title: Yatskan, Shmuel Yankev

abstract: (1874–1936), publisher, editor, and publicist. Born in Vobol’niki (Vabalninkas), Lithuania, Shmuel Yankev Yatskan received a traditional Jewish education at the Ponevezh yeshiva, and rabbinical ordination in 1892. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1895, where he contributed to the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits. He lived in Warsaw from 1902, became a member of the Zionist movement, and was a leading contributor to Ha-Tsefirah. For some time (in 1903) Yatskan supported the Uganda project and was among the founders of the territorialist faction.

text: Lithuania

text: Ponevezh yeshiva

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Melits

text: Warsaw

text: Zionist

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Di bin

text: Haynt

text: Poland

glossary:
publicist
yeshiva
Uganda project


title: Jabotinsky, Vladimir

abstract: (1880–1940), Zionist leader, founder of Revisionist Party. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky was born in Odessa to an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family. He was educated entirely in Russian, and as a teenager spent two years in Bern and Rome studying law. Even before leaving Odessa, he had written poetry and articles for local liberal publications, and continued this work while in Rome. After his return to Odessa, he was the chief cultural correspondent for the prestigious Russian daily Odessa News, for which he wrote daily reviews of cultural events under the pseudonym Altalena.

imgDesc: Vladimir Jabotinsky (with eyeglasses) and members of the Betar youth movement, Lublin, 1930. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Zionist

text: Revisionist Party

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Land of Israel

text: Bund

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Ukraine

text: pogroms

text: Betar

text: Poland

text: youth movements


title: Purim-shpil

abstract: A skit or monologue performed, usually in the vernacular, in a domestic setting at the festive Purim family meal. The celebration of Purim, the Festival of Lots, is based on the biblical Scroll (Megilah) of Esther, which recounts how Mordechai and Esther prevented the massacre of the Jews ordered by Haman, minister of Ahasuerus, king of Persia. Various sources, particularly the Talmud (BT Meg. 7a–b, 9a; Sanh. 64b), mention entertainment at such celebrations associated with the reading of the Scroll of Esther, including pantomimes, parodies of liturgical texts, the custom of the carnival rabbi (Purim rov), and plays performed in the vernacular during the festive meal.

imgDesc: Purim-shpilers in costume, Szydłowiec, Poland, 1937. (YIVO)

text: Purim

text: theater

text: Poland

text: Prague

text: operetta

text: parody

text: cantors

text: badkhn

text: dance

text: instrumental musical

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: seminary

text: Zhitomir

text: ghettos

text: Hasidim


title: Brutskus, Iulii

abstract: (1870–1951), physician, political figure, and historian. Born in Polangen (Palanga), Courland, Iulii Brutskus (Julius Brutzkus) was the brother of the economist Boris Brutskus (1874–1938). Iulii studied medicine in Moscow (earning his medical degree in 1894), where he joined the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. When Jews were expelled from Moscow in 1891–1892, he came to their aid. In 1894, he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he was active in the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (OPE) and the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA). From 1898, he was a member of the editorial board of Voskhod but resigned with other Zionist sympathizers when the journal’s editors became hostile to the Jewish national movement. He showed little sympathy for socialism.

text: Courland

text: Moscow

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Voskhod

text: Razsvet

text: Minsk

text: Lithuania

text: Kovno

text: ORT

text: OSE

text: Revisionist Zionism

text: historiography

text: Khazars

text: Kiev


title: Weil, Jiří

abstract: (1900–1959), Czech novelist and short-story writer. Jiří Weil was born in the village of Praskolesy, near Prague; after World War I, when his father’s frame shop failed, the family moved to Prague, where Weil went to high school and university. Weil soon became involved in the political and cultural left; in 1922 he visited the Soviet Union, and on his return he took a job in the press department of the Soviet mission in Prague. In the 1920s he translated extensively from Russian literature, joined the avant-garde grouping Devětsil, and completed a Ph.D. in Slavic philology, with a dissertation on Gogol and the eighteenth-century English novel.

text: Prague

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Holocaust

text: Terezín


title: Zeyer, Julius

abstract: (1841–1901), Czech poet, dramatist, and novelist. Julius Zeyer’s father was a wealthy lumber merchant descended from Alsatian aristocracy; his mother came from a Jewish family in Prague, although she raised her children as Catholics. Zeyer would become one of the most prolific Czech writers of his day—his collected works run to some 30 volumes, including his verse epics drawing on Czech legends (Vyšehrad; 1880)—but his embrace of Czech culture was not automatic. Like other writers from the Czech lands, he grew up speaking German; nevertheless, he published his first stories in Czech, in his early thirties. Still, he was a fierce, if ambivalent, patriot: he loved Czech culture and yearned for independence from Vienna, and yet excoriated Czechs for their provincialism and docile obedience to Habsburg rule. He felt like a literary outsider in Prague, which he called both “queen” and “whore,” and in 1887 moved to the small town of Vodňany, where he spent the next 12 years, except for his frequent trips abroad. Although Zeyer’s relations with established Czech literary life could be prickly, he was widely admired and honored, and in 1901 became the first person to be buried in Slavín, the tomb of great Czechs in the national Vyšehrad cemetery.

text: Prague

text: Czech lands


title: Donath, Oskar

abstract: (1882–1940), literary historian and teacher. Oskar Donath was a proponent of coexistence for Czechs, Germans, and Jews in the Czech lands (and later in Czechoslovakia). Born in Újezd, near Přeřov (Prerau) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Donath studied Slavic languages and philology at the University of Vienna, where he earned his doctorate. He taught the Czech language at the German gymnasium in Hodonín (Göding) from 1907 to 1913, then in Brno (Brünn) from 1913 to 1930, and finally in Prague from 1930 to 1940. While in Brno, he also was an adjunct instructor at the Jewish gymnasium, which opened in 1920.

