title: Abeles, Shim‘on

abstract: (1682/85–1694), Jewish youth in Prague whose father was accused of murdering him “out of hatred for the Christian faith.” The death of Shim‘on Abeles in February 1694 illuminates the tensions that beset Prague’s Jewish community in the late seventeenth century. Coming at the height of the Catholic Habsburg Counter-Reformation, in which the Jesuit order played a leading role in reshaping Bohemian religion and culture, the case signaled a new stage of repression for Prague’s Jewish community.

imgDesc: Shim‘on Abeles. Engraving from Processus Inquisitorius (Prague: C. Z. Wussin, 1728). (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Prague

text: conversion


title: Prague

abstract: Capital of the Czech Republic. The city of Prague has the oldest Jewish community in Bohemia and is one of the longest enduring and most important Jewish centers in East Central Europe. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Prague was one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The presence of Jewish merchants at Prague markets is mentioned in a report by the Iberian Jewish merchant Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb in about 970. Jewish settlement at the time was located near the prince’s marketplace in the area below Prague Castle (Suburbium Pragense). A second community, near Vyšehrad Castle (Vicus Wissegradensis), on the right bank of the Vltava (Moldau) River, is mentioned in a record of 1091.

imgDesc: Prague. The Jewish district.

text: Czech Republic

text: Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov ha-Lavan of Prague

text: Altneuschul

text: Avigdor Kara

text: banking

text: Hebrew printing

text: Avraham ben Avigdor

text: Mordecai Maisel

text: Ya‘akov Bassevi of Treuenburg

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: yeshiva

text: Efrayim Shelomoh ben Aharon of Luntshits

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Shabetai Sheftel ben Akiva Horowitz

text: David Gans

text: Shim‘on Abeles

text: Familiants Law

text: David Oppenheim

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Joseph II

text: dress

text: names

text: Haskalah

text: Herz Homberg

text: Peter Beer

text: Mosheh Yisra’el Landau

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Zionism

text: Nathan Ehrenfeld

text: German literature

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Franz Werfel

text: Oskar Baum

text: Egon Erwin Kisch

text: Czechoslovak Republic

text: Židovská Strana

text: Terezín

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: USSR

text: Slánský Trial

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah


title: Conversion

abstract: Jewish conversions to Christianity in Eastern Europe were infrequent in both premodern and modern times. Mass conversions to Christianity occurred at two intervals: to Eastern Orthodoxy during the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising (1648–1649; gzeyres takh vetat), and to Catholicism by followers of Jakub Frank in the second half of the eighteenth century. Jewish and Christian sources suggest that individual conversions to Judaism also took place.

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: akub Frank

text: Poland

text: Łuck

text: Vilna

text: Kraków

text: Lithuania

text: Ezofowicz

text: Helicz brothers

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Bund

text: Daniil Khvol’son

text: Saint Petersburg

text: pogroms

text: Hungary

text: Prague

text: Bohemian

text: Hungary

text: Brno

text: Sabbath

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Judaizers

text: Lithuania

text: Dubno

text: Ger Tsedek

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
gzeyres takh vetat
melamed
numerus clausus
halakhah
Shulḥan ‘arukh

subconcepts: Jewish Converts to Christianity in Pre-Partition Poland (before 1772)

subconcepts: Jewish Conversions to Christianity after 1772


title: Abramovich, Rafail

abstract: (1880–1963), revolutionary and publicist. Born in Dünaburg (Dvinsk; mod. Daugavpils, Latvia), Rafail Abramovich (originally surnamed Rein) studied in a modern (nonclassical) secondary school and later at Riga Polytechnic University. He was involved in the student revolutionary movement and in 1901 joined the Bund. He then began publishing in the revolutionary press in Yiddish.

imgDesc: Simon Dubnow (standing, center) at the first international YIVO conference, Vilna, 1935. Other historians and notables on the stage and dais include (seated, from left) Joseph Tshernikhov, Elias Tcherikower, Yankev Botoshansky; (behind Botoshansky’s left shoulder) Zelig Kalmanovitch; (to Dubnow’s right) Ignacy Schiper; (behind Dubnow’s right shoulder) Rafail Abramovich; (seated, first to fourth from right) Yudl Mark, Yankev Shatzky, Max Weinreich, Zalmen Reyzen; (standing behind Weinreich), Nakhman Meisel. The portrait of Tsemaḥ Szabad (right) is draped in black in commemoration of his death, which had occurred a few months earlier. (YIVO)

text: Daugavpils

text: Latvia

text: Riga

text: Bund

text: Kishinev

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Tsukunft

text: World War I

text: Soviet


title: Kisch, Egon Erwin

abstract: (1885–1948), journalist, writer, and political activist. The twentieth-century image of the reporter as adventurer-hero is deeply indebted to the self-fashioning of the “roving reporter,” as Kisch called himself in the title of one of his many reportage collections. Kisch was from a prosperous, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, in the same generation as Franz Kafka. He was a youth in a period of intense social and political conflict between Czechs and Germans in his home country, with the Jews in between; he was a young man during World War I and through the period of intense ideological conflict that followed. Both of these conflicts made powerful impressions on his image of himself and on his creative and political work. He was an innovator of the genre of reportage, a leader of the Communist uprising and brief takeover in Vienna after World War I, a tireless investigator and master of the exposé, and a leftist activist.

imgDesc: Geschichten aus sieben ghettos (Stories from Seven Ghettos) by Egon Erwin Kisch. (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange Verlag, 1934). Illustrated by P. L. Urban. (YIVO)

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka

text: Yehudah Leib

text: Czechoslovakia


title: Werfel, Franz

abstract: (1890–1945), writer. Son of a prosperous Jewish glove manufacturer, Franz Werfel was brought up in Prague, where he was friendly with Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Willy Haas, and other members of the Prague Circle. He initially found fame as an expressionist poet, first writing Der Weltfreund (The Friend of the World; 1911).

imgDesc: Franz Werfel (front seat, left) with friends, Breitenstein am Semmering, Austria, ca. 1925. Also shown are (front seat, right) composer Alban Berg; and (back seat, left to right) Berg’s wife Helene and Werfel’s future wife, Alma Mahler. (Mahler-Werfel Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania)

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Willy Haas

text: Egon Erwin Kisch


title: Familiants Laws

abstract: Legislation enacted in 1726 in Bohemia and in 1727 in Moravia and Silesia in order to limit the number of Jewish males permitted to live and marry in those jurisdictions. The maximum number of Jewish families was set at 8,541 for Bohemia, 5,106 for Moravia, and 119 for Silesia. Originally intended as a temporary measure, the Familiants Laws remained in force until 1848.

text: Bohemia

text: Moravia

text: Silesia

text: reforms of Joseph II

text: Normalschulen

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Prague

text: Herz Homberg

text: Hungary


title: Avraham ben Avigdor

abstract: (d. 1542), rabbi. The inscription on Avraham ben Avigdor’s tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague states that he was a chief rabbi and head of Prague’s yeshiva for more than 20 years. Avraham ben Avigdor is also mentioned in the memorial book of the Altneuschul (fol. 20a) and in David Gans’s chronicle Tsemaḥ David (1592). In the Prague municipal register, Avraham is cited as the author of a legal verdict in a dispute between two parties and as a witness involving the purchase of realty. His name, and the fact that he wrote a liturgical poem, has led to the unsupported view that he was a descendant of Avigdor Kara.

text: Prague

text: yeshiva

text: Altneuschul

text: David Gans

text: Avigdor Kara

glossary:
yeshiva
Arba‘ah turim


title: Czech Republic

abstract: On 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic came into existence as a successor state of Czechoslovakia. At the time, 10 Jewish communities existed on its territory with approximately 3,000 members, most of them living in Prague. Another 2,000 Jews were organized in different Jewish associations. The Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic estimated that approximately 15,000–20,000 Jews were living in the Czech Republic, most of whom were not registered with a formal Jewish community. Some of the communities were very small and had difficulty maintaining religious institutions without permanent rabbis.

imgDesc: Czech Republic and Slovakia, ca. 2000.

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Prague

text: Prague

text: Orthodox

text: communism

text: Terezín


title: Daugavpils

abstract: (Rus. and Yid., Dvinsk; Ger., Dünaburg; among Jews, also called Dinaburg), largest town in southeastern Latvia. Daugavpils, founded in the thirteenth century, became a district capital in the nineteenth century. Jews settled in the town in the mid-1770s. Throughout the nineteenth century and up to World War I, Jews constituted 50 percent of Dvinsk’s total population (increasing from about 1,500 persons in 1800 to about 56,000 by 1914). They lived mainly in the Altstadt, Plan, and Plezer quarters.

imgDesc: Children with their parents before their departure to a summer camp in Striape sponsored by OZE (Society for the Protection of Jewish Health), Daugavpils, 1938. (YIVO)

text: Latvia

text: Misnagdic

text: Hasidic

text: Me’ir Simḥah ha-Kohen

text: heder

text: yeshivas

text: Haskalah

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionist

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Bund

text: Latvia

text: Joint Distribution Committee

text: OZE

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Betar

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Mizraḥi

text: Soviet Union

text: Riga

glossary: heder Talmud Haskalah


title: Gzeyres Takh Vetat

abstract: Acronym referring to the “[Evil] Decrees of 1648–1649.” The Ukrainian lands were part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the first half of the seventeenth century. To the south, Crimea—a region bordering the Black Sea—was part of the Ottoman Empire and was populated largely by Muslim Tatars. Most of the land in Ukraine was owned by Catholic Polish magnates and nobles, while the peasants were mainly Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians. The urban centers were home to a mixture of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and members of other groups. In the southern parts of Ukraine were groups known as Cossacks. They were Orthodox Christians and mainly—but not exclusively—of Slavic origin. They were not farmers but maintained themselves sometimes by hunting and fishing, and largely by warfare and the spoils of war. The Crimean Tatars often attacked the Slavic peasants in the north, taking booty and slaves, and in return, the Cossacks did the same to the Tatars. In the course of time, the Polish crown began to employ the autonomous Cossacks for the defense of the region.

imgDesc: Gzeyres takh vetat. Jewish communities affected, 1648–1649.

