogen, spent his early years at yeshivas in Poland, and moved to Italy. Sha’ul Wahl lived in Brest-Litovsk (Brisk; Brześć nad Bugiem), where he was a large-scale merchant dealing in lumber, salt, and the collection of tariffs and customs duties. For a period of time, he also leased the revenues of the salt mines at Wieliczka, near Kraków, from the Crown. He is best remembered, however, for his association with the widely known legend according to which he was king of Poland for a day.

text: Poland

text: Brest

text: Kraków

text: Lithuania

text: Land of Israel

text: Abraham Prochownik

text: Esterke

text: Lublin

text: Majer Bałaban

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
Torah
Gaon


title: Personal Hygiene and Grooming

abstract: Religious law calls on Jews to undertake ritual washings or ablutions that range from immersion of the whole body (tevilah) to pouring water over the hands (netilat yadayim), although there is no evidence to prove that the practice of such rituals contributed to higher standards of hygiene among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Still, these laws infused with an aspiration for physical purity had some bearing on the general approach of the East European Jew to his or her level of hygiene and grooming. Thus, according to the Shulḥan ‘arukh, it is incumbent upon a Jew on awakening to purify himself by washing his hands and face and rinsing his mouth. Jews must also flow water over their hands before meals and recite a blessing. Immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath) is required to cleanse a man of an impurity such as a seminal issue and, in the case of women, immersion is performed before marriage and after menstruation, among other states of ritual impurity. No ablution, however, is valid unless the person or, in certain cases an object, has been made scrupulously clean beforehand, so as to ensure that no barrier of foreign matter intervenes between the person or object being immersed and the purifying waters. These laws most certainly contributed to the Jews’ perception of what was hygienic, although immediate factors such as the availability of water, cleansers, and medicine, as well as contemporary understandings of what constituted hygiene were certainly even more important to the hygienic life of East European Jewry.

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: marriage

text: shtetl

text: wedding

text: Hasidim

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Sabbath

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: Misnagdim

text: Berdichev

text: Memoirs

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Passover

text: Moyshe Markuze

text: childbirth

text: OZE

text: Saint Petersburg

text: health

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
mikveh
Misnagdim


title: Robinson, Jacob

abstract: (1889–1977), jurist, politician, diplomat, and Holocaust researcher. One of seven brothers, Jacob (Ya‘akov ben David) Robinson was born in Seirijai (Serej) into a family with a rabbinic tradition reaching back to Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (seventeenth century). Although Orthodox, Robinson’s father, David, was an early Zionist.

text: Holocaust

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Suvalki

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Warsaw

text: Lithuania

text: Kaunas

text: Di idishe shtime

text: Shimshon Rosenboim

text: Minorities Treaties

text: Memel

text: Vilna

text: Poland

text: YIVO


title: Kol Mevaser

abstract: Yiddish literary and general-interest weekly published in Odessa from 23 October 1862 until 28 November 1872. Kol mevaser (The Herald) started out as a Yiddish supplement to the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits (The Advocate). From 20 May 1869 it was an independent “popular Jewish newspaper in the spoken tongue.” Its publishers were Aleksander Zederbaum, who also served as editor until the paper’s last years, and Aron-Yitskhok Goldenblum. The paper had more than 250 subscribers.

imgDesc: The first issue of Kol mevaser (The Herald), 23 October 1862. (YIVO)

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Melits

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Yiddish literature

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum


title: Tarnów

abstract: Town in southern Poland, 72 kilometers east of Kraków. Tarnów was founded in 1330, and in the century that followed, Jews were allowed to settle there by its owner, the nobleman Jan Amor. The first privilege authorizing the establishment of a Jewish community was granted in 1582 by the town’s new owner, Konstanty Ostrogski, and was renewed by his successor, Władysław Dominik Ostrogski, in 1637. This privilege exempted the Jews of Tarnów from municipal jurisdiction, entitling them to engage in trade in their own buildings and shops and to distill and deal in alcoholic beverages. They were permitted to have 12 dwelling places on the “Jewish street” (ulica Żydowska). Jews were to pay taxes directly to the magnate and could establish a cemetery near the city. The municipality was responsible for securing the synagogue and cemetery from attack.

imgDesc: The New Synagogue, Tarnów, ca. 1910. (Tomasz Wisniewski, www.szukamypolski.com)

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: guilds

text: Kraków

text: Sandomierz

text: Haskalah

text: Galicia

text: Hasidism

text: Sandz

text: Ruzhin

text: Mordekhai David Brandstetter

text: Zionist

text: industry

text: Ignacy Schiper

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
kehilah
Haskalah


title: Roth, Aharon

abstract: (1894–1947), Hasidic Ḥaredi leader. Born in Ungvár, Aharon Roth founded a sect, known today as Reb Arele’s, that numbers in the thousands and serves as the most visible representative of radical Hasidic anti-Zionism in Jerusalem.

text: Ungvár

text: Yesha‘yahu Silberstein

text: Hungary

text: Orthodox

text: Hasidism

text: Belz

text: Galicia

text: Satu Mare

text: Hasidism

text: piety

text: dress

text: Satmar

text: Zionism

glossary:
Ḥaredi
Talmud
rebbe
ethical will


title: Bałaban, Majer

abstract: (1877–1942), historian and educator. Majer Bałaban was a founder and architect of modern Polish Jewish historiography and the first to synthesize both Polish archival sources and Jewish communal records and rabbinic responsa.

imgDesc: Majer Bałaban (2nd row, seated, center) with other teachers and students at the Taḥkemoni Rabbinical School, where he was director of secular studies from 1920 to 1930, Warsaw, 1929. (YIVO)

text: historiography

text: Lwów

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Lublin

text: Warsaw

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Markus Braude

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Kraków

text: Warsaw


title: Czernowitz Conference

abstract: The first international conference in support of the Yiddish language. An international conference on Yiddish language and its role in Jewish life was convened from 30 August to 4 September 1908 in Czernowitz, then capital of the Austrian crown province of Bukowina (now Chernivtsi in Ukraine). (Czernowitz was the German form of the city’s name used at that time; the Yiddish Tshernovits is increasingly used in scholarly literature on the conference.) Occurring at a time when more than a dozen other languages on three continents were also organizing their own “first” conferences (usually under non- or even antigovernmental auspices), the Czernowitz Conference was the brainchild of Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), a prolific, innovative, and peripatetic Jewish educator, essayist, philosopher, politician, and social organizer.

imgDesc: Yiddish writers at the Czernowitz Conference, 1908: (left to right) Avrom Reyzen, Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, Sholem Asch, Khayim Zhitlovski, Hersh Dovid Nomberg. Postcard (Warsaw: Verlag Jehudia). (YIVO)

text: Yiddish language

text: Bukowina

text: Chernivtsi

text: Ukraine

text: Nathan Birnbaum

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Bund

text: Zionist clubs

text: Galicia

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Asch

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: press

text: theater

text: literature

text: Malke Lifshits

text: Bund

text: Bund

text: Galicia

text: Orthodoxy

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: YIVO

text: TSYSHO


title: Hatvany, Lajos

abstract: (1880–1961), writer, critic, and literary scholar. Baron Lajos Hatvany was born in Budapest into a prominent Hungarian industrial and banking family. He studied classical philology at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and received his doctorate in Budapest. Throughout his career, Hatvany was active in the Hungarian literary scene. Besides being a writer, critic, journalist, and literary scholar, he was an important patron of literature and a champion of modernism. He wrote major scholarly studies of the poets Sándor Petőfi and Endre Ady (the latter was his close friend).

text: Budapest

text: industrial

text: banking

text: Hungary

text: assimilation

text: conversion


title: Ravnitski, Yehoshu‘a Ḥana

abstract: (1859–1944), Hebrew and Yiddish writer, editor, publisher, and educator. Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski (Yoshue Khone Rawnitzki) was born in Odessa and received a traditional Jewish education in heder and yeshiva. After marrying, he lived from 1877 to 1887 in the nearby town of Mayak. There he taught himself Russian, French, and German.

imgDesc: Yiddish writers (left to right) Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh), Alter Druyanow, Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski, Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, and Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz, Odessa, ca. 1910. (Beit Bialik, Tel Aviv)

text: Odessa

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Haskalah

text: Zionism

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Russia

text: Yiddish literature

text: Shomer

text: Ha-Melits

text: Der yud

text: Der fraynd

text: Hebrew literature

text: Der yud

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky

text: Moriah

text: proverbs

text: Moriah

glossary: heder yeshiva Haskalah


title: Polish Literature

abstract: This overview examines Jewish literary creativity in Polish, its historical and artistic roots, and its place in Polish literature. It focuses on those authors who defined themselves as Jewish by exploring Jewish themes: painting their own self-portraits as Jews, depicting Jewish social life and spiritual experience, and enriching Polish literature with forms, contents, and symbolism rooted in the Jewish tradition.