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Moravia

text: Brno

text: Prague

text: Siegfried Kapper

text: Leopold Kompert

text: Jüdische Volksstimme


title: Katzburg, David Tsevi

abstract: (1856–1937), rabbi and editor. Born in the Hungarian town of Nagybörsöny, David Katzburg studied at several yeshivas and was a favored disciple of Simḥah Bunim Sofer, the head of the Pressburg (Bratislava) yeshiva. After Katzburg married, he worked in the business world, though without success. Between 1884 and 1891, he served as a rabbi in two small towns. Katzburg then moved to Waitzen (Hun., Vác), a centrally located town with an active Jewish community that was, in his mind, sufficiently removed from the rush of larger cities. Soon after his arrival, he began to publish Tel Talpiyot, modeled on the first Orthodox periodical Shomer Tsiyon ha-ne‘eman (the latter had appeared between 1846 and 1856). The first issue was produced in the winter of 1891.

text: Simḥah Bunim Sofer

text: Bratislava

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: Akiva Yosef Schlesinger

text: Mizraḥi

text: Zionism

glossary: yeshiva halakhah agadah


title: Menasheh of Ilya

abstract: (1767–1831), rabbi, thinker, and harbinger of the Haskalah. Born in the small town of Smorgon’, Belorussia, Menasheh of Ilya married at age 15 but was divorced after a short time; he remarried at 17 and went to live with his new wife in her hometown, Ilya. From a very young age he attracted attention as a self-taught scholar of exceptional ability; he subsequently adopted the approach to study pursued by the school of the Gaon of Vilna.

text: Haskalah

text: Belorussia

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Haskalah

text: Königsberg

text: Brody

text: Zamość

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

glossary: Haskalah Gaon Maimonides pilpul


title: Jastrow, Markus

abstract: (1829–1903), rabbi, political activist, and academic. Born in Rogasen (Pol., Rogoźno) near Poznań, Markus (Mordekhai) Jastrow received a traditional Jewish education from the local rabbi, Moses Feilchenfeld, and a secular education at the town’s elementary school. He later attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Poznań. In 1852, he began his studies in philosophy at the University of Berlin and in 1856 earned a doctorate from the University of Halle. He received rabbinic ordination in 1853.

text: Poznań

text: Warsaw

glossary: Maimonides Talmud


title: Pascheles, Wolf

abstract: (1814–1857), Hebrew printer, publisher, and bookseller. The son of impoverished parents, Wolf Pascheles earned his livelihood from childhood by tutoring in Prague and its immediate vicinity. In 1828, he edited and published a book of German prayers for Jewish women titled Deutsche Gebete für Frauen (in German with Hebrew letters), whose popularity was evidenced by the appearance of several editions under various titles. In 1832, during the cholera epidemic in Prague, Pascheles edited a booklet containing the prayers and seliḥot (penitential prayers) of Rabbi Eli‘ezer Ashkenazi. With the money earned from editions of the Hebrew and Yiddish prayer books, Pascheles in 1836 opened Prague’s first Hebrew bookshop—selling both new and used books—and another in Brno in 1844.

text: Prague

text: Brno

text: Leopold Weisel

text: Siegfried Kapper


title: Fenyő, Miksa

abstract: (1877–1972), economist, politician, writer, and publisher. Miksa Fenyő—who changed his name from Fleischmann in 1895—was raised in Mélykútin in modest circumstances (his father was a tailor) but graduated from the prestigious Lutheran Central Gymnasium of Budapest. After finishing his legal studies, he maintained a law practice in Budapest from 1900. In 1903, he became vice secretary of the Magyarországi Gyáriparosok Országos Szövetségének (Hungarian Federation of Industrialists; GyOSz), its secretary from 1904, acting director from 1907, and director from 1918. From 1912, he was the director of the Center for Hungarian Customs Policy and the editor of the periodical Magyar Gyáripar. In 1913, he converted to Catholicism.

text: Budapest

text: Hungarian literature

text: Lajos Hatvany

text: Hungary


title: Bondy, Filip

abstract: (1830–1907), Czech rabbi. After completing gymnasium in Prague (one of his teachers was the playwright Václav Kliment Klicpera), Filip Bondy studied philosophy at Prague University. He was simultaneously tutored in Jewish theology and Hebrew literature by Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, the city’s chief rabbi, as well as by Daniel Frank, rabbi of Brünn (Brno), who ordained him in 1857. That same year he also earned his doctorate of philosophy. Bondy’s exceptional linguistic gifts enabled him to master not only Czech and German, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Latin and Greek, but also English, Italian, and French.

text: Prague

text: Hebrew literature

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Brno

text: Vojtěch Rakous

text: Bohemia and Moravia


title: Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia

abstract: (Federatsiia Evreiskikh Obshchin Rossii; FEOR), the umbrella organization of various associations established by the Ḥabad (Lubavitch) movement in 1998–1999. Officially, these associations and their unifying body surfaced later than the other large umbrella organizations—the Federation of Jewish Communities and Organizations of the USSR (Va‘ad), the Russian Jewish Congress (REK), and the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations in Russia (KEROOR). In fact, the Ḥabad associations were preceded by a lengthy period during which the movement developed its organizations first in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and then in the Soviet successor states (FSU).