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Crimea

text: Ukraine

text: Nemyriv

text: Uman

text: Kraków

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Nemyriv


title: Slánský Trial

abstract: An antisemitic show trial in 1952, involving high-ranking politicians of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Political terror was an inherent component of the Stalinist reign in Eastern Europe following World War II. While the first trials focused on political opponents of the Communists, the schism with Tito’s Yugoslavia (i.e., inside the Communist bloc), which started in 1948, led to a hunt for alleged enemies within the Communist parties and produced a series of trials involving Communist politicians in East European countries. The campaign was designed to demonstrate a widespread “imperialist” conspiracy within the Communist movements and to prevent any further disobedience in the Soviet bloc.

text: antisemitic

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Zionist

text: Moscow

text: Prague

text: Communism


title: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

abstract: The October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, the RSFSR, as the successor state to the Russian Empire. In December 1922, by which time the Bolsheviks had in fact established control over the territory of the former empire (except those areas taken from it by the treaties that marked the end of World War I) their state became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), comprising four soviet socialist republics (SSRs): Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcaucasian (by 1936 there were 11 SSRs; the number eventually grew to 15). The USSR’s prime importance, however, was not its size—it was the largest country in the world—nor its considerable wealth of raw materials, but the nature of its regime. As the first Communist state, it preached, and sought to propagate abroad, an ideology that purported to have a message for the modern world, industrial and precapitalist alike. Its regime, therefore, served as a model or laboratory, whose policies and achievements were designed to serve as a stimulus for other countries the globe over.

imgDesc: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1922–1991 (European regions).

text: Bolshevik Revolution

text: World War I

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Romania

text: Bessarabia

text: population

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: assimilation

text: marriage

text: Pale of Settlement

text: trade

text: Moscow

text: Leningrad

text: Kiev

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: civil war

text: agriculture

text: Leon Trotsky

text: Iakov Sverdlov

text: Grigorii Zinov’ev

text: Lev Kamenev

text: political parties

text: Zionist movement

text: Evsektsiia

text: Crimea

text: Birobidzhan

text: antisemitism

text: Holocaust

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Gezkul’t

text: Maksim Litvinov

text: Genrikh Iagoda

text: Solomon Lozovskii

text: Iakov Surits

text: Lev Mekhlis

text: Polina Zhemchuzhina

text: Vladimir Ioffe

text: Lev Zil’ber

text: Mikhail Kol’tsov

text: David Zaslavskii

text: Osip Brik

text: Aleksandr Gel’fond

text: Leonid Kantorovich

text: Mark Krein

text: Mark Naimark

text: Lev Landau

text: Il’ia Lifshits

text: Abram Ioffe

text: Evsektsiia

text: OZET

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Lev Trotsky

text: Lazar’ Kaganovich

text: Veniamin Dymshits

text: Iulii Daniel’

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Moldova

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Riga

text: Chernivtsi

text: Kishinev

text: Riga

text: Vilnius

text: Uzhgorod

text: poetry

text: theater

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Yiddish-language schools

text: heder

text: Vitebsk

text: circumcision

text: Committee of Rabbis in the USSR

text: Sabbath

text: seminary

text: Kol Ya‘akov Yeshiva

text: cantors

text: Solomon Shlifer

text: Passover

text: refusenik

text: Holocaust

text: Minsk

text: Kaunas

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
heder
Yeshiva
aktion

subconcepts:
Population
Chronology
Social Structure
Leadership
Relations with Society and the State
Jewish Identity
Culture
Religion
The Holocaust
Attitude toward Israel
Conclusion


title: Subcarpathian Rus’

abstract: (also Subcarpathian or Transcarpathian Ruthenia), administrative region in present-day Ukraine, known as Zakarpatska Ukraina. The area first functioned as such a unit at the end of World War I, when it became part of Czechoslovakia. Subcarpathian Rus’ comprised the historical counties of Ung, Ugocsa, Bereg, and the northern half of Máramaros in the prewar kingdom of Hungary. Until 1918–1919, Subcarpathian Rus’ belonged to the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy, but in 1918–1919 it was annexed to the Czechoslovak Republic, where it remained until 1938–1939. In autumn 1938, the Hungarian kingdom annexed one part of the region; another section was autonomous until March 1939, when the Hungarians conquered it as well. Soviet troops overran the area in the fall of 1944 and arranged for its incorporation into the USSR as part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

imgDesc: Subcarpathian Rus', ca. 2000.

text: Ukraine

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary

text: USSR

text: Sephardic

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi rebellion

text: Moravian and Bohemian

text: Galicia

text: trade

text: Hasidism

text: Ḥatam Sofer

text: yeshiva

text: Bratislava

text: Orthodox

text: Jewish Congress

text: Uzhhorod

text: Sighet Marmației

text: agriculture

text: banking

text: industry


title: Terezín

abstract: Town in the Czech Republic, 50 kilometers north of Prague. Terezín (Ger., Theresienstadt) was established in 1780 as a fortress town with a military garrison. Presumably, a small number of Jews (mainly soldiers and merchants) lived there from the town’s beginnings. A Jewish military doctor is mentioned in a record dating from 1836, three Jewish families lived there in 1843, and a prayer room was functioning by 1861. Jewish settlement reached its height in 1890 (with 222 persons, representing 3% of the total population). The local prayer society was connected to the religious community of Litoměřice (Ger., Leitmeritz). The cemetery contains about 90 Jewish graves, including those of residents, prisoners of war, and civilian refugees from Galicia and Bucovina from the World War I period.

imgDesc: Both sides of a 20-kronen note printed for use in the Terezín concentration camp, 1943. At lower right is the signature of Jakob Edelstein, the Czech Zionist leader who was appointed by the Nazis to serve as the head of the Jewish administration in Terezín. (YIVO)

text: Czech Republic

text: Prague

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: ghettos

text: Poland

text: Belorussia

text: Latvia

text: Estonia

text: Riga

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Holocaust


title: Židovská Strana

abstract: (Jewish Party), political party that represented the Jewish national minority in Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. The party was founded in January 1919 at the first gathering in Prague of Jewish nationalists in that country and was supported by Zionists from different branches (with the exception of Po‘ale Tsiyon), as well as by non-Zionist Jewish nationalists. Židovská Strana was opposed by members of the Czech Jewish movement in Bohemia and by the majority of Orthodox Jews in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus’, who criticized the party’s Zionist orientation.

imgDesc: List of Židovská Strana candidates, Snina, Czechoslovakia (today in Slovakia), 1938. (YIVO)

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Prague

text: Zionists

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Bohemia

text: Orthodox

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Bratislava

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Silesia

text: Ludvík Singer

text: Angelo Goldstein

text: Emil Margulies

text: Angelo Goldstein

text: Ḥayim Kugel


title: Altneuschul

abstract: (Old-New Synagogue), the oldest building in Prague’s Jewish Quarter and the oldest preserved synagogue in Europe. Originally called the New or Great Shul, it became known as Altneuschul after the establishment of other synagogues in the late sixteenth century. Today it is the oldest surviving Gothic medieval double-nave synagogue. The other examples of this type were the late twelfth-century synagogue in Worms (destroyed in 1938), the early thirteenth-century synagogue in Regensburg (destroyed in 1519), and the fourteenth-century Old Synagogue in Vienna (destroyed in 1420). Similar in layout is the early fifteenth-century Gothic Old Synagogue in Kraków.

imgDesc: The Altneuschul (Old-New Synagogue), built ca. 1270, the oldest building in Prague’s Jewish Quarter and the oldest preserved synagogue in Europe. From Antiquitates Judaicae Pragenses (Jewish Antiquities in Prague), a postcard album printed by M. Schulz for the Gomel Hasidim Burial Society in Prague, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Prague

text: Kraków


title: Czechoslovakia

abstract: A republic located in central Europe, Czechoslovakia was founded on 28 October 1918 as one of the successor states of the Habsburg Empire. It included the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia), Slovakia, and Subcarpathian Rus’. Following the signing of the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938, Nazi Germany annexed the borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia (Sudetenland), which were populated mostly by Germans. The rest of the republic (minus regions annexed by Poland and Hungary) was called the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic. After the Nazi occupation of 15 March 1939, the Czech lands were transformed into Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, with Slovakia becoming a semi-independent state. Following World War II, the Czechoslovak Republic was reestablished without Subcarpathian Rus’, which was incorporated into the Soviet Union. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia was divided into two independent states called the Czech and Slovak Republics.

text: Bohemia, Moravia

text: Silesia

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Czech

text: Slovak

text: Prague

text: Karlovy Vary

text: Brno

text: Ostrava

text: Jihlava

text: Prostějov

text: Bratislava

text: Košice

text: Mukacheve

text: Uzhhorod

text: Galicia

text: Reform

text: Orthodox

text: Hasidism

text: yeshiva

text: Ḥatam Sofer

text: Munkatsh

text: Belz

text: Kosov-Vizhnits

text: Sandz

text: Židovská Strana

text: Zionism

text: Vojtěch Rakous

text: František Langer

text: Karel Poláček

text: Richard Weiner

text: Jiří Orten

text: Egon Hostovský

text: Jiří Langer

text: Jindřich Kohn

text: Alfred Fuchs

text: Eduard Lederer

text: Czech Literature

text: Max Brod

text: Felix Weltsch

text: Franz Kafka

text: Oskar Baum

text: Willy Haas

text: Franz Werfel

text: Hugo Salus

text: Otto Pick

text: Rudolf Fuchs

text: Ernst Weiss

text: Paul Kornfeld

text: Egon Erwin Kisch

text: German Literature

text: Selbstwehr

text: Jüdische Volksstimme

text: Židovské zprávy

text: Mizraḥists

text: Karel Fleischmann

text: Bar Kochba

text: Maccabi

text: Lev Winter

text: Rudolf Slánský

text: Ludvík Singer

text: Angelo Goldstein

text: Ḥayim Kugel

text: antisemitism

text: historiography

text: František Weidmann

text: Jakob Edelstein

text: Židovské zprávy

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Minsk

text: Belarus

text: Terezín

text: extermination camps

text: labor camps

text: Mikha’el Dov Ber Weissmandel

text: Gisi Fleischmann

text: Hungary

text: Kamenets Podolski

text: Galicia

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Egon Erwin Kisch

text: Gustav Sicher

text: Richard Feder

glossary:
Neolog
Status Quo
yeshiva
Beth Hatefutsoth. Print courtesy YIVO
numerus clausus

subconcepts:
Demographic Structure
Religious Identity
National Identity
Culture
Political Affiliation
Antisemitism
The Holocaust
The Postwar Period


title: Baum, Oskar

abstract: (1883–1941), prose writer and poet. The blind poet Oskar Baum was a member of the Prague Circle of German-speaking Jewish writers in the first decades of the twentieth century as well as a particularly close friend of Franz Kafka, to whom the author read his early drafts of “The Metamorphosis” and other manuscripts. As was the case with Kafka and the rest of this informal literary group, Baum was a German writer of Jewish background in a period of intense Czech nationalist challenge to German cultural hegemony.