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

text: Poland

text: assimilation

text: Galicia

text: Hungary

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Warsaw

text: conversion

text: Frankists

text: Jan Czyński

text: Haskalah

text: Seminary

text: Jutrzenka

text: Izraelita

text: Julian (Yehuda) Klaczko

text: Wilhelm Feldman

text: Hilary Nussbaum

text: Aleksander Kraushar

text: Alfred Nossig

text: Leo Belmont

text: Wilhelm Feldman

text: Zionism

text: Khone Shmeruk

text: Antoni Lange

text: Bolesław Leśmian

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Antoni Słonimski

text: Józef Wittlin

text: Aleksander Wat

text: Marian Hemar

text: Mieczysław Jastrun

text: Adam Ważyk

text: Bruno Schulz

text: Józef Wittlin

text: Adolf Rudnicki

text: Janusz Korczak

text: Artur Sandauer

text: Jan Brzechwa

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Mieczysław Grydzewski

text: Chwila

text: Opinia

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Janusz Korczak

text: Dvora Vogel

text: Maurycy Szymel

text: Roman Brandstaetter

text: Jakub Appenszlak

text: Mojżesz Kanfer

text: Holocaust

text: Stanisław Wygodzki

text: Bohdan Wojdowski

text: Adolf Rudnicki

text: Julian Stryjkowski

text: Mieczysław Jastrun

text: Artur Sandauer

text: Kazimierz Brandys

text: Bohdan Wojdowski

text: autobiographical

text: Arnold Słucki

text: communism

text: Stanisław Lec

text: children’s literature

text: cinema

glossary: Haskalah publicist

subconcepts:
The Slow Beginnings
The Maskilim in Search of Integration
Between the Two World Wars
The Long Shadow of the Holocaust
POLISH WRITERS


title: Life in Ghettos (Ghettos)

abstract: The establishment of the 800 to 900 ghettos in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Romania between late 1939 and mid-1942 introduced radical and rapid changes in Jewish communal and individual life, and was a multifaceted and complicated phenomenon. Those changes and the coping strategies Jews invented in response can best be examined from three perspectives—physical space; social welfare; and educational, cultural, and religious activity.

imgDesc: Jews selling off their household goods, Przemyśl ghetto, Poland, 1942. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Romania

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Tarnów

text: Lublin

text: Radom

text: Lwów

text: Łódź

text: Minsk

text: Šiauliai

text: Kaunas

text: Grodno

text: Vilna

text: Haskalah

text: Kielce

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: TOZ

text: ORT

text: Russian Republic

text: Ukraine

text: Judenräte

text: Białystok

text: youth movements

text: Art

text: historiography

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: YIVO


title: Pryłucki, Noah

abstract: (Noyekh Prilutski; 1882–1941), Yiddish scholar, journalist, and political leader. Noah Pryłucki was born into an affluent merchant family in Berdichev, Ukraine, but spent most of his childhood in Kremenets. Under the guidance of his father Tsevi, who was active in the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and the Jewish press, he received both a general education in Russian state schools and a Jewish education at home. While still an adolescent, he began to write for Hebrew-, Yiddish-, and Russian-language Jewish periodicals.

imgDesc: Jewish representatives to the Sejm (parliament), Poland, ca. 1920: (1) Rabbi Moszek Eli Halpern, (2) Noah Pryłucki, (3) Avraham Tsevi Perlmutter, (4) Dr. Berek Wajncier, (5) Yitsḥak Grünbaum, (6) Osjasz Thon, (7) Uri (Jerzy) Rosenblatt, (8) Ignacy Schiper. (YIVO)

text: Berdichev

text: Ukraine

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Russian Empire

text: Warsaw

text: Zionist

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: 1905 Russian Revolution

text: Saint Petersburg

text: theater criticism

text: Czernowitz language conference

text: Yoshue Perle

text: Shmuel Lehman

text: Der moment

text: Folkspartey

text: linguistics

text: YIVO

text: Lithuania

text: Max Weinreich


title: About this Article (Music)

abstract: To survey the traditional music of East European Jews along with the participation of Jews in majority musical culture, this entry includes six articles. The overview defines genres and provides historical context. Music for Sacred Texts describes liturgical music and recitation styles. Traditional and Instrumental Music focuses on what has become commonly known as klezmer music. Concert Music provides a historical analysis of Jewish participation in Western classical music, attending conservatories, becoming professional orchestra and solo performers or composers, and developing a genre of concert music using traditional Jewish themes. Communal Organizations and Social Movements treats the multiplicity of nonprofessional musical organizations that especially arose in urban settings, many of which were closely or even directly associated with political organizations. Study of Jewish Music details the collecting of folk songs and other ethnomusicological activities. For further and related discussion, see Hasidism: Music; Holocaust: Music and the Holocaust; Songs and Songwriters; and Theater.

imgDesc: Dzhum, dzhum. Label of an early twentieth-century recording performed by G. Lebedev for Siren Grand Record, Russia. (YIVO)

text: folk songs

text: Hasidism: Music

text: Holocaust: Music and the Holocaust

text: Songs and Songwriters

text: Theater


title: Yosef Shemu’el ben Tsevi of Kraków

abstract: (d. 1703), rabbi and Talmudist. Born to a rabbinic family in Krzemieniec (Kremenets), Yosef Shemu’el ben Tsevi served as a rabbinic judge in Kraków from 1663 to 1689, when he was appointed rabbi of Frankfurt am Main. There, he established a yeshiva. A scholar of the Talmud and of halakhah, he also had bibliographic and lexicographic interests—along with, apparently, an interest in astronomy and in Kabbalah.

text: Kraków

text: yeshiva

text: approbation

glossary: yeshiva Talmud halakhah Kabbalah responsa


title: Margulies, Emil

abstract: (1877–1943), lawyer and Zionist leader. Born in Sosnowitz (Pol., Sosnowiec), Katowice province, to an Orthodox family, Emil Margulies became active in Zionism while studying law in Vienna, where he became acquainted with Theodor Herzl. In 1903, Margulies settled in Teplitz Schönau (Teplice Šanov) in northern Bohemia, where he worked as a legal clerk and promoted Zionism through lecture tours, leaflets, and proclamations in the local press.

text: Katowice

text: Zionism

text: Bohemia

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Židovská Strana

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Silesia

text: Slovakia


title: Mezey, Ferenc

abstract: (1860–1927), community leader, philanthropist, editor, and writer. Ferenc Mezey’s father, Albert Mezey (originally Grünfeld), was a merchant; Ferenc’s mother, Rózsa Fábián, was born into a small landholder’s family. His parents had planned a rabbinic career for him, but Mezey instead went into commerce and later worked as a bank clerk. Dissatisfied, he attended Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, receiving a degree in law. As a law student, he wrote for newspapers and law journals under a pseudonym.

text: Budapest

text: Mór Mezei

text: Lajos Blau

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle

text: Vilmos Bacher

text: Jewish Congress


title: Lieberman, Hermann

abstract: (1870–1941), lawyer and socialist politician. Born in Drohobycz, Galicia, into an assimilated family, Hermann Lieberman became active in Polish patriotic activities while still a high school student. He studied in Paris and at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków; then practiced law in Przemyśl, where he frequently defended political activists. He became active in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) of Galicia and Silesia and in 1905 opposed the establishment of a separate Jewish Social Democratic Party, modeled on the Bund in the tsarist empire.

text: Drohobycz

text: Galicia

text: Kraków

text: Przemyśl

text: Silesia

text: Bund

text: Brest

text: Czechoslovakia


title: Mir, Yeshiva of

abstract: The Mir yeshiva was founded in 1815 by a wealthy householder, Shemu’el Tiktinski. It shared many of the characteristics of the Volozhin yeshiva, but there is no evidence of direct links between the two institutions. Granting subsidies to students so that they would not be dependent on the charity of householders, Tiktinski raised funds not only in Mir but also in the entire region. In directing the yeshiva, he was assisted by another rosh yeshivah, and a daily lesson in Talmud was the highlight of a student’s day.

imgDesc: Students from the Mir Yeshiva, 1938. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Agudath Israel Archives)

text: yeshiva

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Musar

text: Slobodka yeshiva

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Kovno

glossary: yeshiva Talmud Musar


title: Musical Education and Musical Societies

abstract: Historically, most Jewish musicians in Eastern Europe came from families involved with music, and received their musical education through individual apprenticeships and other informal channels. The traditional Jewish professions of klezmer, badkhn (wedding jester), and ḥazan (cantor) were usually passed from father to son or father to son-in-law, creating dynasties of musicians that persisted into the modern period. Guilds of Jewish musicians with more formal apprenticeships could be found in some towns in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, but after the partitions of Poland, they were largely restricted to towns within Austrian and Ottoman territories. Cantors also passed on their skills to their assistants and accompanists, either to solo zingers (singers) or to ensembles of meshorerim (choristers). More formal cantorial associations were established in the late nineteenth century under German influence in parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Poland in the interwar period. Hasidic melodies were also orally transmitted through Hasidic courts.

imgDesc: Cantor Pinḥas Minkowski (back row, sixth from right) and the boys’ choir in the Brody synagogue, Odessa, ca. 1910. (YIVO)

text: badkhn

text: cantor

text: Guilds

text: Poland

text: Hasidic melodies

text: Russian Empire

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Odessa

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Lublin

text: Hungary

text: Soviet Union

text: Warsaw

text: Rostov-on-Don

text: Riga

text: Avrom Ber Birnboym

text: Poland

text: folk songs

text: Yo’el Engel

text: Sha’ul Ginsburg

text: Society for Jewish Folk Music

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: Menakhem Kipnis

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Vilna

text: YIVO

text: Moisei Beregovskii

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Kiev

text: Kraków


title: Yiddish Actors Union

abstract: Professional association of Jewish actors in Poland in the interwar period (1919–1939). Known by its Yiddish name Yidisher Artistn Fareyn (YAF) or by the official Polish name Związek Artystów Scen Żydowskich (ZASŻ), the union was founded in Warsaw by a group of actors and directors, including Aizik Samberg (1889–194?), Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnsztejn), Yankev Kelter (1880–1938), Mordechai Mazo, Leon Kharaz (1886–?), and Simkhe Rozen (1893–194?). Other YAF activists who played an important role in the union’s history were Zishe Kats (1892–194?), Yitskhok Nożyk, Zygmunt Turkow, Michał Weichert, Mark Yuviler (1904–?), and Maks Brin (1884–194?).