text: Lubavitch

text: Russian Jewish Congress

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Leningrad

text: yeshiva

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Moscow

glossary: Ḥabad yeshiva


title: Hillels, Shelomoh

abstract: (1873–1953), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Shelomoh Hillels was born in the town of Bar, Podolia. When he was six years old, his family moved to Soroca, Bessarabia, where he received a traditional Jewish education. Following his marriage, he began to read Haskalah literature, including the works of Kalman Schulman, Avraham Mapu, and Yehudah Leib Gordon. In 1891, he published his first story, “Ikar ‘ivri” (A Hebrew Farmer), in the Hebrew periodical Ha-Tsefirah. The story reflected his interest in agricultural settlement in Argentina.

text: Soroca

text: Bessarabia

text: Haskalah

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Kishinev

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Tarbut

text: Ukraine

text: Der yud

text: pogroms

text: Russia


title: Josko

abstract: (d. 1506), customhouse leaseholder. Josko (Josef) of Hrubieszów (the son of Lea and Shakhnah of Hrubieszów; husband of Golda; brother of Szania, Mordusz, and Iczchan (Yitsḥak?); father of Pesaḥ and Shakhnah) was the most important customhouse leaseholder of Red Russia during the reigns of Casimir IV, Jan Olbracht, and Aleksander; he also served the royal court as financier and supplier.

text: leaseholder

text: Włodzimierz Wołyński

text: Przemyśl

text: Chełm

text: Lublin

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: Łuck

text: Chełm


title: Pollak, Ya‘akov ben Yosef

abstract: (ca. 1460–after 1532), regarded as the first rosh yeshivah in Poland and as the inventor of a unique method of Talmud study. Although his name suggests Polish origins, Ya‘akov Pollak was apparently born in Germany, or at least he grew up and was educated there. He was a student of Ya‘akov Margaliot, the outstanding rosh yeshivah in Germany of that time, in Nuremberg or in Regensburg.

text: Poland

text: Talmud study

text: Prague

text: rabbinate

text: Fiszel family

text: Kraków

text: yeshiva

text: yeshiva

text: approbation

text: Land of Israel

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: Lublin

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: David Gans

glossary: Talmud yeshiva pilpul


title: Dostrzegacz Nadwiślański

abstract: Bilingual Polish and Yiddish weekly, 44 issues of which appeared in Warsaw between December 1823 and September 1824. Dostrzegacz Nadwiślański / Der Beobakhter an der Vayksel was the first Jewish journal published in Poland. Originally intended as a bilingual Polish and Hebrew periodical, it eventually appeared in a Polish and Yiddish version with pages split into two parallel linguistic columns.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Antoni Eisenbaum

text: Warsaw


title: Nissenbaum, Yitsḥak

abstract: (1868–1942), rabbi and Zionist leader. Born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, Yitsḥak Nissenbaum studied at various yeshivas, including in Volozhin and Vilna. In 1889, he settled in Minsk and was among the founders of the Safah Berurah association for the dissemination of the Hebrew language. When the Volozhin yeshiva closed in 1892, the clandestine national religious association Netsaḥ Yisra’el moved to Minsk, and Nissenbaum was appointed as one of its directors. In 1894, he moved to Białystok, where he served as the secretary of Ha-Merkaz ha-Ruḥani (an Orthodox organization that disseminated the ideas of Ḥibat Tsiyon [Love of Zion]) and as assistant to Rabbi Shemu’el Mohilewer. After Mohilewer’s death in 1898, Nissenbaum began to act as an itinerant preacher for Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion, as the followers of Ḥibat Tsiyon were known), a position he filled for 11 years. In 1900, he moved to Warsaw and preached regularly in synagogues there.

text: Zionist

text: Bobruisk

text: Belorussia

text: yeshivas

text: Vilna

text: Minsk

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Białystok

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Shemu’el Mohilewer

text: Warsaw

text: Mizraḥi

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Poland

text: Sabbath

text: Shemu’el Brodt

glossary:
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Uganda Proposal


title: Krein, Mark Grigorievich

abstract: (1907–1989), Soviet mathematician. The son of a Kievan lumber merchant, Mark Krein showed an early talent for mathematics, attending research seminars at age 14. While he never obtained an undergraduate degree, he was accepted for doctoral studies at Odessa University in 1926, completing them in 1929. He became the author of more than 300 papers and monographs that opened up new areas of mathematics and greatly enriched the more traditional ones. Krein’s work was characterized by a profound intrinsic unity and a close interlacing of general abstract and geometric ideas with concrete and analytical results and applications.

text: Odessa

text: Kiev

text: Ukraine


title: Raikin, Arkadii Isaakovich

abstract: (1911–1988), Soviet comic and variety actor. Born in Riga, Raikin grew up in an assimilated family, the son of a businessman, although his paternal grandfather tried to send him to heder. After World War I and the revolution, Raikin’s family moved to Leningrad. Raikin took part in the young people’s drama circle headed by the actor and director Iurii Iurskii. In 1930 Raikin entered the Leningrad Institute of Stage Arts; his teacher, director Vladimir Solov’ev, had studied with Meyerhold but also valued Stanislavskii’s Method. Raikin absorbed the Russian theatrical culture of the early twentieth century, with its interest in farce and commedia dell’arte.

text: Riga

text: heder

text: Leningrad

text: Moscow


title: Literarishe Bleter

abstract: Yiddish literary and cultural weekly periodical, published between April 1924 and June or July 1939. Literarishe bleter was the leading Yiddish literary publication in interwar Poland. With Warsaw suddenly bereft of Yiddish cultural periodicals and the appearance of a new Polish weekly, Wiadomości Literackie (which soon became Poland’s leading literary publication), a group of young Warsaw writers created the Yiddish weekly Literarishe bleter.