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka

text: Prague

text: Willy Haas

text: Selbstwehr

text: assimilation


title: Brod, Max

abstract: (1884–1968), writer and critic. Born into an assimilated German-speaking family in multiethnic, late-Habsburg Prague, Max Brod went through an ideological transformation in his youth from German liberal and Jewish assimilationist sympathies to Jewish nationalism and Zionism. In his own time the most productive and widely recognized member of the Prague Circle of German-speaking Jewish writers, Brod is remembered chiefly for his role in the preservation of the literary estate of Franz Kafka and the introduction of these modernist masterpieces to a broad public. While his literary production over his long life would range from fiction of many different styles to translations of opera libretti, philosophical tracts, art criticism, and memoir, this ideological commitment would remain behind most of his work.

imgDesc: Max Brod (right) with composer Hans Erich Pfitzner, Venice, 1923–1924. (Mahler-Werfel Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania)

text: Prague

text: assimilationist

text: Zionism

text: Franz Kafka

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Habimah

text: Bar Kochba

text: Franz Werfel

text: Selbstwehr


title: Kafka, Franz

abstract: (1883–1924), writer. A Jewish writer who was born and lived most of his life in Prague, Franz Kafka was one of the most important contributors to European modernist prose. All of his surviving fiction was composed in German, which must be considered his mother tongue, although he was raised in a multicultural environment and had a good command of Czech.

imgDesc: Franz Kafka as a child, Prague, ca. 1890s. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: Max Brod

text: Felix Weltsch

text: Oskar Baum

text: Selbstwehr

text: theater

text: Poland

text: Yiddish literature

text: Zionism

glossary: Talmud Kabbalah


title: German Literature

abstract: Between the Enlightenment and the Shoah, Jews living in Eastern Europe made contributions to German-language literature that by any measure must be considered significant to that tradition. Yet it is difficult to classify this contribution with a unified definition pertinent to the exercise.

imgDesc: Franz Werfel in a café, Leipzig, 1914. (Mahler–Werfel Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania)

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Lithuania

text: Haskalah

text: Silesia

text: Poland

text: Breslau

text: Gdańsk

text: East Prussia

text: Silesia

text: Zionists

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Czech Republic

text: Prague

text: Fritz Mauthner

text: Hugo Salus

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Franz Werfel

text: Oskar Baum

text: Otto Pick

text: Rudolf Fuchs

text: Egon Erwin Kisch

text: Hugo Bergmann

text: Bar Kochba

text: Brno

text: Ernst Weiss

text: Ostrava

text: Galicia

text: L’viv

text: Joseph Roth

text: Ukraine

text: Karl Emil Franzos

text: Bucovina

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Moldavia

text: Chernivtsi

text: Paul Celan

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Slovakia

text: communism

text: Béla Balázs

text: Haskalah

text: Pauline Wengeroff

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Hebrew literature

text: Medzhibizh

text: Minsk

text: memoirs

text: Khar’kiv

glossary:
Haskalah
Maimonides
Pale of Settlement

subconcepts:
The Range of Inquiry
Beginnings
Jews in Eastern German Lands
The Habsburg Monarchy
Farther East


title: Ehrenfeld, Nathan

abstract: (1843–1912), rabbi and teacher. Born in Csusz, Hungary, Nathan Ehrenfeld studied at the most prestigious rabbinical schools of that country: Pressburg (Hun., Pozsony; mod. Bratislava) and Eisenstadt. At the latter—and, then, at the rabbinical seminary in Berlin—he was the pupil of the Orthodox rabbi and scholar Esriel Hildesheimer (1820–1899). Ehrenfeld completed his university studies in Vienna and earned a doctorate in Kiel with a dissertation on Yosef Albo’s Sefer ha-‘ikarim (The Doctrine of Joseph Albo on the Principles and Criteria of Religion). Later he was active as a rabbi in the Prussian towns of Brandenburg an der Havel and Prenzlau, and, from 1878, in Gniezno, Poland.

imgDesc: Nathan Ehrenfeld, chief rabbi of Prague, ca. 1890. (YIVO)

text: Hungary

text: Bratislava

text: Eisenstadt

text: seminary

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Gniezno

text: Poland

text: Prague

text: orthodoxy


title: Zionism and Zionist Parties

abstract: As a modern political movement, Zionism was created to achieve political independence for the Jewish people in the Holy Land. Although scholarly literature is divided about the exact origins of the movement, this summary begins with the history of Zionism from its roots in the Ḥibat Tsiyon period (1881–1897). This section is followed by an account of five additional stages of Zionist development and activity in Eastern Europe: the period of political growth from the First Zionist Congress (1897) to World War I; the interwar years; the Holocaust; the cold war era; and the fate of Zionism after the fall of communism in 1989 through the year 2000.

imgDesc: Members of Daughters of Zion, a women’s Zionist organization, Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Lat.), 1904. (The Institute for Labour Research in Memory of Pinchas Lavon, Tel Aviv)

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: World War I

text: Holocaust

text: communism

text: pogroms

text: Lev Pinsker

text: Białystok

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Romania

text: Samuel Pineles

text: Bucharest

text: Galați

text: Focşani

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Katowice

text: Odessa

text: Sha’ul Pinḥas Rabbinowitz

text: Shemu’el Mohilewer

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Mordekhai Eliasberg

text: Russian Empire

text: Minsk

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Mizraḥi

text: Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Revolution of 1905

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: pogroms

text: Lwów

text: Pinsk

text: Minorities Treaty

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Ozjasz (Yehoshu‘a) Thon

text: Kraków

text: Ignacy Schwarzbart

text: Leon Reich

text: General Zionists

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Dror

text: Hit’aḥadut

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: youth movements

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Gordonia

text: Aharon David Gordon

text: Betar

text: Tarbut

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Jakub Wygodzki

text: Shimshon Rosenboim

text: Menaḥem Solieli

text: Courland

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: Transylvania

text: Mayer Ebner

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Prague

text: Židovská Strana

text: Orthodox

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Ḥayim Kugel

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Soviet Union

text: Holocaust

text: armed resistance

text: ghetto

text: Mordekhai Anielewicz

text: Białystok

text: Abba Kovner

text: Bund

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Judenräte

text: Jakob Edelstein

text: Theresienstadt

text: Rezső Kasztner

text: Khayim Mordkhe Rumkowski

text: Łódź

text: Beriḥah

text: Adolf (Avraham) Berman

text: Yitsḥak (Antek) Zuckerman

text: Moscow

text: Slánský trial

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: memory

text: Refusenik

glossary:
Uganda Affair
Pale of Settlement
Diaspora
Congress Poland

subconcepts: Zionism in the Age of Empires, 1880–1897

subconcepts: From the First Zionist Congress to World War I


title: Rapoport, Shelomoh Yehudah

abstract: (1790–1867), rabbi, Talmudist, maskil, and scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums (Jewish studies). Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport (known also by the acronym Shir) was born into a rabbinical family in Lwów. He received a traditional Jewish education and in 1810 married the daughter of Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller, a famous Galician rabbinic scholar and author of Ketsot ha-ḥoshen (2 parts; 1788 and 1796).

text: Lwów

text: Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller

text: Haskalah

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Żółkiew

text: Ya‘akov Orenstein

text: Haskalah

text: rabbinic literature

text: Yosef Perl

text: seminary

text: Tarnopol

text: Hungary

text: Bohemia

text: Galicia

text: Prague

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: assimilation

glossary: maskil Haskalah Torah halakhah Mishnah


title: Landau, Mosheh Yisra’el

abstract: (1788–1852), Prague communal leader, Hebrew printer, and influential maskil. A scion of the illustrious Polish Landau family, Mosheh Landau was the grandson of Prague’s distinguished chief rabbi, Yeḥezkel Landau (1713–1793). Son of the traditional maskil Yisra’el Landau, Mosheh received both a Jewish and a secular education in Prague. In 1824, he followed his father and began to work as a Hebrew printer for a Christian printing house. In 1827, he bought the press and ran it for 25 years.

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Yisra’el Landau

text: Normalschule

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Haskalah

glossary: maskil Mishnah Rashi Talmud Haskalah


title: Beer, Peter

abstract: (ca. 1758–1838), educator, historian, and religious reformer. Peter Beer was born in Nový Bydžov (Neu-Bidschow), Bohemia, to a middle-class family. He received a traditional Jewish education, attended yeshivas in Prague and Bratislava (Pressburg), but also studied German and Latin with a priest in his hometown. After serving as a private tutor in Hungary, Beer went to Vienna around 1781. He was one of the first Jews to attend a teaching seminary, opened to Jews by the Edicts of Toleration of Joseph II.

imgDesc: Peter Beer. Engraving, early nineteenth century. (The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem)

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Bratislava

text: Hungary

text: Haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Herz Homberg

text: historiography

text: religious reform

glossary: Haskalah Kabbalah Maimonides


title: Homberg, Herz

abstract: (1749–1841), Bohemian maskil and author. Herz Homberg is known mainly for having been the government-appointed supervisor of the German Jewish school system in Galicia between 1787 and 1806. He fully endorsed the policy of enforced enlightenment of Jews and was one of the first to establish a pattern of maskilic cooperation with absolutist governments in Eastern Europe and denunciation of conservative Jewish opponents.

text: German Jewish school system

text: Galicia

text: Prague

text: Prague

text: Pressburg

text: Lemberg

text: Bohemia

text: Jakob Tugendhold

text: rabbinic literature

text: Hungary

text: Tsene-rene

text: Kerem ḥemed

glossary: maskil Maimonides Talmud Torah


title: Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb

abstract: Tenth-century traveler who journeyed from Tortosa (Spain) through Central and Eastern Europe. Some of the written impressions of Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb (more fully, Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb al-Isrā’ilī al-Turtushi) survive through later Arabic sources. The original work was probably a report drafted for the Umayyad caliph of Spain, al-Ḥakam II (r. 961–976), following a visit to Germany as head of a delegation to Emperor Otto I. The depth of knowledge and proficiency that ibn Ya‘qūb displays in his discussions of medical matters suggest that he may have been a physician.

text: Prague

text: Bohemia


title: Haskalah

abstract: The Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, was an ideological and social movement that developed in Eastern Europe in the early nineteenth century and was active until the rise of the Jewish national movement in the early 1880s. Its partisans were known as maskilim. In certain senses, Haskalah was an extension of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, but it was centrally concerned with Jews’ political status and their relationship to European culture. Essentially, Haskalah sought to exploit the new possibilities of economic, social, and cultural integration that appeared to become available to Jews in the late eighteenth century with the removal of legal discrimination.