imgDesc: Membership card of Breyndel Chliwner (Betti Kenig), a member of the Yiddish Actors Union, Warsaw, 1920. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Zygmunt Turkow

text: Michał Weichert

text: Yiddish theater


title: Yiddish Literature (Children’s Literature)

abstract: The period in which modern children’s literature in Yiddish flourished began in the early twentieth century. This era also saw the growth of educational institutions in which Yiddish was the language of instruction. In the Soviet Union as well as in Poland, Yiddish educational textbooks, readers (anthologies), as well as series of booklets for children were published, containing original Yiddish literary writings and translations into that language. A substantial part of children’s literature in Yiddish was first disseminated by means of children’s periodicals, which were edited by educators and writers. In these books and journals, one finds literary selections for different age groups in a variety of genres: nursery rhymes for toddlers; stories about animals, friends, and events for elementary school children; and folklore and travelogues for adolescents.

imgDesc: Krokodil (Crocodile), by Kornei Chukovskii (Riga: Undzer tsukunft, n.d.). Translated by Sh. L. Shmuelson. Illustrated by Remi. Yiddish translation of a popular Russian poem for children. (YIVO)

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: Minsk

text: Petrograd

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: Kletskin

text: Kishinev

text: Y. L. Peretz

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

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kultur-lige

text: Marc Chagall

text: Der Nister

text: Yisakhar Rybak

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: El Lissitzky

text: Yoysef Tunkel

text: TSYSHO

text: Shloyme Bastomski

text: Zionism

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Beys Yankev

text: Łódź

text: Shloyme Bastomski

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Der Nister

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Ukraine

text: Itsik Kipnis

text: Kadia Molodowsky

text: Samuil Marshak

text: Der fraynd

text: Purim

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Yiddish literature

text: Łódź

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Warsaw

glossary: © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/YIVO


title: Yiddish Prose (Prose)

abstract: A new genre of fiction in the Yiddish language (the term modern Yiddish literature can mislead) emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, lagging somewhat behind innovations in drama and other literary genres. The new fiction, moreover, developed during the first half of the century at a very slow pace, first in Galicia and western Ukraine, and eventually (from the 1840s on) also in the Lithuanian north, with Vilna as its epicenter of production and dissemination. The emergence of the new fiction was closely related to the gradual spreading of the Haskalah throughout Eastern Europe. As Yiddish literature of the Haskalah came of age in the 1860s, its fiction quickly reached a high level of productivity.

imgDesc: Title page of Di vunderlekhe lebns-bashraybung fun Shmuel-Abe Abervo (Dos bukh fun gan-eydn) (The Amazing Life Story of Shmuel-Abe Abervo [The Book of the Garden of Eden]), by Itsik Manger. (Warsaw: Farlag H. Bzhoza, 1939). (YIVO)

text: Yiddish literature

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Haskalah

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Haskalah

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Meir Wiener

text: Maks Erik

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Hasidic

text: parodies

text: Menakhem Mendel Lefin

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: satire

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: Shomer

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Ukraine

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: pogroms

text: shtetl

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Sholem Asch

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Yona Rozenfeld

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Sholem Asch

text: Der Nister

text: Yona Rozenfeld

text: Froyim Kaganovski

text: Sabbath

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Israel Joshua Singer

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Yoshue Perle

text: Yisroel Rabon

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Sabbatianism

text: Yisroel Rabon

text: Der Nister

text: Soviet Union

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Shklov

text: Shimen Horontshik

text: Meir Wiener

text: Nosn Zabara

text: Perets Markish

text: Itsik Kipnis

text: Oyzer Varshavski

text: Holocaust

text: Imre Kertesz


title: Markish, Perets

abstract: (1895–1952), Yiddish poet, prose writer, playwright, and essayist. Perets Markish was born to impoverished parents in Polonnoye, a town in Volhynia. He received a heder education and left home at a young age, working at various incidental jobs, including as a choirboy for a cantor. During World War I he was drafted into the Russian army. After his discharge from the military during the March Revolution of 1917, he settled in Ekaterinoslav.

imgDesc: Yiddish writers Oyzer Varshavski (left), Perets Markish (standing), H. Leyvik (seated, right), and an unidentified man, Paris, ca. 1924. Photograph by J. Deutscher. (YIVO)

text: Yiddish poet

text: heder

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Kiev

text: Ukraine

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Yiddish literature

text: Warsaw

text: Soviet Union

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Khalyastre

text: I. J. Singer

text: Oyzer Varshavski

text: Marc Chagall

text: shtetl

text: pogrom

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Yitskhok Nusinov

text: Holocaust

text: resistance

text: Vilna

text: Moscow

text: Shimon Markish

text: Khone Shmeruk


title: Mezei, Ernő

abstract: (1851–1932), politician, journalist, writer, and member of the Hungarian parliament. The younger brother of Mór Mezei, Ernő Mezei studied law in Pest and worked as a journalist from the time of his youth. His original family name was Grünfeld, which he changed in 1875 together with the rest of his family (his brother Mór had already taken this step in 1860). By the age of 20 he was already working as a political analyst for the opposition newspaper Ellenőr. Three years later, when Egyetértés, the leading daily of the constitutional opposition (Independence Party, the most nationalistic of the liberal parliamentary parties) was founded, Mezei joined its staff as an editorial writer. During the period 1875 to 1877, he published several booklets on contemporary political issues (on government activity, civil marriage, and the like). He had therefore already established himself as a known publicist in the capital before embarking on a political career in 1881.

text: Mór Mezei

text: Tiszaeszlár blood libel

text: Budapest


title: Tsadok ha-Kohen of Lublin

abstract: (1823–1900), Hasidic master. Born in Kreuzberg, Courland, to a Latvian and Lithuanian family related to the Gaon of Vilna, Tsadok ha-Kohen (Zadok Rabinowicz) showed great promise as a child, and was married early into a wealthy family, facilitating his continued study. After a few years of marriage, however, he sought a divorce because of rumors about his wife. He eventually became a follower of Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits. In 1888, following the death of Tsadok ha-Kohen’s friend and colleague Leibele Eger—who was, similarly, a disciple of Mordekhai Yosef and who had been a rebbe in Lublin continuing the traditions of Izhbits Hasidism—Tsadok ha-Kohen inherited his friend’s position.

text: Hasidic

text: Courland

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Izhbits

text: Lublin

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Maharal of Prague

glossary: Gaon rebbe Torah tsadik responsa


title: Lilienthal, Max

abstract: (1815–1882), German rabbi, born and educated in Munich; famous for establishing modern schools for Jews in the Russian Empire. In 1839, Ludwig Phillipson, a moderate reforming rabbi and editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, recommended Lilienthal to serve as rabbi and teacher in the largely German-speaking Jewish community of Riga. Lilienthal’s role in establishing a modern school for Jewish children there came to the attention of the minister of education of the Russian Empire, Count Sergei S. Uvarov, who hired him in 1841 to serve as special adviser for Jewish affairs. Lilienthal’s mission was to replicate his Riga school throughout the Pale of Settlement, as part of Uvarov’s plan to “enlighten” the Jews of Russia by weaning them away from conventional Talmudic learning, introducing them to secular studies, and training them to become artisans. Although viewed traditionally as a malignant scheme aimed at converting Jews to Russian Orthodoxy, recent scholarship has argued that Uvarov’s plan was not, in fact, aimed at proselytizing, but was a small part of his overall goal to introduce Western-style and classical education throughout the Russian Empire. This plan, however, faced severe opposition from some top governmental authorities in Russia, and in many ways contradicted the basic ideology of Tsar Nicholas I, for whose regime Uvarov was a major theoretician, and which emphasized autocracy, Russian Orthodoxy, and Russian nationalism.

text: Russian Empire

text: Riga

text: Pale of Settlement

text: conversion

text: Haskalah

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
Haskalah


title: Lieberman, Aharon Shemu’el

abstract: (1843–1880), socialist author, Hebrew translator, and political essayist. Aharon Shemu’el Lieberman (Liebermann) was born in Luna, Grodno district, Russia. His father, Eli‘ezer Dov Lieberman (1820–1897), was a maskilic author, translator, and political writer. Lieberman studied at the rabbinical seminary in Vilna (1861–1867), worked as a teacher and clerk, and spent time in Białystok, Saint Petersburg, Vilna, and other cities. In 1866, he married Raḥel, the daughter of Mosheh Trotsky, and had three daughters and a son.

text: Grodno

text: Russia

text: seminary

text: Vilna

text: Białystok

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Königsberg

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: satire

text: Zionism

glossary: Talmud maskil


title: Wissotzky, Kalonymus Ze’ev

abstract: (1824–1904), businessman, Zionist activist, and philanthropist. Kalonymus Wissotzky was born in a town near Kovno (mod. Kaunas) into the family of a small merchant. At 18, he married and his wife’s parents agreed to support his Talmud studies for three years. He attended the Volozhin yeshiva but had to leave because of illness.

text: Zionist

text: Kaunas

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Musar movement

text: charity

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Land of Israel

text: pogroms

text: Katowice

text: Ha-Asif

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: philanthropy

text: ORT

text: yeshiva of Ponevezh

text: Panevėžys

glossary:
Talmud
Musar
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Gutmann, Simḥah Alter

abstract: (Ben-Tsiyon Gutmann; 1870–1932), Hebrew writer and educator. Known by his nom de plume S. Ben-Tsiyon (S. Ben-Zion in English sources), Simḥah Gutmann was born in Teleneshty, Bessarabia. Though he received a traditional heder education, Ben-Tsiyon was also exposed to Hebrew maskilic literature. His first story, “Mayn khaver” (My Friend), appeared in Yiddish (1899); he later translated it into Hebrew and published it under the title “Meshi” (Silk; 1902). His subsequent Hebrew stories appeared in prominent journals.