imgDesc: Masthead of Literarishe bleter: Ilustrirte vokhnshrift far literatur, teater, un kunst-fragn (Literary Pages: Illustrated Weekly of Literature, Theater, and Art), no. 5 (6 June 1924), Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Perets Markish

text: I. J. Singer

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Boris Kletskin

text: Vilna

text: YIVO

text: Bund

text: communism

text: Haynt


title: Weiss, Manfréd

abstract: (1857–1922), Hungarian economist. According to family lore, Manfréd Weiss’s grandfather, Barukh Weiss, had been a simple village artisan. Probably originally from Moravia, the family, which settled in Pest, was relatively prosperous by the time Weiss’s father, Adolf B. Weiss (1807–1877), married. Several relatives made their living trading in produce, and in the 1860s and 1870s the family was involved with the emerging mill industry. Weiss was the sixth and youngest child. He studied at a commercial academy and after a short trip abroad, he joined the family business, immediately changing its profile to a more dynamic and versatile enterprise.

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Slovakia


title: Fortunatus, Imre

abstract: (ca. 1460–ca. 1526), adventurer, financial adviser to the royal court, and well-known apostate in Hungary. Imre Fortunatas (also Szerencsés) had the original family name of Seneor (or Sneor; Sneur), a corrupted version of Latin Senior; his personal name was Shelomoh (Zalman) ben Efrayim. Some claim he was of Spanish origin and that he was the brother or nephew of Avraham Seneor, the leader of Spanish Jewry before 1492. Autographs of Hebrew codices in Fortunatus’s library indicate that he must have been a learned man; he wrote his confidential memoranda in cursive Hebrew.

text: Hungary

text: Buda

text: conversion

text: Prague

text: servants


title: Brodsky, Joseph

abstract: (1940–1996), Russian-born poet and Nobel Prize Laureate in literature in 1987. Joseph Brodsky (as he is known in the West; in Russian, Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodskii) was born in Leningrad. He was the only child of Aleksandr Ivanovich Brodskii, a photojournalist who served for a time in the Soviet Navy, and Mariia Moiseevna Volpert, both assimilated Jews. Because of his Jewish background and growing interest in philosophical and literary questions, Brodsky experienced increasing alienation at an early age.

text: Russia


title: Mikulov

abstract: (Ger., Nikolsburg), town in Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. Mikulov was the largest and most important Jewish community in Moravia until the middle of the nineteenth century, and seat of the Moravian chief rabbinate from the mid-sixteenth century until 1851. The oldest written evidence of Jews in Mikulov dates from 1369, but the Jewish community was probably founded by Jews expelled from Vienna and Lower Austria in 1420. Additional Jews arrived after the expulsions from Brno and Znojmo in 1454.

imgDesc: Burial society pitcher. Mikulov, 1801. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Moravia

text: Czech Republic

text: Brno

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres

text: Familiants Laws

text: guilds

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Prague

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: Menaḥem Mendel Krochmal

text: David Oppenheim

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: yeshiva

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Galicia

text: Silesia


title: Hirshbeyn, Perets

abstract: (Often spelled Peretz Hirschbein in English sources; 1880–1948), playwright, novelist, journalist, travel writer, and theater director. Perets Hirshbeyn’s father operated a rural water mill outside a small town in Grodno province, where Hirshbeyn was born. Educated initially by local tutors, Hirshbeyn eventually made his way to Grodno and then Vilna, where he joined a circle of yeshiva students who studied the Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Jewish history together. Hirshbeyn began giving Hebrew lessons to support himself while publishing Hebrew poetry and writing Yiddish stories. He also began to shift from writing lyrical poetry to naturalist drama, starting with Miryam (1905), which he first wrote in Hebrew, later translated into Yiddish, and later still revised in Yiddish under the title Barg arop (Downhill). Inspired by an encounter with a prostitute—and perhaps by Hirshbeyn’s own squalid living conditions in Vilna—the play was a harbinger of Hirshbeyn’s skill at characterization, dialogue, and atmosphere.

imgDesc: Perets Hirshbeyn and his wife, the poet Esther Shumiatsher, on a visit to Johannesburg, South Africa, 1921. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Grodno

text: Vilna

text: yeshiva

text: Hebrew poetry

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Odessa

text: Łódź

text: Sholem Asch

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Semen Iushkevich

text: Ben-Ami


title: Eliasberg, Mordekhai

abstract: (1817–1889), rabbi, public activist, and early leader of religious Zionism. Mordekhai Eliasberg studied in the Volozhin yeshiva and served as rabbi in Bauska, Latvia, from 1862 until his death. Fluent in German and well versed in contemporary literature, Eliasberg firmly believed that there was no contradiction between faith and the Haskalah (Enlightenment). Nonetheless, he expressed concern about what was at the time called “false enlightenment” (i.e., enlightenment that serves social purposes such as secularizing society), which he felt posed a great danger to faith. He also believed in the importance of improving the economic situation of Russian Jews.

text: Zionism

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Latvia

text: Haskalah

text: Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer

text: Land of Israel

text: agriculture

text: industry

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Shemu’el Mohilewer

text: Lev Pinsker

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

glossary:
yeshiva
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Torah
responsa


title: Kantorovich, Leonid Vital’evich

abstract: (1912–1986), Soviet mathematician and economist, Nobel Prize laureate. Born into a family of physicians in Saint Petersburg, Kantorovich went right from his nine-year primary school to the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Leningrad State University. Upon graduation, he was asked to stay on in graduate school, which he completed in two years while also teaching at the Institute of Construction. In 1932 he became professor and department head at the Institute of Industrial Transport. That same year he was named assistant professor at Leningrad State University, becoming full professor in 1934.