imgDesc: Page of scientific illustrations from the 1864 edition of Sefer elim, by Yosef Shelomoh ben Eliyahu Delmedigo of Candia (Crete; 1591–1655), who had spent five years in Lithuania. This book, first published by Menasheh ben Yisra’el in Amsterdam in 1628, was republished twice (1864 and 1870) in Odessa by the Hebrew writer and Yiddish writer and lexicographer Mosheh Eli‘ezer Beilinson (1835–1908). Consisting of Delmedigo’s answers to questions posed by Zeraḥ ben Natan of Troki (1578–1657/58), a Karaite, it addresses matters related to trigonometry, algebra, astronomy, medicine, physics, and metaphysics. Its republication in Eastern Europe reflects the program of the moderate Haskalah, which sought to make works related to science and scientific method available to the Jewish reading public. (The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary)

text: Yisra’el Zamość

text: Barukh Schick

text: Shklov

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Talmud study

text: Kaliningrad

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Lemberg

text: Tarnopol

text: banking

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Zhovkva

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Hasidism

text: Yosef Perl

text: satirical works

text: parodies

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Odessa

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Russia

text: Vilna

text: Odessa

text: Hebrew poetry

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Hasidism

text: Misnagdim

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Riga

text: Minsk

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: seminary

text: industry

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

text: Lithuania

text: Belorussia

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Avraham Uri Kovner

text: Re’uven Braudes

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Ha-Melits

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: religious reform

text: rabbinate

text: Breslau

text: Gintsburg

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Musar Movement

text: Hebrew literature

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

glossary:
Haskalah
maskil
Talmud
Torah
Pale of Settlement
Kabbalah
halakhah
Misnagdim
yeshiva
melamed
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Musar

subconcepts:
Early Haskalah
Berlin Haskalah
Haskalah in Galicia
Haskalah in Russia
Haskalah and Jewish Nationalism


title: Names and Naming

abstract: The most appropriate way of considering names used by Jews in Eastern Europe is to separate the discussion of personal names from that of family names. Indeed, personal names represent an organic part of Jewish culture. Their corpus developed over the centuries in a natural way, inside the community. Their history is closely related to that of Yiddish. On the other hand, but for a very few exceptions, the family names were invented during a short period of time, around the turn of the nineteenth century. Their adoption was forced by state authorities. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, in numerous communities they were marginal for Jewish self-consciousness.

imgDesc: Miriam Leye Kuperman, Sore Rivke Weinreich, and Rokhl Ajzenberg, Szydłowiec, Poland, 1925. Their personal names are examples of Ashkenazic forms of biblical names (Miriam, Leah, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel). (YIVO)

text: Yiddish

text: Bohemia–Moravia

text: Lwów

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: circumcision

text: Sabbath

text: Ashkenaz

text: death

text: Prague

text: USSR

text: Galicia

text: Kraków

text: Lublin

text: Radom

text: Warsaw

text: Russian Empire

text: Pale of Settlement

text: kahals

text: Belorussia

text: Ukraine

text: Courland

text: Kiev

text: Grodno

text: Lithuania

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary

text: Bucovina

glossary:
Torah
Congress Poland
Pale of Settlement

subconcepts:
Personal Names
Family Names


title: Dress

abstract: The determinants of Jewish attire, aside from those that affected everyone in the general society, included the requirements of halakhah, communal regulations, restrictions imposed by state and local authorities, and the influence of local non-Jewish communities. The most important factors observed generally were biblical law prohibiting mixing linen and wool in a single garment (Lev. 19:19; Deut. 22:11), known as shatnes (Heb. sha‘atnez), and the halakhic requirement that males wear prayer shawls (Yid., talesim; sg., tales; Heb., talit; Eng., tallis).

imgDesc:
Portrait of Hanna Posnerowa. Jan Sikorski, ca. 1845. Oil on canvas. A Jewish woman, the wife of Shlomo Zalman Posner of Warsaw, wearing an elaborate
shterntikhl. (National Museum in Warsaw,  inv. nr MP 2804 [gift of Posner family])

text: shpanyer arbet

text: Shpanyer arbet

text: sumptuary legislation

text: Sabbath

text: Tykocin

text: Poland

text: Poland

text: Passover

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: Poland

text: Purim

text: Lithuania

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

glossary:
halakhah
Council of Four Lands
Torah
responsa

subconcepts:
Men’s Clothing
Men’s Headgear
Women’s Clothing
Women’s Headgear


title: Josephinian Reforms

abstract: The accession of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) as sole ruler of the Habsburg lands in 1780 ushered in a tumultuous decade of change. The enlightened absolutist emperor intervened in the internal affairs of his Jewish subjects on an unprecedented scale, with the intent of altering the contours of Jewish culture and society.

text: Bohemia

text: Silesia

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: agriculture

text: transportation

text: crafts

text: Familiants Laws

text: Normalschulen

text: Bukowina

text: Prague

text: Pressburg

text: Lemberg

text: Brody

text: Herz Homberg

text: Haskalah

text: rabbinate

text: Talmud study

text: names

glossary: Haskalah Talmud


title: Landau, Yeḥezkel ben Yehudah

abstract: (1713–1793), halakhic authority, Talmudic scholar, and chief rabbi of Prague. Yeḥezkel (Ezekiel) Landau was born in the Polish city of Opatów into a prominent and wealthy family. He was educated by his father and by Rabbi Yitsḥak of Ludmir (Rus., Vladimir; now Ukr., Volodymyr Volyns’kyi). Shortly after his marriage at age 18, Landau entered the elite Brody kloyz, which was then the center of kabbalistic study in Poland, and remained there for 13 years. In Brody, he established connections with many leading scholars and mystics. In 1733, he also became the head judge of one of Brody’s four Jewish courts.

imgDesc: Yeḥezkel ben Yehudah Landau and his son Shemu’el. František Sir after M. Klauber, ca. 1840. Engraving. The Hebrew inscription under the senior Landau’s name refers to him as Noda‘ bi-Yehudah (Prominent in Judah), the title of his book of responsa, often used as an alternate name for Landau himself. (YIVO)

text: Prague

text: Opatów

text: Volodymyr Volyns’kyi

text: Brody

text: kloyz

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Sabbatian

text: Habsburg reforms

text: Normalschule

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Avraham Danzig

text: Efrayim Zalman Margoliot

text: El‘azar ben David Fleckeles

text: Haskalah

text: Sabbatianism

text: Frankism

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Galicia

text: Mosheh

glossary:
responsa
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
Kabbalah
Haskalah
maskil


title: Judaizers

abstract: Defined as heretics by the Russian Orthodox Church, Judaizers were Christians who adopted various practices such as observing the Sabbath, practicing iconoclasm, and, at times, denying the divinity of Jesus. In the sixteenth century, Russian chronicles and decrees of the Orthodox Church Council made note of a “Judaizing heresy” that had existed in Russia in the area of Novgorod and Moscow at the end of the fifteenth century. There is no consensus, however, on whether the movement had been stimulated by actual Jewish influences. Indeed, Russian nationalist historians have tended to dismiss the idea of a modern Jewish impact on Orthodox Christianity, while Soviet historians saw “humanist and antifeudal foundations” in these movements. Historians writing outside of Russia have found trends related to the Reformation within the faction, while some Jewish historians undeniably have argued for the existence of Jewish inspiration. More recently, scholars have linked the emergence of this heresy to failed eschatological expectations among Eastern Orthodox Christians and to political upheavals in the region.

text: Sabbath

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Poland


title: Oppenheim, David

abstract: (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague; bibliophile. Oppenheim was born in Worms, where his father, Abraham, was a communal leader. Samuel Oppenheim, financier and war contractor to Habsburg Emperor Leopold I, was his uncle. David Oppenheim’s teachers included, among others, Gershon (Ulif) Ashkenazi and Ya‘akov Sack (father of Tsevi Ashenazi, the Ḥakham Tsevi). In 1681 he married Gnendl, daughter of the court Jew Leffmann Behrens (Lipmann Cohen) of Hanover.

imgDesc: David Ben Abraham Oppenheim[er]. Baltzer, after Kleinhard. Engraving, eighteenth century. (Moldovan Family Collection)

text: Prague

text: Gershon (Ulif) Ashkenazi

text: Mikulov

text: Moravia

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Prague

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Land of Israel

text: Yiddish literature

text: Hebrew literature

text: Moritz Steinschneider

text: yeshiva

text: purim-shpil

text: Te’omim-Fränkel

text: Breslau

glossary: responsa Torah Rashi yeshiva


title: Gans, David ben Shelomoh

abstract: (1541–1613), chronicler, astronomer, mathematician, and teacher. David Gans was born into a well-to-do merchant family in Westphalia. As a youth he studied with Mosheh Isserles, the renowned head of the Kraków yeshiva. Gans moved to Prague in 1564, where he continued his studies with Sinai ben Betsal’el, the brother of Maharal of Prague, and was associated with the latter as well.

imgDesc: Page from Neḥmad ve-na‘im, by David ben Shelomoh Gans (Jessnitz, 1743). (Moravské Zemské Knihovna, Czech Republic)

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Kraków

text: yeshiva

text: Prague

text: Maharal

text: Efrayim of Luntshits

text: approbation

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Haskalah

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah


title: Horowitz Family

abstract: One of the largest and most prominent Ashkenazic families that has thrived since the fifteenth century. The Horowitz family is made up of Levites who took their name from the small town of Horovice in Bohemia; they dominated the Prague community in the sixteenth century and formed marriage alliances with other prestigious families. The Horowitz family preserved a tradition claiming that its roots went back to the so-called Golden Age of Jewish culture in medieval Spain; the name of Rabbi Zeraḥyah ha-Levi Gerondi (ca. 1115–1186) was sometimes specifically mentioned. They reached Eastern Europe after the expulsion from Spain, and produced numerous rabbis and leaders and, later, writers of the Enlightenment, scholars, musicians, and scientists. Karl Marx was one of its descendants.

imgDesc: Shefa‘ tal by Shabetai Sheftel ben Akiva Horowitz (Bilzorka: Mordekhai, 1807). This kabbalistic work was issued by one of the many small presses that emerged in the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century and  is  printed on the type of cheap, blue-tinted paper often used by indigent printers.  The stamp at center, right, indicates that the book at one time  belonged to the library of Yisroel Halevi Kitover, rabbi of Felsztyn (now Skelivka, Ukr.). (Bottom) Russian censor's stamp. (Top) Inscription by another owner of the book, "Moyshe of the village of Holvits" (Golevichi?, Bel.). (YIVO)

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: piety

text: Dubno

text: Ostróg

text: Land of Israel

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl Epstein

text: Poznań

glossary:
Kabbalah
ethical will
Musar
Lurianic Kabbalah


title: Heller, Yom Tov Lipmann

abstract: (1578–1654), Talmudic scholar. Born in Wallerstein, North Swabia, Yom Tov Lipmann Heller was a disciple of Maharal of Prague. A member of the rabbinic court of that city from about 1598 to 1624, Heller held the posts of rabbi of Nikolsburg (1624–1625), Vienna (1625–1627), Prague (1627–1629), Niemirów (1631–1634), Włodzimierz (mod. Ukr., Volodymyr Volyns’kyi; 1634–1643), and Kraków (1643–1654).

text: Maharal

text: Prague

text: Niemirów

text: Volodymyr Volyns’kyi

text: Kraków

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Yo’el Sirkes

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Poland

text: liturgy

text: Ya‘akov Bassevi

text: Ukraine

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

glossary:
Mishnah
Tosafot
Torah
Talmud
halakhah
agadah
Kabbalah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Council of Four Lands


abstract: (1550–1619), rabbi, preacher, exegete, and moralist. Efrayim Shelomoh ben Aharon of Luntshits (Pol., Łęczyca) was a student of Shelomoh Luria. As a young man, Efrayim developed a reputation as an outstanding preacher. He lived for a considerable time in Lwów, where he served as rosh yeshivah, but also preached frequently in other towns, including Jarosław and Lublin (at meetings of the Council of the Four Lands). In 1604 he was appointed chief rabbi of Prague, where he served until a year before his death.