text: Bessarabia

text: heder

text: Odessa

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Zionism

text: Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Moriah

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: shtetl

glossary: heder Diaspora


title: Kugel, Ḥayim

abstract: (1897–1966), educator and politician. Ḥayim Kugel was born in Minsk, Belorussia. His parents were members of Ḥoveve Tsiyon who sent him to study at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. With the outbreak of World War I, Kugel could not return to Palestine after his summer holidays, so he continued his schooling in Russia. Between 1920 and 1924, he attended the German University in Prague. He gave private lessons in modern Hebrew and founded the club ‘Ivriyah, which later became part of the Tarbut organization.

text: Minsk

text: Russia

text: Prague

text: Tarbut

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Mukačevo

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Slovakia

text: Židovská Strana

text: Angelo Goldstein

text: Silesia


title: Weltsch, Felix

abstract: (1884–1964), philosopher and journalist. Born in Prague, Felix Weltsch obtained doctorates in both law and philosophy, and in his books concentrated on social philosophy and political ethics. He belonged to what his lifelong friend Max Brod, the writer and biographer of Franz Kafka, called the Prague Circle of young Jewish intellectuals, of which Kafka was the most famous member (Weltsch himself was a friend of Kafka). Weltsch was a Zionist from an early age, and in the interwar period he was editor in chief and the moving spirit of the main Zionist weekly in Czechoslovakia, Selbstwehr (Self-Defense). He also worked as an academic librarian.

imgDesc: Jüdischer Almanach, Prague, 1930–1931 [5691 in the Hebrew calendar], coedited by Friedrich Thieberger and Felix Weltsch. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: Prague

text: Max Brod

text: Franz Kafka

text: Zionist

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Selbstwehr


title: Lehman, Shmuel

abstract: (1886–1941), folklorist. Shmuel Lehman collected material from marginal social groups such as the Jewish underworld and prostitutes. Although not formally trained in academics or in theories of folklore, he dedicated his life to culling folk songs, proverbs, purim-shpils, and folktales from a wide spectrum of Yiddish-speaking society in Poland. He used whatever work he did, including bill collecting and selling lottery tickets, as an excuse to meet ordinary people and record their folklore. By the time of his death in the Warsaw ghetto, he had published more data than any other Yiddish folklorist.

imgDesc: Shmuel Lehman (fourth from right) reenacting an interview with an elderly woman, with his folklore students crowding around them, Warsaw, 1931. (YIVO)

text: folklore

text: folk songs

text: proverbs

text: purim-shpil

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Bund

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk

text: Elijah the Prophet


title: Art and the Holocaust (Holocaust)

abstract: During World War II, Jews produced art in concentration camps, in ghettos, or while in hiding. Unlike artistic production undertaken by outsiders in the name of propaganda, or to confirm the events after the killing had ended, art created by victims under Nazi domination may be viewed as a form of documentation, witnessing, and spiritual resistance that plays a very important historical role as evidence from the victim’s perspective.

imgDesc: Children Only Allowed to Go for Short Walk. Karel Fleischmann, Terezín, 1942. India ink wash drawing. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: ghettos

text: Terezín

text: Karel Fleischmann

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Vilna

text: Kovno

text: Lithuania

text: Łódź

text: Artur Szyk

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Minsk

text: Kiev


title: Rotbaum, Jakub

abstract: (1901–1994), theater director, actor, and painter. Born in Żelechów, Poland, Jakub Rotbaum (Yid., Yankev Rotboym) received a traditional heder education. He attended high school and then studied in Warsaw at the School of Decorative Arts, the School of Fine Arts, and the School of Film. Both of his sisters had careers in the theater, and it was in this realm that Rotbaum made his mark, although he had a considerable career as a painter as well.

text: theater

text: Poland

text: heder

text: Warsaw

text: Alter Kacyzne

text: Moscow

text: Vilna

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Poland

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sholem Asch

text: Hershele Ostropolyer

text: Wrocław


title: Philanthropy

abstract: Accompanying the classical version of charity—direct assistance provided by a person of means to a person in need, and the traditional and fraternal associations that addressed the various needs of the poor—there developed in East European Jewish society an extensive and far-reaching network of philanthropy. In this context, the term philanthropy refers to assistance provided to individuals, communities, or social and educational institutions by wealthy individuals above and beyond traditional communal frameworks.

imgDesc: Photomontage illustrating activities of OZE (Society for the Protection of Jewish Health), Ukmergė, Lithuania, 1937. Photograph by J. Glaso. (YIVO)

text: charity

text: Vilna

text: Belorussia

text: Moscow

text: Passover

text: Bobruisk

text: money

text: Białystok

text: Dvinsk

text: Izrail’ (Yisra’el) Brodskii

text: Kiev

text: Šiauliai

text: Lithuania

text: Zbytkower

text: Natanson

text: Epstein

text: Bergson

text: Bloch

text: Warsaw

text: Jakubowicz

text: Kraków

text: Nota Notkin

text: Shklov

text: Grodno

text: charity

text: Matityahu Strashun

text: Hasidic

text: shtadlones

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Society for the Promotion of Culture (or Enlightenment) among the Jews of Russia

text: Gintsburg

text: Zak

text: Russian Empire

text: Shemu’el Poliakov

text: Leon Rosenthal

text: ORT

text: agriculture

text: OZE

text: Kiev

text: Kharkov

text: Minsk

text: pogroms

text: Moscow

text: Romania

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Soviet Union

text: Lubavitch Hasidic

glossary:
Talmud
tsadik
Pale of Settlement
get


title: Levinzon, Yitsḥak Ber

abstract: (1788–1860), thinker and teacher; considered by some as the father of the East European Haskalah. Born in Kremenets, Ukraine, where he received a traditional Jewish education, Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon (Isaac Baer Levinsohn; known also as Ribal) married a woman from the town of Radzhivilov in 1807 and lived there until 1812. He learned Russian, German, French, and Latin and served as an official interpreter for the Russian army.

imgDesc: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon, 1895. The Hebrew inscription reads, “Born on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 1788, died on 17 February 1860 in the city of Kremenets.” Lithograph, copy of a portrait from the gallery of Count L. N. Tolstoi, 1895. (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: Ukraine

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Lwów

text: Tarnopol

text: Zhovkva

text: Yehudah Leib Mieses

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Me’ir Letteris

text: Ya‘akov Shemu’el Bick

text: Yosef Perl

text: Russian Empire

text: Berdichev

text: Ostróg

text: Nemirov

text: agriculture

text: Hasidism

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Passover

text: Karaite

text: Vilna

text: Odessa

glossary:
Haskalah
Pale of Settlement
maskil


title: Zsolt, Béla

abstract: (1895–1949), writer, poet, editor, dramatist, publicist, and member of parliament. As a second-generation contributor to the modernist journal Nyugat (West), Zsolt followed a career path similar to that of writers from Nyugat’s first generation. He began as an admirer and imitator of Endre Ady, and became a journalist and editor in Nagyvárad (mod. Rom., Oradea). In 1925, he moved to Budapest, where he wrote spirited political pieces for several newspapers. In 1929, he became editor in chief of A Toll (The Pen), a bourgeois-liberal periodical.

text: Oradea

text: Budapest

text: Aladár Komlós

text: assimilation

text: sexuality

text: Holocaust

text: Ukraine

text: Kasztner

text: Hungary


title: Yiddish Poetry (Poetry)

abstract: The dynamic development of Yiddish poetry in Eastern Europe charts a complex interplay between ideological approaches, cultural factors, and literary models profoundly influenced by historic events. For instance, each generation of Yiddish poets had at its disposal the diverse forms of the Yiddish folk song with its broad range of themes and genres: love songs with their ostensibly naive language; lullabies sung largely in a mother’s voice; children’s songs; songs about soldiers and conscripts; songs about the underworld; ballads; and songs with religious, mystical content. However, Yiddish poets differ in the extent to which they used this creative source; this is one of the keys to understanding the changes in literary sensibilities and cultural attitudes.

imgDesc: Khumesh-lider (Bible Songs), by Itzik Manger (Warsaw: Farlag “Aleynenyu,” 1935). (YIVO)

text: folk song

text: Haskalah

text: prose

text: Haskalah

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mikhl Gordon

text: Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz

text: operetta

text: theater

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: satire

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Elyokem Tsunzer

text: badkhonim

text: humor

text: Yiddish literature

text: prose

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: love

text: David Frishman

text: Shimen Frug

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Mark Varshavski

text: Sha’ul Ginsburg

text: prose

text: Russian Revolution of 1905

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: besmedresh

text: Galicia

text: Shmuel Yankev Imber

text: Leyb Naydus

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Perets Markish

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: pogroms

text: Kiev

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Minsk

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Izi Kharik

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Zelik Akselrod

text: Ezra Fininberg

text: shtetl

text: Warsaw

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Galicia

text: journals

text: Khalyastre

text: Łódź

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: theater

text: Yung-yidish

text: Romania

text: Czernowitz

text: Itsik Manger

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Yisroel Shtern

text: Khayim Semyatitski

text: Mordkhe Gebirtig

text: Miryem Ulinover

text: Yekhiel Lerer

text: Rokhl Korn

text: Kadia Molodowsky

text: Dvora Vogel

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Bucharest

text: children’s literature

text: Der Nister

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Chaim Grade

text: Leyzer Volf

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: ghettos

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Holocaust

text: Sovetish heymland

glossary: Haskalah rebbe


title: Piotrków

abstract: City roughly 16 miles (25 km) southeast of Łódź in central Poland, Piotrków was the capital of the Piotrków guberniia from 1867 to 1915. Founded in the twelfth century, the town was the site of the Polish Crown Tribunal between 1578 and 1792. Although Piotrków was granted the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis (1487, 1569, 1628, 1673, and 1720), Jews settled with royal permission in its suburbs during the sixteenth century.