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow


title: Celmajster, Dovid

abstract: (1878–194?), impresario and theater director in Warsaw and Łódź. Dovid Celmajster was born in Warsaw into a merchant family. He received a thorough traditional education and a rudimentary secular education, and began working in theater in 1910, eventually with both popular and dramatic companies. In 1917, Celmajster produced the operetta Di dolar-printsesin (The Dollar Princess) at Kaminski’s Theater in Warsaw; in 1920 in Łódź he produced An-ski’s Der dibek (The Dybbuk), directed by Dovid Herman, with scenic design by Yitskhok Brauner (Broyner).

text: theater

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: operetta

text: The Dybbuk

text: Turkow

text: Kaminska


title: Steinschneider, Moritz

abstract: (1816–1907), bibliographer, historian, and linguist; a founder of modern Jewish studies. Born in Prossnitz (Prostějov, Moravia), Moritz Steinschneider received both a general and a Jewish education, including yeshiva studies in Nikolsburg (Mikulov). In Prague, he qualified for a Hebrew teacher’s diploma. In the course of his academic studies at the universities of Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin, Steinschneider made the acquaintance of Leopold Dukes, Leopold Zunz, and Abraham Geiger, as well as Michael Sachs, who had formative influences on him. While working at a series of teaching jobs in Prague, Steinschneider obtained his rabbinical ordination in Prossnitz in 1843, and moved to Berlin in 1845 in search of employment.

text: Prostějov

text: Moravia

text: yeshiva

text: Mikulov

text: Prague

text: Prague

text: Ignác Goldziher


title: Baron, Devorah

abstract: (1887–1956), Hebrew writer. Born in Uzda, a shtetl near Minsk, Devorah Baron received the type of religious education generally offered only to boys, in the heder of her father, Rabbi Shabetai (Shepsl) Eli‘ezer Baron. Growing up in a rabbinic home, she was exposed to halakhic decisions as they applied both to the community as a whole and to her own family. This experience marked her creative worldview throughout her life.

text: shtetl

text: Minsk

text: heder

text: Ha-Melits

text: Kovno

text: Vilna

text: Hebrew literature

text: shtetl

text: childhood


title: Berman, Jakub

abstract: (1901–1984), activist in the interwar Communist Party of Poland; brother of psychologist and Warsaw ghetto leader Adolf Abraham Berman (1906–1978). Among the leaders of postwar Stalinist Poland, Berman was responsible for overseeing both cultural policy and the security apparatus.

text: Communist

text: Warsaw

text: Adolf Abraham Berman

text: Poland

text: YIVO

text: Vilna

text: Białystok

text: Minsk

text: anti-cosmopolitan campaign

text: Rudolf Slánský


title: Szomory, Dezső

abstract: (1869–1944), writer and journalist. Born Mór Weisz in the crowded Jewish quarter of old Pest, Dezső Szomory reinvented himself as an ivory-tower aesthete and a dandy who knew little about the world of crass reality. Of course he knew a great deal about it, and let his readers know this, though always in a teasing, suggestive manner. In 1890, to avoid being conscripted into the army, he fled to Paris, and stayed there for 17 years. In A párizsi regény (The Paris Story; 1929), he evokes the years he spent abroad with a mixture of lyricism and irony, which makes this his most consistently satisfying book.

text: circumcision

text: humor

text: Budapest

text: Hungary


title: Kristianpoller Family

abstract: Wealthy rabbinic family in Galicia. Several members of the Kristianpoller family were rabbis in Brody from the end of the eighteenth century. The dynasty began with Me’ir Kristianpoller (1740–1815), who served for a time as rabbi of Kristianpol (Pol., Krystynopol; about 60 km north of Lwów), from which the family adopted its name. In 1785, he was appointed rabbi of Brody and served in that capacity for 30 years until his death. He wrote novellae on the Talmud, titled Yad ha-Me’ir (1874).

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Lwów

text: seminary

glossary: Talmud Torah


title: Kaminer, Yitsḥak

abstract: (1834–1901), Hebrew poet, physician, and socialist. Yitsḥak Kaminer was born in Levkiev, near Zhitomir. As a child, he received a traditional education, but also began to read Hebrew scientific and Haskalah literature. Hoping to keep him in the traditional fold, his parents married him to a young girl. Kaminer, however, abandoned his wife and headed for Vilna, where he associated with maskilim, in particular with Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn, who supervised the city’s rabbinical college.

text: Haskalah

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Purim

text: Purim

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Kiev

text: Kiev

text: Kiev

text: poetry

text: Haskalah

text: Love

text: satire

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Misnagdim

text: Pogroms

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Ahad Ha-Am

glossary: Haskalah Misnagdim


title: Falk, Miksa

abstract: (1828–1908), Hungarian journalist, publisher, and member of parliament. Born into an impoverished merchant family in Pest, Miksa Falk began writing articles for both German- and Hungarian-language newspapers as early as age 14. In the wave of conversions during the 1840s, he and his brother Zsigmond became Christian. Of all of Falk’s associates, he alone retained a tenuous connection to Judaism. In 1847, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Pest and later continued his studies at the Vienna Polytechnic. In 1848, he returned to Pest, where he became an editor of the German-language newspaper Ungar during the first few months of the revolution. In September 1848, Falk returned to Vienna and lived there until 1867, writing political articles for several newspapers.