imgDesc: Title page of Keli yakar (Żółkiew: Aharon and Gershon Segal, 1763). An example of a title page that boasts the use of “Amsterdam” fonts, although it was printed in Żółkiew. (Gross Family Collection)

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Lwów

text: Lublin

text: Prague

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Horowitz

glossary:
Council of the Four Lands
Torah
pilpul


title: About this Article (Yeshiva)

abstract: This entry is divided into two articles, one treating the yeshiva in the period before 1800 and the other covering the following two centuries. The first article focuses on Poland, the location of the most significant yeshivas in the early period. For the period following 1800, in addition to the survey article here, see the entries on the individual Lithuanian yeshivas (for example, Ponevezh, Yeshiva of). For examples from other regions, see Bratislava and Sofer Family. For further discussion of religious education, see Bet Ha-Midrash; Heder; Kloyz; and Talmud Study.

imgDesc: The students, faculty, and building of the ‘Ets Ḥayim Yeshiva, Kleck, Poland (now Kletsk, Bel.), 1938. Photograph by Kurnos. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Ponevezh, Yeshiva of

text: Bratislava

text: Sofer Family

text: Bet Ha-Midrash

text: Heder

text: Kloyz

text: Talmud Study

glossary:
yeshiva
Bet Ha-Midrash
Heder
Talmud


title: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

abstract: (d. 1609), rabbi and scholar, known as Maharal of Prague. Yehudah Leib (or Löw [Heb., Liva’]; Maharal is an acronym based on the honorific Morenu ha-Rav Liva’, “our teacher, the Rabbi Löw”) was respected as an important halakhist—he was cited as authoritative, for example, by Yo’el Sirkes in Bayit ḥadash—but his fame was the result of his theological works: he brought the medieval genre of exposition of agadah (nonlegal Talmudic literature) to its peak in early modern times. Maharal’s extensive output took different forms—straightforward commentaries on Talmudic legends; commentaries on specific religious literature (the Talmudic tractate Avot, the Passover Haggadah, the legends in Rashi’s commentary on the Torah); and other works organized by subjects, historical and ethical—yet he was always true to his own method of detailed analysis and exposition of the sayings of ancient sages. Working within this traditional model, which he perfected, he presented a unique worldview, one of the most creative and original systems of thought developed by East European Jewry.

imgDesc: Annual prayer service at grave of Yehudah Löw. Prague Burial Society. Oil on canvas, ca. 1830. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Prague

text: Yo’el Sirkes

text: Passover

text: Poznań

text: Nikolsburg

text: golem

text: Hasidic

text: Tsadok ha-Kohen of Lublin

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

glossary: agadah Rashi Torah pilpul


title: Bassevi of Treuenberg, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1570–1634), financier, merchant, and court Jew. Born in Italy (likely in Verona), Ya‘akov Bassevi of Treuenberg (also known as Bazzevi, Passeni, Bashe [from Heb., Bat Sheva], and Jakob Schmiles) went to Prague with his brother Samuel at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1599, both brothers were granted imperial privileges of free trade, similar to those given to Mordecai Maisel a few years earlier. These privileges were later confirmed by Emperor Mathias in 1611, who named Bassevi his court Jew.

imgDesc: Coat of arms of Ya‘akov Bassevi of Treuenberg, seventeenth century. A painted stone shield from the former house of Bassevi in Třistudniční (Three Wells Place), in the Prague ghetto. The house was demolished between 1893 and 1907. (Archives of the City of Prague)

text: Prague

text: Mordecai Maisel

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Land of Israel

text: Mladá Boleslav


title: Maisel, Mordecai

abstract: (also Meisel; 1528–1601), financier, merchant, philanthropist, Jewish community head, and builder of Prague’s Jewish Town. References to Mordecai Maisel’s family in Prague date from as early as 1477; he is first mentioned as a business partner of his father-in-law, Yitsḥak Rofe, in 1569. From 1576 on, Maisel was a member of the Prague Jewish Communal Council, he later became its head.

text: Prague

text: David Gans

text: Poznań

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Wolf Pascheles


title: About this Article (Hungary)

abstract: To treat the history of Jewish presence in Hungarian lands, this entry includes three chronologically arranged articles. The first covers early history and Habsburg rule through the end of World War I and the dissolution of the empire; the second covers the interwar and Holocaust periods (1918–1945); and the last covers Hungary during the Communist and postcommunist eras.

imgDesc: Hungary in the twentieth century.


title: About this Article (Russia)

abstract: To treat the history of Jewish settlement and cultural and political activity in Russia, this entry includes three chronologically arranged articles. Russian Empire covers the period from 1772, when the first partition of Poland placed a large Jewish population under tsarist rule, until the end of the empire in 1917. Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic covers the Soviet period, specifically within the Russian Republic itself, until the fall of the USSR in 1991. Russian Federation covers the post-Soviet period of the 1990s until 2000. For related discussion, see Pale of Settlement; Belarus; Ukraine; and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

imgDesc: Russian Empire, ca. 1914.

text: Poland

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Belarus

text: Ukraine

text: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics


title: Ezofowicz Family

abstract: Sixteenth-century Jewish financiers living in Poland. Three Ezofowicz (or Józefowicz) brothers—Jan Abraham (d. 1519), Michal (d. 1529?), and Ajzyk (Isaac; dates unknown)—were among a number of prominent Jews in medieval and early modern Poland who managed the finances of Polish monarchs.

imgDesc: Postcard with scenes of Grodno (now Hrodna, Belarus), home of the nineteenth-century Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa (portrait, center), author of Meir Ezofowicz and other books with sympathetic portrayals of Jews, ca. 1915. Photograph by L. M. Gelgor. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Kiev

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: Wilno

text: Opatów

text: Brest Litovsk

text: Kraków

text: conversion


title: About this Article (Kraków)

abstract: To trace the history of Jewish presence in the city of Kraków, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first treating the period through the Polish partitions and the second from 1795 until 2000.

imgDesc: Kraków. Location of the nineteenth-century Jewish district on a modern map.


title: About this Article (Poland)

abstract: To treat the history of Jewish presence in the Polish lands, this entry includes three chronologically arranged articles. The first covers early history through the third Polish partition in 1795; the second covers the period from 1795 to 1939, including the partition period, , and the interwar years; the last, "Poland since 1939," covers Poland during and after World War II and the Communist and postcommunist eras.

imgDesc:
The
  Polish Republic in the Interwar Period, ca. 1930s.


title: Printing and Publishing before 1800 (Printing and Publishing)

abstract: Jewish printing in Eastern Europe began in Prague in 1513, pioneered by a group of printers led by Gershom ben Shelomoh ha-Kohen (d. 1544). The chief cities for printing in Eastern Europe during the period under discussion—between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—included Prague, Kraków (from 1534), and Lublin (from the late 1540s); Żółkiew became an important center in the eighteenth century (actually beginning in 1692). The main book dealers after the advent of printing were the owners of print shops; until the end of the eighteenth century, the term publisher was not applicable. Very little is known about the press runs of specific books; hence, historians generally rely on the number of editions printed in trying to gauge the popularity of a work.

imgDesc: Ḥamishah ḥumshe Torah and megilot with Rashi, haftarot. (Prague: Gershom ben Shelomoh  ha-Kohen with his sons Mordekhai and Shelomoh ben Gershom, 1530) (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: Lublin

text: Żółkiew

text: Poland

text: Helicz family

text: Yitsḥak ben Aharon of Prostitz

text: Eli‘ezer ben Yitsḥak

text: Sabbatianism

text: tkhines

text: Bak family

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Fayvesh family

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Avraham ben Shabetai Sheftel Horowitz

text: Yiddish literature

text: Tsene-rene

text: Moyshe Markuze

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Kraków

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Shimshon of Ostropol

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl Epstein

text: Luts’k

text: Lwów

text: Grodno

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Dubno

text: Ostróg

glossary:
Kabbalah
Talmud
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Arba‘ah turim
Council of Four Lands
halakhah
Rashi
Torah
musar
ethical will
Zohar
Maimonides
magid
Mishnah
Gemara


title: Banking

abstract: From the beginning of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe, moneylending and money dealing in its various forms represented—alongside commerce, tax farming, and leasing—a central area of their economic activities. Into the nineteenth century, Jewish entrepreneurs were typically involved in more than one of these areas. Furthermore, in the early modern period Jewish communities played a significant role in the monetary economy of Eastern Europe by borrowing from church institutions and the aristocracy. In the nineteenth century—considerably later than in Western or Central Europe—the whole of Eastern Europe witnessed the emergence of prominent figures who served, either primarily or exclusively, as private bankers. With the rapid spread of joint stock banks, such figures declined in significance by World War I. However, the proportion of Jewish capital in these public companies remained significant, and Jews continued to be prominent in the management of those company’s affairs.

imgDesc: Central Bank for the Support of Jewish Cooperatives in Lithuania, Kaunas, 1923. Flanking the entrance to the bank are (left) A. Baloserio Bookstore and (right) a bicycle shop. In the foreground is a sign for the Pasazas barbershop. (YIVO)

text: money

text: leasing

text: credit

text: trade

text: Poznań

text: Kalisz

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Lewko

text: Lithuania

text: Fiszel

text: Bohemia

text: Lemberg

text: councils

text: kahal

text: Pinsk

text: Vilna

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Hungary

text: Saint Petersburg

text: industry

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Kiev

text: Odessa

text: Berdichev

text: Gintsburg

text: Avraam Zak

text: Kronenberg

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: credit

text: Poliakov

text: leaseholding

text: Moscow

text: Avraam Zak

text: Epstein

text: Shmul Zbytkower

text: Mathias Rosen

text: agriculture

text: Jan Bloch

text: Radom

text: Hipolit Wawelberg

text: Łódź

text: Hungary

text: Siegmund Kornfeld

text: Nandor Beck de Madarassy

text: Moritz von Ullmann

text: Petschek family

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
kahal
Pale of Settlement
Congress Poland

subconcepts:
Middle Ages
Early Modern Period
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries


title: Kara, Avigdor

abstract: (d. 1439), rabbi, Talmudic scholar, kabbalist, and poet. Very little is known about the life of Avigdor Kara, a contemporary of Yom Tov Lipmann Mülhausen. Kara survived the “Bloody Easter” pogrom in Prague during Passover 1389, though his father was probably a victim and is described as a martyr in Kara’s tombstone inscription. Kara may also have been the stepbrother of Menaḥem ben Ya‘akov Kara, another Prague scholar. Avigdor Kara’s name, as well as that of his wife Rivkah, appears in municipal registers.