imgDesc: Little Synagogue (built ca. 1765) on Jerozolimska Street, Piotrków, Poland, 2001. Photograph by Piotr Piluk. (© 2001 Piotr Piluk)

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Warsaw

text: Me’ir Shapira

text: Beys Yankev

text: Ger

text: Aleksander

text: Radomsk

text: Zionist

text: Bundist

text: Tarbut

text: TSYSHO

text: ORT

text: Sabbath

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Betar

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Maccabi

text: Ha-Po‘el

text: Morgnshtern

text: Shtern

text: Judenrat

text: labor camps

text: bet midrash

glossary:
de non tolerandis Judaeis
kehilah


title: Tombstones

abstract: East European Jewish tombstones follow the Ashkenazic pattern that was developed in Central Europe from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. Their most typical traits include vertical position (as opposed to Sephardic tombstones, which usually lie horizontally), rectangular shape, and the prominence of inscription fields. In addition to simple vertical slabs, pseudosarcophagi were popular in some localities in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, some tombs of exceptional scholars, rabbis, or holy men were built with an ohel (lit., tent), a simple structure covering the grave (see image at right). Until the nineteenth century, all tomb inscriptions were written in Hebrew (with some Aramaic barbarisms in the epitaphs of learned elites), although many betray poor knowledge of the language. Hebrew inscriptions were written in square script. Cursive and semicursive script began to appear sporadically only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were used for the closing formula (or some part thereof) of the epitaph.

imgDesc: The ohel (structure over the tomb) of the rabbi of Orla, Poland, and his wife, 1930s. Photograph by D. Duksin. (YIVO)

text: Ashkenazic

text: Sephardic

text: Belarus

text: Bucharest

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Kolín

text: Brno

text: Silesia

text: Wrocław

text: Chełm

text: Lwów

text: Lublin

text: Buczacz

text: Kraków

text: Przemyśl

text: Prague

text: Ukraine

text: Holocaust

text: Moldavia

text: Międzyboż

text: Łódź

text: Antoni Eisenbaum

text: Holocaust


title: Karinthy, Ferenc

abstract: (1921–1992), novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. Ferenc Karinthy was part of a literary family whose members have been present on the Hungarian cultural scene for nearly a century. In a two-volume family history published in 2003, Márton Karinthy, a theater director and the oldest living member of the family, reveals that his great-grandparents, both of whom had hailed from observant Jewish homes, converted to Christianity in the 1870s before they were married, so that their children would be born Protestant. (This revelation put the lingering doubt about the family’s origins to rest.)

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Budapest


title: Death and the Dead

abstract: There is a shared foundation in all of Jewish culture with respect to death, the primary and most influential principle of which concerns the impurity of the dead. From this belief derives the need to distance the dead from places of human habitation and to confine them to separate areas set aside for them: cemeteries. The dead were buried with a ceremony—the funeral—and their relatives, the mourners, practiced customs of mourning anchored in halakhah.

imgDesc: Three panels from a cycle of paintings documenting the work of the Prague Burial Society: sewing shrouds , washing and preparing the deceased  for burial, and digging the grave. Oil on canvas, 1780s. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Sha’ul Tshernichowsky

text: Lithuania

text: tombstones

text: Poznań

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl Epstein

text: Tsevi Hirsh Koidanover

text: Poland

text: S. An-ski

text: Prague

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Haskalah

text: tkhines

text: Warsaw

text: Budapest

glossary:
halakhah
Torah
Talmud
Naḥmanides
ethical will
Council of Four Lands
Va‘ad Arba‘ Aratsot
Zohar
Haskalah

subconcepts:
The Burial Society
The Cemetery


title: Zak, Avraam Isakovich

abstract: (1829–1893), banker, philanthropist, and public figure. Avraam Zak was born into a well-established family in Bobruisk (now Bobruysk, Belarus), where he may have been influenced by local maskilim. He was self-taught, mostly in mathematics and later in economics, and showed an interest in Hebrew literature and music.

text: banker

text: Bobruisk

text: Belarus

text: Hebrew literature

text: Evzel’ Gintsburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Leopold Kronenberg

text: Russia

text: ORT

text: blood libel

text: pogroms


title: Childhood

abstract: In the early modern period and even more intensely in the nineteenth century, the Jewish population of Eastern Europe grew at a rate faster than that of the non-Jewish populations. Demographers agree that this difference was a consequence, chiefly, of lower rates of infant mortality among Jews. The effect was a continually growing increase in the proportion of young people in the Jewish population. It can be hypothesized that in certain ways, the disparate ideological movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Hasidism, the new style of yeshivas, the Haskalah and the Musar movement, all of which gained substantial energy and participation from young men under the age of 20, were a consequence of this demographic factor.

imgDesc: Cradle. Mohelnice na Moravě, Austro-Hungary (now in Czech Republic), first half of the nineteenth century. Oak. 32.141. The sides of the cradle bear a Hebrew inscription meaning “The little one will be big one day.” (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Hasidism

text: yeshivas

text: Haskalah

text: Musar movement

text: youth movements

text: Lwów

text: heder

text: Tsevi Hirsh Koidanover

text: Grodno

text: marriage

text: Kraków

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: guilds

text: trade

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Ber of Bolechów

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Toys and Games

text: literature

glossary:
Haskalah
Musar
Torah
heder
ethical will
Council of Four Lands
yeshiva


title: Lefin, Menaḥem Mendel

abstract: (1749–1826), maskil, author, and translator. Born in Satanów, in Podolia—a heartland of Hasidism—Menaḥem Mendel Lefin (also Levin) was a figure who linked the Haskalah between Western and Eastern Europe. Raised in a traditional Jewish family, Lefin was drawn in the late 1780s to Berlin, where he befriended Moses Mendelssohn and other maskilim. Unlike Salomon Maimon and Yitsḥak Satanov, two Polish Jewish contemporaries who also traveled to the West, Lefin returned to Poland and sought to further the ideals of the Enlightenment in a manner suited to East European Jews.

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: kahal

text: Tuviah Feder

text: Brody

text: Tarnopol

text: Galicia

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

glossary: maskil Haskalah kahal musar tsadik rebbe Maimonides


title: Galaţi

abstract: Port city on the Danube River, located in the Moldavian region of Romania. Written records of Jewish settlement in Galați (Galatz) include information from the seventeenth century. The town’s oldest standing Jewish cemetery dates back to 1774, though earlier cemeteries apparently existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Great Synagogue, mentioned in documents in 1780, was rebuilt in 1813. Galați’s communal register dates back to 1812.

imgDesc: A group of Jews who tried to emigrate from Iaşi to a Turkish-controlled area in Galați and were expelled, with the corpse of a man drowned when Romanian soldiers refused the group reentry to Romania and threw them in the Danube, 1866. Postcard printed in Germany, captioned with a quote by Romanian Prime Minister Petre P. Carp (1900–1901; 1911–1912): “We no longer live in times when it is permissible to throw Jews in the water.” (YIVO)

text: Moldavian

text: Romania

text: trade

text: banking

text: industry

text: crafts

text: Charity

text: Zionists

text: heder

text: Romania

text: Maccabi

text: Samuel Pineles

text: Joseph Brociner

text: Pogroms

text: Passover

text: Bessarabia

glossary:
heder
Talmud
Talmud Torah


title: Brucăr, Isac

abstract: (1888–1960), philosopher, editor, and journalist. Born in Bosancea, Bucovina, Isac Brucăr studied philosophy in Bucharest, Jena, and Leipzig, receiving his doctoral degree in 1930 with a thesis on the philosophy of Spinoza, a recurrent topic of his later research. Brucăr combined an academic career, teaching at the department of psychology at the University of Bucharest, in different high schools, and, after World War II, at the Institute of Philosophy of the Romanian Academy. He also was a journalist who wrote for leading publications.

text: Bucovina

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Salomon Maimon

glossary: Kabbalah Zohar


title: Łódź

abstract: (Yid., Lodzh), Polish city and industrial center about 100 km west of Warsaw. From a hamlet of 767 people, including 259 Jews, in 1820, Łódź grew over the next century to a city of 670,000, with a Jewish community of more than 230,000, the second largest in Poland. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Łódź was home to about 1 million people, fewer than 300 of whom were Jews.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Aleksander

text: Ger

text: Litvaks

text: Lithuania

text: Belarus

text: Ukraine

text: Orthodox

text: Hasidism

text: Zionists

text: trade

text: industry

text: crafts

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: music society

text: assimilationists

text: heder

text: Markus (Mordekhai) Braude

text: Bar Kochba

text: Folkist

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Eliyahu Ḥayim Meisel

text: Markus Jastrow

text: Warsaw

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Yisroel Rabon

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Miryem Ulinover

text: Shimen Dzigan, and Yisroel Shumacher

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Leib Mincberg

text: Mizraḥi

text: Israel Joshua Singer

text: Khayim Mordkhe Rumkowski

text: Prague

text: labor camps

text: TOZ

text: ORT

text: Soviet Union

text: Białystok

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland

text: Rokhl Oyerbakh

text: Froyim Kaganovski

text: Aleksander Ford

text: film

text: Kaminska

text: Y. L. Peretz

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
rebbe
heder
yeshivas
kehilah
status quo
Talmud
Torah
yeshiva


title: Appenszlak, Jakub

abstract: (1894–1950), publicist, writer, and translator. In the period between the two world wars, Jakub Appenszlak was a member of the editorial board of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przegląd, publisher of the literary weekly Lektura (1934), chair of the Jewish Association for the Advancement of Fine Arts, and a Zionist activist. He published poetry, a novel, and translations of works by Theodore Herzl, Sholem Aleichem, and Sholem Asch. He also wrote the screenplay for Henryk Bojm’s film Shaḥar, yom ve-lailah shel Erets Yisra’el (1934).