text: Hungary

text: Mór Wahrmann

text: Arad

text: Budapest


title: Sholem Aleichem

abstract: (Shalom Rabinovitz; 1859–1916), one of the founding fathers of modern Yiddish literature. A supreme Jewish humorist, Sholem Aleichem tapped into the energies of the East European, spoken-Yiddish idiom and invented modern Jewish archetypes, myths, and fables of unequaled imaginative potency and universal appeal.

imgDesc: Sholem Aleichem at his writing desk, Saint Petersburg, 1904. (Beit Scholem Aleichem, Israel)

text: Yiddish literature

text: Ukraine

text: shtetl

text: Hasidic

text: heder

text: Haskalah

text: crown rabbi

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Melits

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Kiev

text: literary journals

text: Odessa

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: David Frishman

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Shomer

text: Zionist

text: humor

text: Der yud

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: theater

text: Warsaw

text: pogroms

text: 1905 Russian Revolution

text: Lemberg

text: assimilation

text: Pale

text: Khone Shmeruk

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Yitskhok Nusinov

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Maks Erik

text: Meyer Viner

text: Ayzik Zaretski

text: Elye Spivak

glossary: heder Haskalah


title: Solomon, Dumitru

abstract: (1932–2003), playwright and critic. Dumitru (Dolfi) Solomon attended elementary school and high school in Bârlad, Romania. After graduating from Bucharest University (1955), he worked as an editor for Gazeta literară (1955–1962) and Luceafărul (Evening Star; 1962–1964). He made his mark in literary society with essays and critical studies, contributing to Romania’s major journals in the field. In 1964, he began a career in cinematography, first as a director at the Film Studios of Bucharest (until 1972), and then, until 1989, as a script reader and executive producer. At the same time, he was a prolific playwright and drama critic. After 1989, he served as editor in chief of the theatrical culture reviews Teatrul, azi (Theater Today) and Scena (Stage).

text: Bârlad

text: Romania

text: Bucharest


title: Brest

abstract: (also Brest Litovsk; Pol., Brześć nad Bugiem; Yid., Brisk or Brisk de-Lita [Brisk of Lithuania]), city now in Belarus. Located at the confluence of the Bug and Mukhavets Rivers, Brest was a district capital and a large commercial center. Jews settled in Brest at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In 1388, they received a privilegium (charter) from Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas. It repeated the terms of the Charter of Bolesław, granted to Jews in Poland a century earlier, and assured Jews of occupational freedom and communal autonomy, as well as security of life, limb, and property.

imgDesc: Women sewing clothes at a kindergarten supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Brest (then Brześć nad Bugiem, Pol.), 1921. (YIVO)

text: Lithuania

text: Belarus

text: Poland

text: Poland

text: Sha’ul Wahl

text: shtadlan

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Warsaw

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: agriculture

text: leasing

text: council

text: Vilna

text: Hasidim

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: yeshiva

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Yo’el Sirkes

text: Soloveichik Family

text: Haskalah

text: crafts

text: Folkspartey

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Bund

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Mizraḥi

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Zionist

text: Land of Israel

text: yeshiva

text: Tarbut

text: Beys Yankev

text: ORT

glossary: Torah yeshiva Haskalah Talmud


title: Epstein, Zalman

abstract: (1860–1936), essayist and Zionist activist. Zalman Epstein was born in Lubań, in the Minsk district of Russia. During his adolescence he studied at the Volozhin yeshiva. At age 16, he moved with his family to Odessa, where he acquired a secular education but was not admitted to the university. Though he enjoyed a very fruitful literary career, he drew his main source of income from his lifelong work as a bookkeeper and merchant.

text: Zionist

text: Minsk

text: Russia

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Boker or

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Hebrew language

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Hebrew literature

text: Haskalah

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: shtetl

text: prose

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

glossary: yeshiva Torah Haskalah Gaon


title: Gumplowicz Family

abstract: Advocates of the Haskalah and then of Polish Jewish assimilation. Abraham Gumplowicz (1803–1876) was a wealthy merchant and politician. His son Ludwik (1838–1909) was a legal historian and sociologist. Abraham’s grandson, Maksymilian Ernest (1864–1897), was an attorney, historian, and Slavic studies specialist. Maksymilian’s son Władysław (1869–1942), a physician by training, was a geographer and journalist.

text: Haskalah

text: assimilation

text: Kraków

text: religious reform

text: Jutrzenka

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: conversion


title: Orshanskii, Il’ia Grigor’evich

abstract: (1846–1875), lawyer, historian, and publisher. Il’ia Orshanskii was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Dnipropetrovs’k). After receiving a traditional Jewish education, he studied law at Novorossiiskii University, Odessa, graduating in 1868. Because he refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, Orshanskii was denied a lectureship at Novorossiiskii University. He subsequently opened a private law practice in Odessa, and at the same time became involved in communal activities, publishing several articles and books on Jewish topics.