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Mülhausen

text: Prague

text: Passover

text: Bohemia

text: David Gans

text: pogroms

glossary: Torah Kabbalah


title: Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov ha-Lavan of Prague

abstract: (fl. 12th century), Talmudic scholar. Also known as Yitsḥak of Bohemia and Yitsḥak of Regensburg, Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov reputedly acquired the nickname ha-Lavan (White) because of the color of his hair, but according to other sources the name was connected to that of the river Labe (Elbe). Yitsḥak ha-Lavan lived and worked in Prague, although it is not certain that he actually came from Bohemia. He studied in Germany and France and was a student of Yitsḥak ben Asher ha-Levi and Ya‘akov ben Me’ir Tam (Rabenu Tam). Throughout his life he associated with members of the Prague school of Tosafists (including Yitsḥak ben Mordekhai and Eli‘ezer ben Yitsḥak), who maintained ties to the centers of Jewish culture in northern France and Germany.

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Eli‘ezer ben Yitsḥak

text: Yitsḥak ben Mosheh of Vienna

text: Ashkenaz


title: Crafts

abstract: The crafts practiced by East European Jews in the medieval period were a direct outgrowth of Jewish ritual requirements, and therefore were protected by rights and privileges granted by monarchs and other rulers. Such crafts included those associated with slaughtering and baking (due to Jewish dietary laws); with textile manufacture and tailoring (due to the biblical prohibition against mixing linen and wool); and with hairdressing (due to religious restrictions on shaving beards). In 1389, the Grodno Jewish community was granted a charter in which the right of local Jews to “work in various crafts” was expressly guaranteed. Though special privileges granted by local authorities would, as a rule, only allow Jewish artisans to perform work for their fellow Jews, it was invariably the case that Jewish butchers, tailors, and barbers would cater to Christians as well. Moreover, reports from Lwów in 1460 make specific mention of Jewish artisans involved in work unconnected to Jewish ritual. They also mention that some of Lwów’s Jews were leather tanners and that this profession had been widespread among Jews from time immemorial.

imgDesc: Torah crown with the signs of the Zodiac. Moscow, 1845.  Silver: gilded, wrought, engraved. Ukrainian Museum of Historical Treasures, Kiev. Photograph by Dmytro Klochko. (MIDU Inv Nr DM-1031. Ukrainian Museum of Historical Treasures, Kiev)

text: beards

text: Grodno

text: Lwów

text: guilds

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Rzeszów

text: leasing

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Bohemia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Poland

text: Bund

text: Moldavia

text: Iaşi

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Warsaw

text: Lithuania

text: Soviet Union

text: artel

text: Ukraine

text: industry

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Lublin

glossary:
arenda
Pale of Settlement


title: Trade

abstract: Commercial activity was the mainstay of Jewish economic life in Eastern Europe from the medieval period until the mid-twentieth century. However, its significance went beyond the incomes that it brought to Jewish society and helped support not only individuals and families but also the communal infrastructure. For many centuries, non-Jewish authorities viewed Jews’ success in the field of trade as the very raison d’être for Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. The support that trade brought Jews allowed them to overcome their neighbors’ attempts to exclude them from urban life. Trade was thus a political factor in Jewish social development. In addition, Jewish trading networks, important for economic success, helped strengthen ties between different centers and so contributed to the development of transnational elements in East European Jewish culture.

imgDesc: Empty marketplace, shut down by Soviet restrictions against private trade, Shklov, USSR (now in Belarus), 1920s. (YIVO)

text: economic life

text: Khazaria

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: Kiev

text: Poznań

text: Gniezno

text: Lublin

text: Lwów

text: Brześć

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: guilds

text: Brody

text: Szkłów

text: Dubno

text: Berdyczów

text: Leszno

text: credit

text: Yehoshu‘a Falk ha-Kohen

text: leaseholding

text: tavernkeepers

text: Hungary

text: Breslau

text: Walachia

text: Gdánsk

text: Königsberg

text: Hungary

text: Hungary

text: Romania

text: money

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: Odessa

text: industry

text: Bucharest

text: Iaşi

text: Pale of Settlement

text: beggars

text: Izrail’ (Yisra’el) Brodski

text: Jan Bloch

text: Soviet Union

text: Czechoslovakia

text: guilds

text: Lithuania

text: Budapest

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
Va‘ad Arba‘ Aratsot
arenda
Pale of Settlement
numerus clausus

subconcepts:
The Middle Ages
The Early Modern Period
From the Partitions to World War I
The Interwar Period
The Holocaust and Postwar Periods


title: Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankev

abstract: (Mendele Moykher-Sforim; 1835–1917), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh is acknowledged, almost universally, as the founder of modern artistic prose in Hebrew and Yiddish. Born to a middle-class family in the Belorussian town of Kapulye (Kopyl), he lost all familial support at the age of 15. After spending several years as a student at various yeshivas, he made an adventuresome, perilous trek south to Ukraine on foot and in the company of itinerant beggars, arriving in Kamenets Podolski in 1853, where he stayed for five years as a teacher and then as the son-in-law of a middle-class family. He cultivated the friendship of the few local exponents of the Haskalah (especially Avraham Ber Gottlober) and began writing on matters pertaining to education.

imgDesc: Galleys for Abramovitsh’s Di klyatshe (The Nag) (Odessa: A. Varshaver, 1889). The handwritten corrections are believed to have been made by the author himself. (YIVO)

text: prose

text: Ukraine

text: Kamenets Podolski

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Berdichev

text: Hebrew literature

text: Eli‘ezer Zweifel

text: literary criticism

text: Kol mevaser

text: Haskalah

text: messianism

text: satire

text: Zhitomir

text: crown rabbi

text: Odessa

text: pogroms

text: Russia

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Yiddish literature

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Bund

text: David Frishman

text: Shmuel Niger

text: prose

glossary: Haskalah maskil


title: World War I

abstract: Name generally given to the set of military conflicts during the years 1914–1918 that set the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria (the Central Powers) against those of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, and other countries (the Allied and Associated Powers, more commonly known as the Allies or the Entente). The geographical scope of the war, the sophistication of weapons employed by both sides, the human cost of the fighting among both soldiers and civilian populations—all of these were at the time unprecedented in the history of warfare, and during the subsequent two decades the experience of the war weighed heavily upon the thinking and behavior not only of political leaders but of virtually all who had been affected by it.

imgDesc: Jews expelled from Pinsk (now in Belarus) by the Germans with their belongings loaded onto carts, on the outskirts of the city, 1917. (YIVO)

text: Hungary

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Belorussia

text: Łuck

text: Tarnopol

text: Buczacz

text: Czernowitz

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Ukraine

text: Kaunas

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Czech lands

text: Kol mevaser

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: assimilationist

text: Orthodox

text: Maksim Vinaver

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Iulii Brutskus

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Mizraḥi

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: S. An-ski

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: Sholem Asch

text: Grodno

text: Suwałki

text: Kurland

text: February–March 1917 revolution

text: Brest

text: Finland

text: Moscow

text: Lemberg

text: pogrom

text: Pinsk

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Slovakia

text: Hungary

text: Soviet Union

text: Silesia

subconcepts:
The War in the East
Population Dislocations
Relations with the Central Powers
Hardship and Relief
Political Activity
Revolution, Civil War, and Pogroms
The War’s Effects


title: Tsukunft

abstract: Founded in 1913, Yugnt-Bund Tsukunft (the Future) was the main Bundist youth organization in interwar Poland. Its predecessor, Der Kleyner Bund, was a network of youth organizations that spontaneously appeared throughout the Pale of Settlement at the time of the 1905 Revolution. A product of the idealism and enthusiasm of the times, Der Kleyner Bund declined in the years of reaction following the revolution. An attempt to recreate the youth organization on a more systematic basis immediately preceding World War I led to the creation in 1913 of the Sotsyal-Demokratishe Yugnt-Organizatsye Tsukunft.

imgDesc: Members of the Warsaw branch of Tsukunft on a hike to a camp in Gąbin, Poland, 1938. Photograph by Kuper. (YIVO)

text: youth organization

text: Poland

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: sport

text: pogroms

text: Vilna

text: Białystok


title: Russian Revolution of 1905

abstract: During the Revolution of 1905, or, more accurately, 1904–1907, sizable sectors of the Jewish community in the Russian Empire entered the arena of national politics. The upheaval began in the fall of 1904, when public opinion turned sharply against the government in reaction to the ruinous defeats the country suffered in its ill-considered war against Japan.

imgDesc: Zionist Socialist revolutionaries with pistols, Daugavpils (now in Latvia), 1905. The Yiddish and Russian banners displayed include: (right) “Down with the Monarchist Constitution! Long Live the Democratic Republic!” and (bottom) “Workers, All Peoples, Unite!” (YIVO)

text: Russian Empire

text: Saint Petersburg

text: censorship

text: Moscow

text: pogroms

text: Vilna

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Białystok

text: Bund

text: Zhitomir

text: Łódź

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Zionists

text: yeshiva

text: Telz

text: emigration

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
yeshiva


title: Kishinev

abstract: Capital city of the Republic of Moldova. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Kishinev (officially, Chişinău; Yid., Keshenev) was in the principality of Moldova (Moldavia), which was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1818 and called Bessarabia. In 1918–1940 and 1941–1944 it was in the Kingdom of Romania and, in 1940–1941 and 1944–1991, it served as capital of the Moldavian SSR. The earliest documentation of a Jewish presence dates to the beginning of the eighteenth century.

imgDesc: Number 3 in a series of panoramic views of Kishinev. (A Yiddish note on the back of the photograph explains that the pictures are to be mounted together “under glass in a cardboard frame” to provide a sweeping panorama of the city.) (YIVO)

text: Republic of Moldova

text: Moldavia

text: Russian Empire

text: Bessarabia

text: Romania

text: Ḥayim ben Shelomoh Tyrer

text: Hasidic

text: yeshiva

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: Zionists

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: pogroms

text: Passover

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: World War I

text: Zionist

text: Yehudah Leib Zirelson

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Soviet Union

text: Transnistria

text: Holocaust

text: Bessarabia

text: Yankev Shternberg

glossary:
yeshiva
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Protocols of the Elders of Zion


title: Riga

abstract: Capital of Latvia. Founded at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Riga was a member of the Hanseatic League. Jewish merchants became active in the city from the mid-sixteenth century, although opposition from local merchants forced them to live on the outskirts of the town. After the Russian conquest at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Jewish commercial activity expanded. The Jewish population continued to grow in both Riga itself and neighboring Sloka despite several expulsion orders, and Jews played a central role in economic and commercial life, engaging in trade, industry, and finance.

imgDesc: A postcard with three city scenes: (left to right) Sand (Smilsu) Street (a streetcar and building spires); the cathedral; and the bridge over the Tima River with the city theater (National Opera) in the background, Riga. (YIVO)

text: Latvia

text: trade

text: industry

text: finance

text: heder

text: Russia

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Haskalah

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Yehudah Leib Kantor

text: Zionist

text: Hasidic

text: music

text: theater

text: youth movements

text: Revisionist Zionists

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Folkspartey

text: Bund

text: General Zionists

text: Pauls

text: Vladimirs Mincs

text: Aryeh Disenchik

text: Mordekhai Dubin

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Altestenrat

text: ghetto

glossary: heder Haskalah


title: Latvia

abstract: State in the eastern Baltic region, created in 1918 out of the former Russian provinces of Courland (an autonomous duchy linked to Poland until 1795), Livonia (under Swedish rule from 1629 to 1721), and Latgalia (part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1772). Between 1940 and 1991, Latvia was a republic of the Soviet Union, regaining full independence with the breakup of the USSR.