text: Warsaw

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: poetry

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sholem Asch

text: Izraelita

text: assimilation

text: antisemitism

text: theater

text: Holocaust

text: Armed Resistance


title: Maimon, Salomon

abstract: (1754–1800), maskil and philosopher. Salomon Maimon (Shelomoh ben Yehoshu‘a) was born and raised near Nieśwież in Poland–Lithuania (now Nesvizh, Belarus). He received a Talmudic education, married at 11, and soon began to work as a private tutor. Early in his life, he encountered Jewish mystical-pietistic movements, showed an interest in Kabbalah, and flirted with new Hasidism. Later, influenced by the philosophy of Maimonides (in whose honor he adopted a surname), he devoted himself to secular studies and began to lean toward skepticism.

imgDesc: Solomon Maimon. W. Arndt. Engraving or etching. This portrait appeared in the 1792 German-language edition of Maimon’s autobiography and has been reprinted in subsequent translations and editions. (YIVO)

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: Belarus

text: Hasidism

text: Königsberg

text: Poznań

text: Wrocław

text: Silesia

text: autobiography

text: Dov Ber

text: Haskalah

glossary: maskil Kabbalah Maimonides Magid Haskalah


title: Morevski, Avrom

abstract: (1886–1964), Yiddish actor, director, translator, and essayist. Avrom Morevski (also Morewski; Menaker) was born in Vilna into a comfortable merchant family. He received both a traditional Jewish and a secular education. Drawn to theater and Russian literature, in 1905 he began performing on the Russian stage and in 1910 graduated from the Russian-language Suvorin Theater School in Saint Petersburg. He performed in Russian until 1918 when he turned to the Yiddish stage, first in Vilna and then in Łódź.

imgDesc: Avrom Morevski (left) with an unidentified actor from Habimah, Poland, 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: theater

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Łódź

text: Vilner Trupe

text: The Dybbuk

text: Warsaw

text: Riga

text: Kraków

text: films

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: Ida Kaminska

text: Alter Kacyzne

text: Arn Zeitlin


title: Reines, Yitsḥak Ya‘akov

abstract: (1839–1915), rabbi, rosh yeshivah, and halakhic authority. Born in Karlin, near Pinsk, Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines studied in the Volozhin yeshiva and served as rabbi in various Jewish communities in Lithuania, including Saukenai in the district of Kovno, Svencionys in the district of Vilna, and, from 1886 in Lida, Belorussia. Reines was one of the most prominent rabbis in Russia from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until World War I. His signature appears alongside those of rabbis Naftali Tsevi Berlin of Volozhin, Yosef Dov Soloveichik of Brisk (Brest), and others on various proclamations to Russian Jewry regarding communal issues, such as the introduction of general studies into the yeshiva curriculum and the establishment of the Kolel Perushimin Kovno. Eventually he was ostracized by much of the rabbinic leadership because of his support for political Zionism and the modernization of yeshiva education.

imgDesc: Students and staff of the Lida Yeshiva, established by Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines in Lida, Russia (now in Belarus), ca. 1905. (YIVO)

text: Pinsk

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Lithuania

text: Russia

text: Naftali Tsevi Berlin

text: Yosef Dov Soloveichik

text: Brest

text: yeshiva

text: Zionism

text: Poland

text: Mizraḥi

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Minsk

text: Land of Israel

text: rabbinic literature

glossary:
yeshiva
Kolel
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Uganda plan
responsa
Torah
agadah


title: Bialik, Ḥayim Naḥman

abstract: (1873–1934), foremost modern Hebrew poet. Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik was born in the village of Radi, near the city of Zhitomir in Ukraine. After his father’s timber business failed, the family moved to Zhitomir when Bialik was about six years old. His father opened a tavern in a suburb but died after about a year. Because of her own poverty, his mother sent him to be raised by his grandfather.

imgDesc: Hebrew poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik (left) and poet and translator Sha’ul Tchernichowsky, Odessa, 1907. (Asher Barash Gnazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

text: Zhitomir

text: Ukraine

text: heder

text: bet midrash

text: Haskalah

text: yeshiva of Volozhin

text: Shimen Frug

text: Ha-Melits

text: Odessa

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Poland

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: poetry

text: prose

text: Moriah

text: Kishinev

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: folk songs

text: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Estonia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: childhood

text: Zionist

text: Land of Israel

text: poetry

text: Hebrew literature

glossary: heder Haskalah yeshiva Talmud agadah


title: Gezkul’t

abstract: (From Yid., Gezelshaft kultur; Culture Society), the All-Ukrainian Society for Promoting the Development of Jewish Culture, an independent organization, Communist in ideology, that worked mainly in Yiddish. Gezkul’t was founded in Kiev on 26 September 1926 (the date of its charter) and was active until the early 1930s.

text: Kiev

text: Yiddish literature

text: Kultur-lige


title: Sighet Marmaţiei

abstract: Town in Romania. Sziget (Hun., also Máramarossziget; in Jewish sources Sziget, Siget, or the older Sihot) was the capital of Máramaros county in the Kingdom of Hungary before northern Transylvania became part of Romania after World War I. The town was returned to Hungary briefly between 1940 and 1944. Surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains, it was located in a region least affected by modernization in the kingdom. In all of Hungary, the cultural and economic profile of the Jews of Máramaros county most resembled those of the eastern European shtetls.

imgDesc: Young Orthodox men in a weaving workshop maintained by a yeshiva, Sighet Marmației, Romania, ca. 1930s. Photograph by Stern. (YIVO)

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Poland

text: Sabbatian

text: Jakub Frank

text: Yehudah Kahana

text: Hasidic

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Kosov

text: Pressburg

text: yeshiva

text: trade

text: crafts

text: industry

text: Galicia

text: Lithuania

text: Orthodoxy

text: Satu Mare

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: piety

text: Zionism

text: Mizraḥi

text: Transylvania

text: youth movements

text: Tseirey Agudas Yisroel

text: Yoysef Holder

text: Holocaust

glossary:
yeshiva
Status Quo
rebbe


title: Meisels, Dov Berush

abstract: (1798–1870), Talmudic scholar and rabbi of the Jewish communities of Kraków and Warsaw. Hailing from a prominent family of Galician rabbis, Dov Berush Meisels grew up in Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi (Ukraine) before moving to Kraków in 1820, where he married Freydl Bornstein, the daughter of wealthy leaseholder Zalman Bornstein. With his father-in-law, Meisels founded a successful bank. However, his support for the failed Polish uprising of 1830 brought the business to the brink of financial ruin.

text: Kraków

text: Warsaw

text: Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi

text: Ukraine

text: Ḥayim Dawidsohn

text: Markus Jastrow

glossary: Talmud Maimonides


title: Gintsburg Family

abstract: Russian Jewish financiers, communal activists, and philanthropists. The three most prominent members of the Gintsburg (sometimes Günzburg or Guenzburg) family were Evzel’ Gavriilovich (1812–1878), Goratsii (Horace) Osipovich (1833–1909), and David Goratsievich (1857–1910).

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Avraam Zak

text: Samuil Poliakov

text: ORT

text: emigration

text: philanthropy

text: pogrom

text: Mark Antokol’skii

text: Il’ia Gintsburg

text: Lithuania

text: Daniil Khvol’son

text: Pale of Settlement

text: guilds

text: pogroms

text: Simon Dubnow

text: shtadlonim

text: Iakov Brafman

text: kahal

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
kahal

subconcepts: The Gintsburg Circle and the Legal Position of Russian Jewry


title: Assimilation

abstract: Although widely used in both scholarly writing and public life, the term assimilation, without modification or qualification, lacks critical rigor. Conceptually, it can encompass—and is often confused and conflated with—four analytically distinct changes in Jewish behavior and status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: acculturation (the acquisition of the cultural and social habits of the dominant non-Jewish group), integration (the entry of Jews into non-Jewish social circles and spheres of activity), emancipation (the acquisition of rights and privileges enjoyed by non-Jewish citizens/subjects of similar socioeconomic rank), and secularization (the rejection of religious beliefs and the obligations and practices that flow from these beliefs). In Eastern Europe, as in Western Europe, these processes, while obviously influencing each other, operated in the end independently of each other. Thus, in most East European states, Jewish acculturation and secularization were well in advance of legal emancipation and social integration.

imgDesc: Postcard depicting a family on its way to a synagogue. The grandfather is bearded and traditionally dressed, while the next generation wears modern clothes and the man is beardless. (Publisher unknown, printed in Germany.) (YIVO)

text: dress

text: Minorities Treaty

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: World War I

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Miksa Szabolcsi

text: Budapest

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Zionism

text: Budapest

text: Sámuel Kohn

text: Hungary

text: Izraelita

text: Lwów

text: councils

text: Gintsburg

text: shtadlan

text: finance

text: industry

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Odessa

text: OPE

text: Gintsburg family

text: Odessa

text: Riga

text: ORT

text: credit

text: Razsvet

text: Osip Rabinovich

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Kol mevaser

text: Ha-Melits

text: Razsvet

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Pale of Settlement

text: pogroms

text: Bundism

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: banking

text: dress

text: Antoni Eisenbaum

text: liturgy

text: Kraków

text: Orthodoxy

text: Dostrzegacz Nadwiślański

text: Daniel Neufeld

text: Jutrzenka

text: Izraelita

text: Warsaw

text: Hilary Nussbaum

text: Zjednoczenie

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Reform Judaism

text: Béla Kun

text: conversion

text: Prague

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Brno

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Walachia

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Chernivtsi

text: Bucovina

glossary:
Neolog
Haskalah
Pale of Settlement

subconcepts:
Russia
Poland
Hungary
Bohemia and Moravia
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe


title: Music and the Holocaust (Holocaust)

abstract: The sufferings of Jews under the Nazi regime were reflected in their music and musical life. Music offered Jews a way to express their humanity in inhuman conditions, to escape from reality and give voice to their yearning for freedom, and to find comfort and hope.