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Hasidism

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Mark Antokol’skii

text: Il’ia Gintsburg


title: Új Élet

abstract: (New Life), published in Budapest, is the official journal of the Hungarian Jewish organized community. Appearing first on 18 November 1945, it was a weekly until 1957 and has been a biweekly ever since. Until 1984, no editor’s name was listed on the masthead. From 1984 until 1991, Rabbi István Domán edited the journal, succeeded by Rabbi Péter Kardos.

text: Budapest

text: Hungary


title: Hayoets

abstract: Yiddish social and political newspaper published in Romania from 12 June 1874 until 5 January 1913. In 1882, its editors concluded an agreement with the Bucharest representatives of the Central Committee for the Colonization of the Land of Israel; in effect, Hayoets (The Counselor) became an organ of the emerging Zionist movement and the chronicler of Romanian Jewish immigration to Palestine.

text: newspaper

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionist movement

text: assimilation

text: Haskalah


title: Smolar, Hersh

abstract: (1905–1993), Polish and Soviet Yiddish writer and editor. Born to a poor family in the town of Zambrów, Poland, Hersh Smolar (also rendered Smolyar) attended primary school until the age of 11, when he began working, and soon became involved in revolutionary activities. He was a leader of the local branch of the Jewish Socialist Youth Association from 1918 to 1920. During the 1920 Polish–Soviet War, Smolar belonged to a revolutionary committee that had formed in Zambrów when the Red Army had occupied the town.

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Khar’kiv

text: Poland

text: Białystok

text: Soviet Union

text: Minsk

text: Moscow

text: Folks-shtime


title: Utitz, Emil

abstract: (1883–1956), philosopher and psychologist. Emil Utitz was born in Prague, studied philosophy at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Leipzig, and started his career in Rostock, Germany, where he became a professor of philosophy and aesthetics in 1916. Beginning in 1925, he lectured at the university in Halle. In September 1933 he was forcibly retired and he moved back to Prague. Thanks to the intercession of Josef Schneider, professor of German studies at the German University in Prague, Utitz was entrusted to catalog the unpublished works of Franz Brentano.

text: Prague

text: Terezín

text: Holocaust


title: Ickowicz Brothers

abstract: Extremely wealthy Jewish dzierżawcy (estate lessees) in Lithuania. Presumably born at the turn of the eighteenth century, Shmuel (known in Polish as Szmojło) and his younger brother Yoysef Gdalye (known as Gdal), were the sons of a businessman from Ołyka on the Radziwiłł estates in Volhynia. In 1726, they moved to the town of Biała Podlaska, and began to lease estates from Anna Radziwiłłowa.

text: lessees

text: Lithuania

text: Słuck

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Poland

text: Moscow

text: Riga

text: Königsberg

text: Kraków

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Minsk


title: Markish, Shimon

abstract: (1931–2003), literary and cultural historian; translator. The son of poet Perets Markish, Shimon (Simon Peretsovich) Markish was educated as a classical scholar, a choice determined by his father’s arrest in 1949, which precluded other, more prestigious choices. After his father’s execution, Markish was arrested and sent with the family to exile to Kazakhstan from 1953 to 1954.

text: Perets Markish

text: Soviet Union

text: Hungary

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Isaac Babel

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Imre Kertész


title: Infeld, Leopold

abstract: (1898–1968), physicist. The son of a shoeshop owner, Leopold Infeld was born in Kraków. He studied at the Jagiellonian University with Władysław Natanson between 1916 and 1921 and was later able to study briefly in Berlin. Infeld was an assistant to the chair of theoretical physics at the Jagiellonian University between 1921 and 1924, when he went again to Berlin, and at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów from 1932, where until 1934 he held the position of docent (lecturer).

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Poland

text: Konin

text: Warsaw


title: Censorship in the USSR (Censorship)

abstract: The Provisional Government that succeeded the tsars in March 1917 abolished censorship. However, two days after the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, they reintroduced censorship and extended it to films, art, and music. Though labeled a “temporary measure,” censorship lasted until the late 1980s. Even labels on bottles were subject to censorship; the knowing eye could discern the censor’s individual number, stamp, and date of issue. Violation of censorship rules could be construed as “divulging state secrets,” a crime punishable by imprisonment.

text: Holocaust

text: Poland

text: Black Book

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Babi Yar


title: Mincberg, Leib

abstract: (1887–1943), manufacturer, head of the Łódź  kehilah, Polish parliamentary deputy, and leader of Agudas Yisroel. Born in Radom to a Hasidic family, Leib Mincberg received a traditional education yet also learned several European languages. Upon his marriage into a Gerer Hasidic family, he transferred his allegiance to that dynasty. With the outbreak of World War I, Mincberg moved to Łódź, where he began a successful career in manufacturing.

text: Łódź

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Radom

text: Gerer

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Soviet Union

text: Białystok


title: Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigor’evich

abstract: (1891–1967), writer, journalist, and poet. Ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev. In 1895, his family was permitted to move to Moscow, where his father managed a brewery. Inspired by his older high school comrade Nikolai Bukharin, Ehrenburg was drawn as a teenager to the Bolshevik underground. Arrested in 1908, Ehrenburg spent five months in a tsarist jail before being released and permitted to travel to France.

imgDesc: Jewish cultural figures who would become members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee signing an appeal to world Jewry to support the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany, Moscow, 1941. (Front row, left to right) Dovid Bergelson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Ilya Ehrenburg; (second row) David Oistrakh, Yitskhok Nusinov, Yakov Zak, Boris Iofan, Benjamin Zuskin, Aleksandr Tyshler, Shmuel Halkin. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Martin Smith)

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Land of Israel

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Holocaust

text: Black Book

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Lazar Kaganovich

text: Soviet Union

text: labor camps

text: Doctors’ Plot

glossary: © The Israel Museum / The Bridgeman Art Library / © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn


title: Lakhovits-Kobrin-Slonim Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: The Lakhovits-Kobrin-Slonim Hasidic dynasties, from Belorussia, trace their origins to the third-generation Hasidic leader Avraham of Kalisk (d. 1810), and more specifically to his opposition to Lubavitch’s aggressive approach to the propagation of Kabbalah. This dispute generated a network of dynastic lines within Lithuanian and Belorussian Hasidism that adopted more conservative forms of Hasidic piety, eschewing the popularization of mystical contemplation.