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

text: Courland

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Ventspils

text: crafts

text: Lithuania

text: Russian Empire

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Riga

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Daugavpils

text: Bund

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: Me’ir Simḥah ha-Kohen

text: Liepāja

text: industry

text: crafts

text: transportation

text: agriculture

text: TSYSHO

text: Zionists

text: Bund

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Mizraḥi

text: General Zionists

text: youth movements

text: Revisionist Zionist

text: Betar

text: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky

text: Mordekhai Dubin

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Jelgava

text: ghetto

text: labor camps

text: monuments

text: Holocaust

text: Moscow

glossary:
status quo
Diaspora

subconcepts:
Early Settlement
The Interwar Years
World War II
The Postwar Period


title: Shulḥan ‘arukh

abstract: A summary and codification of halakhah in brief and authoritative form, completed in Safed in 1563 by the Sephardic rabbi, Yosef Karo. First published in Venice in 1565 and reprinted many times in the succeeding decades and centuries, the Shulḥan ‘arukh is an abridgement and distillation of Karo’s Bet Yosef—commentary and glosses on the medieval code Arba‘ah turim by Ya‘akov ben Asher. As is the Turim, the Shulḥan ‘arukh is divided into four sections: Oraḥ ḥayim, on Sabbath, holiday and daily commandments; Yoreh de‘ah, on dietary laws and various other categories such as mourning and purity; Even ha-‘ezer, chiefly on marriage and divorce; and Ḥoshen mishpat, mainly on civil law.

text: Poland

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Yehoshu‘a ha-Kohen Falk

text: Shabetai ha-Kohen

text: David ha-Levi

text: Mosheh Lima

text: Avraham Abele Gombiner

text: Poland

text: Ashkenaz

text: Avraham Yesha‘yahu Karelits

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh

glossary:
halakhah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Arba‘ah turim
Maimonides
Torah
Talmud
Gaon


title: Isserles, Mosheh ben Yisra’el

abstract: (1520?–1572), rabbi and yeshiva head in Kraków, considered one of the greatest Ashkenazic legalists; known by the acronym Rema’. Mosheh Isserles studied with his father, a leader of the Kraków community, but his principal teacher was Shalom Shakhnah, the head of the Lublin yeshiva, who was the official chief rabbi of the district. Shakhnah was regarded as a rigorous legalist, and was given to using the convoluted method of argumentation known as pilpul in his teaching. According to a somewhat dubious tradition, Isserles’ first wife was Shakhnah’s daughter.

text: yeshiva

text: Kraków

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: Lublin

text: yeshiva

text: Mosheh Landau

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Poland

text: Binyamin Aharon Slonik

text: Yesha‘yahu Horowitz

text: Ashkenaz

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Yehoshu‘a Falk

text: David Gans

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
yeshiva
pilpul
Maimonides
Responsa
Diaspora
Darshan
Arba‘ah turim
Shulḥan ‘arukh
halakhah
agadah
Zohar


title: Ger Tsedek

abstract: (Also Walentyn Potocki, Graf Potocki), legendary son of a duke who converted to Judaism and died a martyr’s death in Vilna (Wilno). In the late eighteenth century, a well-crafted legend of a nobleman who converted to Judaism attained popularity. (The term ger tsedek refers generally to a righteous convert to Judaism.) The story maintained that Walentyn Potocki had become Jewish and was subsequently burned at the stake in Vilna. A subplot mentions the conversion of Potocki’s friend, Zaremba, who similarly converted along with Zaremba’s wife.

imgDesc: Tomb of the Ger Tsedek, Vilna, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: converted

text: Vilna

text: Poland

text: Land of Israel

text: Lithuania

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Jakub Frank

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah


title: Dubno

abstract: A town on the Ikva River (Pripiat’ basin), Dubno is the district center of Ukraine’s Rivne oblast. From the 1320s, it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1569 to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1795 it was in the Russian Empire and from 1796 served as a district center of Volhynia province. Thereafter, from 1921 to 1939 the town was within the borders of independent Poland.

imgDesc: Passersby outside the synagogue, Dubno, Poland (now in Ukraine). (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Rivne

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Horowitz

text: Horowitz

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Ya‘akov Kranz

text: trade

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Misnagdim

text: pogroms

text: economic life

text: Tarbut

text: Zionist parties

text: youth movements

text: USSR

glossary: Magid Haskalah Misnagdim Talmud Torah aktion


title: Luria, Shelomoh ben Yeḥi’el

abstract: (1510?–1573), rabbi, legal authority (posek), and head of yeshivas in Brisk (Brest Litovsk), Ostraha (Ostróg), and Lublin. In traditional literature, Shelomoh Luria is known by the acronym Maharshal or Rashal, and is most famous for his Talmudic commentary, Yam shel Shelomoh. Luria received his early education in Poznań at the house of his grandfather, Yitsḥak Klober. In his writings, Luria noted Ashkenazic customs and liturgical traditions that he had learned from Klober (Responsa, 64, and others).

imgDesc: From Ḥokhmat Shelomoh, by Shelomoh ben Yeḥi’el Luria. (Kraków, ca. 1582) An example of an early Hebrew book printed in Poland. (YIVO)

text: Brest

text: Ostróg

text: Lublin

text: Poznań

text: Sephardic

text: yeshiva

text: Ashkenazic

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Poland

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: Lublin

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Kraków

text: Binyamin Aharon Slonik

text: Yehudah Leib

text: Prague

text: Yehoshu‘a Falk

text: Mordekhai Yaffe

text: Efrayim Shelomoh of Luntshits

glossary:
Responsa
Talmud
yeshiva
pilpul
Shulḥan ‘arukh
kabbalah
Rashi
Tosafot
Maimonides


title: Sabbath

abstract: The Sabbath was the focal point of the religious life of East European Jewry. Signs of its imminent approach were already evident in the frenetic activity that characterized Jewish households on Friday mornings and in the spare lunch eaten early on that day, so as to leave a good appetite for the sumptuous evening meal. Lunch was followed by the weekly visit to the bathhouse, “upon returning home from which it was customary to taste the fish that had been prepared for Sabbath,” according to memoirist Shemu’el Rappaport (Barukh, 1980).

imgDesc: A man bringing a pot of cholent to the baker’s oven, Poland, ca. 1930s. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: Bessarabia

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: tkhines

text: heder

text: Galicia

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Yesha‘yahu Horowitz

text: Hasidism

text: Yosef Perl

text: Slonimer dynasty

text: foods

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Kiev

text: Tsene-rene

text: Slutsk

glossary: Get heder Torah haftarah maskil rebbe


title: Brno

abstract: (Ger., Brünn), capital of Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. The earliest evidence of Jewish settlement in Brno is a 1254 charter granted by Přemysl Ottakar II, Margrave of Moravia. This charter was renewed in 1268 and incorporated into municipal statutes in 1276. A charter from 1345 encouraged Jews—who were engaged primarily in commerce and moneylending—to settle in Brno.

imgDesc: Ceremonial hall at the cemetery, built in 1900, Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), 1974. The Hebrew inscription over the door, a combination of two verses, reads: “Zeh ha-sha‘ar, le-vet mo‘ed le-khol ḥai.” Photograph by Jacob Roth. (YIVO)

text: Moravia

text: Czech Republic

text: yeshiva

text: Boskovice

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary

text: Max Hickl

text: Jüdische Volksstimme

text: Hugo Gold

text: Holocaust

text: Richard Feder

glossary:
yeshiva
numerus clausus
publicist


title: Bohemia and Moravia

abstract: The lands of the Bohemian crown (also referred to as Bohemian lands or Czech lands) comprised the geographic regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (after 1742, only the part of Silesia that remained part of the Habsburg domains). After 1918, these territories constituted the westernmost regions of Czechoslovakia; since 1993, they have formed the Czech Republic. The lands of the Bohemian crown were attached to the Přemyslid dynasty from roughly the ninth to the fourteenth century, and to the house of Luxembourg in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In 1526, they passed definitively to the Habsburg dynasty (during the reign of Ferdinand I) where they remained for nearly 400 years, up to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918.

imgDesc: Bohemia and Moravia, ca. 1780.

text: Silesia

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Czech Republic

text: Hungary

text: Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb

text: Prague

text: Brno

text: Hungary

text: Silesia

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Sabbath

text: Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov Lavan

text: Yitsḥak ben Mosheh

text: Jihlava

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Familiants Laws

text: Ya‘akov Bassevi

text: Familiants Laws

text: rabbis

text: yeshivas

text: Mordekhai ben Avraham Yafeh

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Efrayim Shelomoh of Luntshits

text: Lwów

text: Horowitz

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Kraków

text: David Oppenheim

text: Menaḥem Mendel Krochmal

text: Mikulov

text: David Oppenheim

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Opatów

text: Haskalah

text: Hungary

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: religious reform

text: Nathan Ehrenfeld

text: Alexander Kisch

text: yeshiva

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: Orthodoxy

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: trade

text: crafts

text: agriculture

text: Normalschulen

text: Josephinian reform

text: Peter Beer

text: Herz Homberg

text: Yisra’el Landau

text: Wolfgang Wessely

text: relations between Jews and non-Jews

text: Hilsner

text: David Gans

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Mordecai Maisel

text: Českožidovské listy

text: Hugo Bergmann

text: Hans Kohn

text: Robert Weltsch

text: Max Brod

text: Bar Kochba

text: Selbstwehr

text: Zionism

text: integrationism

text: Oskar Baum

text: Max Brod

text: Ernst Weiss

text: Franz Werfel

text: Franz Kafka

text: Czechoslovakia

glossary:
yeshiva
Mishnah
Talmud
Tosafot
responsa
Haskalah
Torah
status quo
maskil

subconcepts: Jewish Settlement and Population Patterns

subconcepts: Enlightened Absolutism, Cultural Reform, and Emancipation

subconcepts: Moravian Exceptionalism: The Political Jewish Community

subconcepts: Cross-Cultural Relations, Conflicts, and New Directions


title: Pogroms

abstract: In general usage, a pogrom is an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group; it usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities. The term came into widespread usage after the riots of 1881 and 1882 in the Russian Empire. While the standard Russian bureaucratic term for mass unrest was besporiadki (disorders), the occasional use of the word pogrom to describe the events of 1881 and 1882 popularized the term in the West. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first use in the Times of London on 17 March 1882 (“That the ‘Pogromen’ [riots against the Jews] must be stopped . . .”), defining the word as “an organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class: orig. and esp. applied to those directed against the Jews.” In Soviet historiography, the word was applied to violence carried out by reactionary groups against opponents of the tsarist regime, and it thereby gained a political but lost a specifically “Jewish” connotation. In contemporary Russian, pogrom is used for violence directed against any ethnic group.