imgDesc: Violinist Anton Kraft, a native of Prague, and pianist (name unknown) giving a recital in the Łódź ghetto, 1943. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: ghettos

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Khayim Rumkowski

text: Vilna

text: Shmerke Kaczerginski

text: Mordkhe Gebirtig

text: Przytyk pogrom

text: Terezín

text: killing centers

text: Babi Yar


title: Dobrushin, Yekhezkl

abstract: (1883–1953), Soviet Yiddish literary author, critic, and scholar. Born in a village in Chernigov guberniia, Ukraine, to the family of a timber merchant, Yekhezkl Dobrushin received a private Jewish and Russian education at home. Between 1902 and 1909, he lived in Paris, where he studied law at the Sorbonne and was active in the socialist Zionist movement. After recovering from an illness that had confined him to bed for several years, he published his first collection of poetry and short plays, Benkende neshomes (Longing Souls) in 1912; other publications soon followed. In 1916, Dobrushin settled in Kiev and his articles and poetry appeared in various Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals. During the civil war, he edited and contributed to the publications of the Kultur-lige. In 1920, he moved to Moscow, where he coedited the magazine Shtrom and other Soviet Yiddish periodicals.

imgDesc: Jewish writers on the occasion of a visit by Yiddish writer H. Leyvik (front row, center), Moscow, 1925. Among those in the portrait are Izi Kharik and Zelik Akselrod (back row, first and third from left), Yehezkl Dobrushin, Borekh Glazman (also visiting from New York), Shmuel-Nisn Godiner, and Arn Kushnirov (front row, first, second, fourth, and fifth from left). Photo by B. Kapustinskii. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union

text: Crimea

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Yiddish literature

text: theater

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Holocaust

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Haynt

abstract: Yiddish daily newspaper, published in Warsaw between 1908 and 1939. Haynt (Today) was one of the two longest running and most important Yiddish daily papers published in Warsaw in the early 1900s. In view of the success of the earlier popular and inexpensive Yiddish daily Idishes tageblat (1906–1910), its energentic editor, Shmuel Yankev Yatskan (1874–1936), founded Haynt with his associate publishers, brothers Noyekh and Nekhemye Finkelshteyn.

imgDesc: Masthead of Haynt, Warsaw, 17 January 1938. (YIVO)

text: newspaper

text: Warsaw

text: Shmuel Yankev Yatskan

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: David Frishman

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Moyshe Bunem Yustman

text: Poland

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Ozjasz Thon


title: Trotsky, Leon

abstract: (1879–1940), revolutionary and central figure in Soviet and world communism. Leon Trotsky, originally Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was born in Kherson province, and was the son of a well-to-do tenant farmer who later became a major landowner. Trotsky received his earliest education in a heder, though he spent just several months there. After attending elementary school in Odessa, he graduated from secondary school in Nikolaev in 1896.

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

text: communism

text: heder

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Saint Petersburg

text: October Revolution

text: Brest

text: Zinov’ev

text: Kamenev

text: USSR

text: Moscow

text: Bund

text: Zionism

text: assimilation


title: Fiszel Family

abstract: The most influential family in Kraków’s Jewish community from the 1470s to the mid-sixteenth century. Members of the Fiszel family served as creditors to King Casimir the Jagiellonian and his sons Jan Olbracht, Aleksander, and Sigismund I. The family’s origins are disputed; it is possible that they came from Prague, elsewhere in Bohemia, or Germany.

text: Kraków

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: Ya‘akov Pollak

text: conversion

text: Poland

text: Poznań

text: Gniezno

text: Abraham Bohemus

text: Lublin

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Ya‘akov Pollak

text: Prague


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

abstract: The stirrings of Hebrew literature in Galicia and Lithuania in the first half of the nineteenth century were accompanied by early critical appraisals. In the periodicals Bikure ha-‘itim (The First Fruits of the Times; 1831) and Kerem ḥemed (Vineyard of Delight; 1839), Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport (Shir), one of the outstanding intellectuals of Galicia, published articles about Yosef Perl’s satire Megaleh temirin (Revealer of Secrets; 1819) and about its roots in the European satirical tradition. In the journal Pirḥe tsafon (Flowers of the North; 1844), editor Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn published a detailed discussion of Adam ha-Kohen’s Shire sefat kodesh (Poems in the Holy Tongue), and Fuenn’s editorial colleague Eli‘ezer Lipman Horovitz wrote a historical survey of Hebrew poetry from the biblical period to modern times. However, these and others were isolated and rare publications.

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

text: Hebrew literature

text: Galicia

text: Lithuania

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Yosef Perl

text: satire

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Adam ha-Kohen

text: Hebrew poetry

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Russia

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Eli‘ezer Zweifel

text: Haskalah

text: orthodoxy

text: Hebrew literature

text: Avraham Uri Kovner

text: Avraham Ya‘akov Paperna

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Me’ir Letteris

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: literary journals

text: newspapers

text: Shim‘on Bernfeld

text: Shemu’el Leib Zitron

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Avraham Shalom Friedberg

text: Sha’ul Pinḥas Rabbinowitz

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: David Frishman

text: Zalman Epstein

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Mordekhai Tsevi Mane

text: Yehudah Leib Kantor

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Odessa

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Zionism

text: Warsaw

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Yehoshu‘a (Osjasz) Thon

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Menaḥem Mendel Feitelson

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: prose

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: Mordekhai Tsevi Mane

text: Menaḥem Mendel Feitelson

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Fishel Lachower

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: Kraków

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Yisroel Tsinberg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Shapira

text: Kovno

glossary: Magid Haskalah


title: Schmelkes Family

abstract: Prominent rabbinic family. Several members of the Schmelkes family served as rabbis and community leaders in Galicia from the middle of the nineteenth century. Most prominent among them were the rabbis of Przemyśl: Yitsḥak Yehudah Schmelkes (1828–1905) and his nephew Gedalyah Schmelkes (1857–1928).

text: Galicia

text: Przemyśl

text: Lwów

text: yeshiva

text: Kołomyja

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionist

text: Tarnów

text: Mizraḥi

glossary: yeshiva responsa


title: Oshry, Ephraim

abstract: (1914–2003), rabbi and halakhic authority, known primarily for his book She’elot u-teshuvot mi-ma‘amakim, a collection of halakhic rulings issued in the Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto during the Holocaust period. Ephraim (Efroim) Oshry was born in Kupishok, in the district of Panevėžys (Ponevezh) in Lithuania. He studied in the finest yeshivas in Lithuania—Khelm, Ponevezh, and Keneset Yisra’el in Slobodka. Oshry discussed halakhic issues and the clarification of Talmudic passages with prominent authorities, including Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski and Avraham Duber Shapira, with whom he maintained a particularly close relationship.

imgDesc: Rabbi Ephraim Oshry conducting a memorial service at the Ninth Fort, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis, Kaunas, 1945. With him are four Jews who succeeded in escaping from the fort in 1943: (left to right) Pinia Krakinovski, Israel Gitlin, Berl Gempel, and Władysław Blum (?). (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eliezer Zilberis)

text: Kaunas

text: Holocaust

text: Panevėžys

text: Lithuania

text: yeshivas

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: memory

text: Holocaust

glossary: Gemara responsa Torah


title: Mauthner, Fritz

abstract: (1849–1923), journalist, novelist, philosopher, and literary critic. Born into an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family from Hořitz (Hořice; also Horschitz) in Bohemia, Fritz Mauthner received his primary and secondary education at German schools in Prague. Although he officially studied law, he acquired a broad education at the German university in Prague. In 1876, Mauthner moved to Berlin, where he published articles in or collaborated on several literary journals, earning his living primarily through writing theater reviews. In 1889, he was a founder of the avant-garde theater Freie Bühne (Free Stage). He wrote plays, novels, short stories, and satires.

imgDesc: Fritz Mauthner, Meersburg, Germany, early 1900s. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: David Kuh

text: Jakub Frank


title: Photography

abstract: Invented in Western Europe in 1839, the new technology of photography soon migrated to Eastern Europe and Russia. Beginning in the 1840s, East European Jews were leading figures in developing photography as a new art form, a tool of documentation, and a medium of social criticism. Although initially an expensive and rarified technology, as photography became less costly, easier, and therefore more popular at the end of the nineteenth century, Jews rushed into this new burgeoning field.

imgDesc: Photogram. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1922. George Eastman House. (George Eastman House 81:2163:0004. © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

text: Warsaw

text: postcards

text: Archives

text: Kamenets Podolski

text: S. Z. Rapoport

text: Russian Empire

text: Minsk

text: Soviet

text: Moscow

text: Mikhail Kol’tsov

text: Russian Civil War

text: Pale of Settlement

text: El Lissitzky

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Vilna

text: Alter-Sholem Kacyzne

text: Poland

text: Roman Vishniac

text: Evgenii Khaldei

text: Crimea

text: Russian Civil War

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: memory


title: Hatvany-Deutsch Family

abstract: Hungarian industrialists and cultural figures. The Hatvany-Deutsch family played a decisive role for several generations in the economic and—later—the cultural life of Hungary.

text: industrialists

text: Hungary

text: Arad

text: banking

text: Košice

text: Munkács

text: Budapest

text: Timişoara

text: Hungary

text: Seminary

text: Lajos Hatvany

text: conversion

text: Hungarian literature

text: assimilation

text: Zionist movement


title: Balázs, Béla

abstract: (1884–1949), film theoretician and screenwriter. Balázs was born Herbert Bauer, the son of assimilated German Jewish parents, both school teachers, in Szeged, Hungary. After studying at the Budapest University of Arts, he published poetry and plays; his friends and associates included composers Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, philosopher Georg Lukács, art historian Arnold Hauser, and sociologist Karl Mannheim. Balász held several cultural posts with the revolutionary Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. When the regime fell, he went into exile, first in Vienna—where he published his early works on “film culture”—and then Berlin. Balázs was among the first and most lucid writers on film language, with a particular appreciation for the power of the close-up; his formalism was tempered by a sense of vision as essentially cultural and motion pictures as determined by economics.

text: film

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Moscow


title: Roth, Joseph

abstract: (1894–1939), novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Born in Brody (in Austrian Galicia) and raised without a father, Joseph Roth volunteered during World War I and in 1917 was sent as a reporter to the Galician front. This experience had an enormous impact on him. In 1918, he returned to Vienna and began working as a journalist for leftist newspapers such as Arbeiterzeitung and Der Neue Freie Tag. In 1920, he moved to Berlin, where he contributed to the Neue Berliner Zeitung,Berliner Börsen-Courier, and the Vorwärts, among others. From 1923 to 1932 Roth was a feuilletonist for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as its foreign correspondent in France, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Albania, Italy, and Poland. Beginning in 1923, he published novels as well.

imgDesc: Joseph Roth at a railroad station, France, 1926. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: shtetl

text: assimilation

text: heder

glossary: melamed heder


title: Kol Ya‘akov Yeshiva

abstract: Rabbinical seminary, opened in Moscow in 1957. The last yeshivas in the Soviet Union had been closed in the 1920s. Subsequently, at the end of World War II Jews had not been allowed to open a seminary, whereas other religious groups were permitted to do so. Realizing the declining status of Jewish learning and its implications for the future of the rabbinate—and of Judaism as a whole—in the Soviet Union, which would remain without Jewish religious functionaries of any kind, Rabbi Solomon Shlifer (unofficially acknowledged as chief rabbi of Soviet Jewry) persistently requested the authorities to endorse the establishment of a Jewish theological seminary. Eventually, in May 1956 permission was granted, and in January 1957 the Kol Ya‘akov Yeshiva began operating on the precincts of the Moscow Choral Synagogue with Shlifer as first rector.

text: seminary

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union

text: rabbinate

text: Solomon Shlifer

text: Yeshiva

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Ukraine

text: Orthodox

text: Budapest


title: Kornfeld, Zsigmond

abstract: (1852–1909), banker and financial expert. Zsigmond Kornfeld was born in the Czech town of Golčûv Jenikov (Ger., Goltsch-Jenikau), the nephew of Aharon Kornfeld, who was the last great head of a yeshiva in Bohemia. At age 16, Kornfeld left school to work for the Torsch Bank House in Vienna. After a short trip to Paris in 1872, he was employed by the Böhmischer Bankverein in Prague; four years later he was promoted to be vice manager of the local branch of the Vienna Creditanstalt. Early in 1878, Albert Rothschild appointed Kornfeld to direct its partner institution, the Hungarian General Credit Bank in Budapest. From 1900, Kornfeld was the managing director and from 1905 the president.

text: yeshiva

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Budapest

text: banking

text: transportation

text: Hungary

text: Slovakia


title: Mülhausen, Yom Tov Lipmann

abstract: (fl. late fourteenth–early fifteenth century), eminent rabbinic leader in Bohemia, anti-Christian polemicist, halakhist, philosopher, kabbalist, and commentator. Mülhausen’s activities, coming a generation or two after the devastation of the Black Plague, raised the intellectual, cultural, and religious profile of Bohemian Jewry. Along with contemporaries such as the brothers Avigdor and Menaḥem Kara and Menaḥem Shalem, Mülhausen belonged to a set of rabbinic figures whose intellectual breadth was not usually associated with the Ashkenazic rabbinate of the late medieval period.

text: Bohemia

text: Kara

text: rabbinate

text: Prague

text: Ashkenaz

text: Poland


title: Braun, Mieczysław

abstract: (1902–1941 or 1942), writer, poet, publicist, and member of the Esperanto movement. Mieczysław Braun (Braunstein, Bronsztejn, or Braunstein) collaborated with both the interwar Polish and Polish Jewish press (Skamander, Wiadomości Literackie, Nasz Przegląd, Nowy Dziennik, Ster). After fighting in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920, he studied law in Warsaw from 1922 to 1926, and then worked as an attorney in Łódź. He died of typhus in the Warsaw ghetto.

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: antisemitism


title: Pinsk

abstract: City in southern Belarus. Pinsk’s Jewish community was founded in 1506 (and from ca. 1690 Pinsk was twinned with the town of Karlin) and was one of the five chief communities of “Lite” (Jewish Lithuania), extending its authority over at least 26 smaller Jewish settlements from the mid-sixteenth century until the abolition of Polish–Lithuanian Jewish autonomy in 1764.

imgDesc: Photograph taken after administration of the oath to Jewish soldiers in the Old Synagogue, Pinsk, 1937: (left to right) Rabbi Yoakhim; Rabbi Aron Walkin, head of the kehilah; Yoysef Shmid, cantor; and Shmuel Gorynowski, gabai (trustee). Photograph by M. Freidkes. (YIVO)

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: crafts

text: Berdichev

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: kahal

text: Russian revolution of 1905

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: pogroms

text: World War I

text: Judenrat

text: Karliner Hasidim

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: trade

text: leaseholding

text: yeshiva

text: Levi Yitsḥak ben Me’ir (later of Berdichev)

text: Hasidism

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Misnagdim

text: Haskalah

text: Tarbut

text: Aguda

text: CYSHO

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: General Zionists

text: Revisionist Zionists

text: Mizraḥi

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: philanthropy

glossary:
kahal
arenda
yeshiva
Misnagdim
Haskalah
numerus clausus


title: Maze, Iakov Isaevich

abstract: (1859–1924), Russian rabbi, publicist, and Zionist leader. Born in Mogilev, Iakov Maze lost his father at an early age and was raised by his maternal grandfather, who gave him a thorough Jewish education. While studying at the gymnasium in Kerch (Crimea), Maze was shocked to overhear an antisemitic remark by the reputedly liberal Tsar Alexander II. Maze remained observant—unusual for his era—while studying law at Moscow University. He then practiced law for a time after graduation.

imgDesc: Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki (right), with (left to right) Hebrew writers Iakov Maze and Leon Rabinovich, editor of the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melits, 1885. Among the portraits of other Hebrew writers on the table is (center) one of Perets Smolenskin. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Crimea

text: Moscow

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Mendel Beilis

text: Evsektsiia


title: Warski, Adolf

abstract: (1868–1937), Polish Communist activist and leader. Born in Kraków into an assimilated family that favored the country’s independence, Adolf Warski (orig. Warszawski) was one of the founders of the Związek Robotników Polskich (Polish Workers Union; ZRP) in 1889. In 1893, he helped organize the Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy (Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania; SDKPiL), which, as its name implied, renounced the independence of Poland as one of its goals and directed its activities to the tsarist empire, where it sought a proletarian revolution. From 1902 to 1913, Warski was a member of the party’s Central Executive and played an active part in the Revolution of 1905–1907, during which he was arrested several times by tsarist police.

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Revolution of 1905–1907

text: USSR


title: Lorbeerbaum, Ya‘akov ben Ya‘akov Mosheh of Lissa

abstract: (1760–1832), rabbi and Talmudist. After his first marriage, Ya‘akov ben Ya‘akov Mosheh of Lissa (commonly known as Ḥavat Da‘at) worked in Stanisławów as a partner in a brewery. When the business failed, he supported himself by serving as a rabbi in various communities of Poland and Galicia. Until 1791, he served as rabbi in Monasterzyska, and from there he moved to Kałusz, both in Galicia. It was in Kałusz that Lorbeerbaum wrote his earliest works.

text: Stanisławów

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller


title: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

abstract: (1796–1850), Hasidic leader and tsadik. Famed for his eccentric personality, Yisra’el Friedman of Ruzhin (Yid., more properly Rizhin) presided over a Hasidic court whose opulence and wealth rivaled that of Polish nobility. The dramatic events in which he was involved—imprisonment on suspicion of aiding and abetting the violent murder of informers, flight from Russia to Austria—made him a legend in his own lifetime, revered by his followers but despised and ridiculed by his opponents, mainly maskilim. Descended from a distinguished Hasidic family (his great-grandfather was Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh) that claimed descent from King David, and possessing exceptional religious charisma, sharp natural intelligence, and organizational talents, he was not only one of the most prominent and impressive Hasidic leaders in the period of the greatest growth of Hasidism, but also the founder of a new style of Hasidism known as the “regal way.”

text: informers

text: Russia

text: Dov Ber

text: Hasidism

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: Yosef Perl

text: Kiev

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Czernowitz

text: Hungary

text: Lithuania

text: Buczacz

text: Sabbath

text: Shelomoh Kluger

text: Brody

text: Vurke

text: Ger

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Land of Israel

text: Karlin

text: Chernobil

text: Vizhnits

text: Apt

text: Berdichev

glossary:
tsadik
Magid
Torah
Pale of Settlement
maskil
kolel