imgDesc: Pogroms. Sites of major pogroms, 1881–1884 and 1903–1906.

text: Russian Empire

text: Ukraine

text: gzeyres takh

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Odessa

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Kiev

text: Warsaw

text: Christmas

text: Bund

text: Zionism

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Kishinev

text: Bessarabia

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Gomel

text: Russian Revolution of 1905

text: Białystok

text: Galicia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russian Civil War

text: Lwów

text: Pinsk

text: Grodno

text: Przytyk

text: Brest

text: Kielce

text: memory

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

glossary:
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Pale of Settlement

subconcepts:
Pogroms in the Russian Empire
Wartime Pogroms
After the Holocaust


title: Saint Petersburg

abstract: Founded by Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) in 1703, Saint Petersburg is located at the northwest periphery of Russia, on the Gulf of Finland. In 1712, it replaced Moscow as the capital of the Russian Empire. Over the course of the next two centuries, Saint Petersburg was transformed into a grand metropolis and chief conduit of Western influence, the nerve center of Russia’s political, cultural, and economic life. During the late imperial period (1861–1917) the city’s Jews aspired to play an analogous role in the life of Russian Jewry.

imgDesc: Saint Petersburg. Detail showing the Pod”iacheskii neighborhood. (Based on Michael Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions through a Noble Past [Philadelphia, 1989), pp. xxvii, xxix)

text: Russia

text: Finland

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Pale of Settlement

text: banking

text: Warsaw

text: Kiev

text: Odessa

text: assimilation

text: Gintsburg

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Hebrew literature

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Shimen Frug

text: Adolph Landau

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Lev Levanda

text: Sholem Asch

text: Shloyme Rapoport

text: Simon Dubnow

text: pogroms

text: ORT

text: World War I

text: Łódź

text: Yisroel Tsinberg

text: Lubavitch

text: Ukraine

text: Belarus

text: “anticosmopolitan” campaign

text: refuseniks

text: Leningradskii Evreiskii al’manakh

text: samizdat

text: communism

glossary:
Ḥabad
Pale of Settlement
yeshiva
Haskalah

subconcepts:
The Imperial Period
Wars and Revolutions (1917–1945)
The Late Soviet Period and Beyond


title: Khvol’son, Daniil Avraamovich

abstract: (1819–1911), orientalist. Daniil Khvol’son was born in Vilna. He received a traditional rabbinical education but then studied French, German, and Russian. To complement his traditional education, he moved to Riga. There, Max Lilienthal provided him with a letter of introduction to Abraham Geiger, who enabled Khvol’son to finish his studies at the University of Breslau.

text: Vilna

text: Riga

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Breslau

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: blood libel

text: conversion

text: Horace Gintsburg

text: Leon Rosenthal


title: Bund

abstract: Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland (The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), known simply as the Bund, was founded in Vilna in October 1897 by a small group of Jews who were profoundly influenced by Marxism. Led by Aleksandr (Arkadii) Kremer (1865–1935), their goal was to attract East European Jews to the emergent Russian revolutionary movement.

imgDesc: Centers of Bund activity. Boundaries shown are ca. 1935.

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Vilna

text: Aleksandr (Arkadii) Kremer

text: Pale of Settlement

text: L. (Iulii) Martov

text: Vladimir Kossovskii

text: John (Yosef) Mill

text: Minsk

text: Vladimir Kossovskii

text: 1905 Revolution

text: pogroms

text: February Revolution of 1917

text: Moyshe Rafes

text: Henryk Erlich

text: Khaye Malke Lifshits

text: Evsekstiia

text: Moscow

text: Yekusiel [Noyekh] Portnoy

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Lublin

text: Zionism

text: Łódź

text: Henryk Erlich

text: Wiktor Alter

text: Tsukunft

text: Morgnshtern

text: TSYSHO

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Medem Sanatorium

text: newspapers

text: Vladimir Kossovskii

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Przytyk

text: Romania

text: Latvia

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Riga

text: Holocaust

text: ghetto

text: Shmuel (Artur) Zygielbojm

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
Congress Poland
Diaspora


title: Medem, Vladimir Davidovich

abstract: (1879–1923), political leader; Marxist theorist; Bundist. Vladimir Davidovich Medem was the main theorist of the Jewish Labor Bund, in Russia and in the Bund’s early years in Poland, and arguably the party’s most famous and celebrated leader. Born in Libau (Liepāja, Latvia; then part of tsarist Russia), he spent most of his childhood and youth in Minsk. Medem’s parents had converted to the Lutheran Church, and his father, David Medem (1836–1893), was one of the first graduates of Jewish origin of the Russian Military Academy of Medicine. The young Medem grew up as a Christian surrounded by Christian people. Despite his later prominence in Jewish politics, as an adult Medem never found it necessary to convert to Judaism, as Jewish culture, not religion, was at the basis of his choice to join the Jewish nation.

imgDesc: Title page of Fun mayn leben (My Life), by Vladimir Medem (New York: Vladimir Medem Committee, 1923). (YIVO)

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Liepāja

text: Latvia

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Warsaw

text: communism

text: John Mill

text: Dubnow

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: assimilation


title: Warsaw

abstract: Capital of Poland from 1596 to 1794 and again since 1918. Warsaw’s importance in Polish and Jewish history is a relatively late phenomenon. For much of the Middle Ages, the Duchy of Mazovia, in which Warsaw was located, was a sparsely populated region, only loosely subject to the Polish crown. Warsaw itself was established in the second half of the thirteenth century on the west bank of the Vistula River.

imgDesc: Warsaw. Sites of Jewish institutions, ca. 1938. (Prepared by Eleonora Bergman, Ursula Fuks, and Olga Zienkiewicz, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)

text: Poland

text: Epsteins

text: Kronenbergs

text: banking

text: Berek (Berko) Joselewicz

text: Galicia

text: Hasidim

text: Misnagdim

text: Dov Berush Meisels

text: reform

text: Orthodox

text: Seminary

text: Antoni Eisenbaum

text: Haskalah

text: Natanson

text: Mathias Rosen

text: conversion

text: beards

text: Polish–Jewish relations

text: Kraków

text: Markus Jastrow

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Litvaks

text: assimilationists

text: Izraelita

text: pogrom

text: Jan Bogumił Bloch

text: Zionism

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: press

text: Ha-Yom

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Haynt

text: Shmuel Yankev Yatskan

text: Odessa

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: World War I

text: Bundist

text: Folkist party

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Yudishe togblat

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Jakub Appenszlak

text: Sholem Asch

text: Israel Joshua Singer

text: Antoni Słonimski

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Adolf Rudnicki

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists

text: publishing

text: Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater

text: Zygmunt Turkow

text: Ida Kaminska

text: Yung-teater

text: Michał Weichert

text: Yiddish theater

text: Polish theater

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Edmund Stein

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Revisionist Zionists

text: Bund

text: ghettos

text: Judenrat

text: Adam Czerniaków

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Soviet Union

text: killing center

text: Białystok

text: labor camps

text: Armed resistance

text: Folks-shtime

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: communism

text: Maccabi

text: memory

text: monuments

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

subconcepts: Jews in Warsaw during the Kingdom of Poland


title: Helicz Brothers

abstract: The first printers of Hebrew and Yiddish books in Poland (fl. 1530s–1550s). Shemu’el, Asher, and Elyakim were the sons of Ḥayim Helicz. After learning their trade in Prague, the three brothers began printing Hebrew and Yiddish books in Kraków in 1534. By 1537 they had published a Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary of biblical words (Merkevet ha-mishneh), a legal guide to the laws of kashrut (Sha‘are Dura’), a Yiddish legal handbook for women (Azhores nashim), a Yiddish ethical text (Muser un hanhoge), and perhaps a second such text (Ka‘arat kesef).

imgDesc: Title page of a Yiddish version of the New Testament published by Paul Helicz, Kraków, 1540. (Jagiellonian Library, Kraków)

text: printers

text: Poland

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: conversion

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: Wrocław


title: Lithuania

abstract: Southernmost of the three Baltic states. The name Lithuania originally referred to a grand duchy established along the Baltic coast to the northeast of Poland around 1250. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had expanded into a large state, including substantial territories that today are part of Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. In 1386, it was joined to Poland in a personal union; the same monarch occupied the thrones of the two states. In 1569, Lithuania confederated formally with Poland in the Union of Lublin, forming a state often called the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). With the Polish partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795, virtually all of the historic Lithuanian lands were incorporated into the Russian Empire.

text: Poland

text: Latvia

text: Belarus

text: Ukraine

text: Lublin

text: Russian Empire

text: Vilnius

text: Kaunas

text: Klaipėda

text: USSR

text: Suwałki

text: Grodno

text: Vitebsk

text: Minsk

text: Litvak

text: Courland

text: Slutsk

text: Brest

text: Pinsk

text: council

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Hasidism

text: Riga

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: yeshiva

text: Volozhin

text: Mir

text: Telz

text: Slobodka

text: Ponevezh

text: Panevėžys

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Soloveichik

text: Yosef Kahaneman

text: Musar Movement

text: Lipkin

text: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Yitsḥak Ya’akov Reines

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ha-Melits

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Šiauliai

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Mizraḥi

text: heder

text: Białystok

text: Bobruisk

text: Daugavpils

text: World War I

text: Jakub Wygodzki

text: industry

text: crafts

text: agriculture

text: transportation

text: Jakub Wygodzki

text: Shimshon Rosenboim

text: Naḥman Rachmilewitz

text: Sabbath

text: Zionists

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Folkspartey

text: Yudl Mark

text: Tarbut

text: Kultur-lige

text: Revisionists

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: youth movements

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Bund

text: Romania

text: pogroms

text: Jacob Robinson

text: Ruvn Rubinshteyn

text: Di idishe shtime

text: Poland

text: ghettos

text: ghettos

text: Jakub Gens

text: Abba Kovner

text: armed resistance

text: labor camps

text: killing centers

text: Estonia

text: Beriḥah

text: Holocaust

glossary: Beth Hatefutsoth, Photo Archive, Tel Aviv

subconcepts:
Early History
World War I
The Interwar Years
World War II
The Postwar Period