imgDesc: A classroom at the Slonimer yeshiva, Vilna, 1930s. Photograph by A. Sapir. (YIVO)

text: Belorussia

text: Avraham of Kalisk

text: Lubavitch

text: Hasidism

text: piety

text: yeshiva

text: Lithuania

text: Holocaust

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: piety

text: Misnagdim

text: Land of Israel

text: yeshiva

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: Agudas Yisroel

glossary: yeshiva rebbe Torah Misnagdim


title: Crown Rabbi

abstract: (Rus., kazennyi ravvin; Yid., rabiner; Ger., Staatsrabbiner; Heb., rav mi-ta‘am). The crown rabbis of late imperial Russia held the government-mandated designation of rabbi, but their functions as record keepers, Russian administrative representatives, and sometimes Jewish communal (but secular) leaders belied the religious title. Historical research into Russian Jewry is still uncovering the precise nature of their leadership, in its variegated forms.

imgDesc: Three brothers of the Shokhor family who studied in the Vilna rabbinical seminary and went on to become crown rabbis in various cities of the Russian Empire, 1898. (Forward Association / YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Vilna

text: Zhitomir

text: rabbinate

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-Melits

text: Voskhod

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Grodno

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Iakov Isaevich Maze

glossary: Talmud Haskalah


title: Peltz, Isac

abstract: (1899–1980), writer, playwright, and journalist. Isac Peltz was born in Bucharest, to a family of impoverished craft workers. Beyond attending heder, it is unlikely that he received formal schooling. At age 16, Peltz single-handedly edited a review titled Indrumarea (Guidance). One year later, he published a pamphlet, Menirea literaturii (The Purpose of Literature), pleading for writers’ moral and social commitment. In 1916, he took his first job, at the editorial office of a newspaper.

text: Bucharest

text: heder

text: Romania

text: Revista cultului mozaic din R.P.R.

text: pogroms


title: Dolitzki, Menaḥem Mendel

abstract: (1856–1931), Hebrew poet and novelist. Born in Białystok, Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki received a traditional education. At an early age, he was attracted to the Haskalah, and in 1875–1876 he traveled to Vienna. There Dolitzki became acquainted with Perets Smolenskin, editor of the Hebrew periodical Ha-Shaḥar.

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

text: Białystok

text: Haskalah

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: satire

text: Białystok

text: Ha-Melits

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Kalonymus Wissotzky

text: pogroms

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Ha-Melits

text: Moscow

text: Shemu’el Leib Gordon

text: proverbs

glossary:
Haskalah
Pale of Settlement
Diaspora
Magid


title: Ioffe, Abram Fedorovich

abstract: (1880–1960), physicist. A graduate of the Saint Petersburg Institute of Technology (1902), Abram Ioffe began his scientific career in Munich, where he worked as a doctoral student in the laboratory of Wilhelm Röntgen, the first Nobel laureate in physics. Ioffe’s collaboration with Röntgen on studies of the elastic and photoelectrical properties of crystals continued until 1914, although most of the results were never published because of Röntgen’s extraordinary experimental exactitude.

text: Saint Petersburg

text: USSR

text: Isaak Kikoin

text: Iulii Khariton

text: Iakov Zel’dovich

text: Kharko


title: Ehrenstamm Family

abstract: Leaders in the textile industry of Moravia. The Ehrenstamm family came to prominence in the early nineteenth century. Its head was Veit Ehrenstamm (1760–1827), son of Salomon Jakob Kolin, a minor Jewish merchant from Prossnitz (Prostĕjov) who during the 1750s had been involved in the wool trade, purchasing fabrics from importers and then selling them piecemeal to hawkers and peddlers. After he lost his fortune as a result of the ban imposed by the Habsburg government on textile imports, his son, who had in the meantime adopted a German name, turned to different economic enterprises.

text: industry

text: Moravia

text: Prostĕjov

text: trade

text: Lämmel

text: Prague


title: Boymvol, Rokhl

abstract: (1914–2000), Yiddish writer. Rokhl Boymvol was born in Odessa. Her father, Yehude Leyb (1892–1920), a Yiddish playwright and theater director, was murdered by Polish soldiers. A precocious child, Rokhl began rhyming even before she learned to read and write. Her first poetry collection, Kinderlider (Children’s Poems), appeared in Moscow in 1930. The literary critic Moyshe Katz wrote in his introduction, “Rokhl Boymvol is not a wunderkind who surprises by showing that a child can write exactly like a grown-up, seasoned master. She does it even better: in her writings we find what a grown-up master could not have done so honestly and naturally; she shows us the emotions of a maturing child.”

imgDesc: Bertshik brud, by Rokhl Boymvol (Minsk: Melukhe-farlag fun vaysrusland, 1936). Illustrator unknown. A Yiddish children’s book in verse, it was one of 18 Yiddish works published by Boymvol during her career in the Soviet Union. (YIVO)

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Shike Driz

text: children’s literature

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Arn Vergelis


title: Panevėžys

abstract: Town in northeastern Lithuania, on the Nevėžys River; the town served as a district capital. From 1843, Panevėžys (in Jewish usage, variously Ponevezh, Ponivezh, or Ponevich) was included in Kovno guberniia. Jews began to settle in Panevėžys at the beginning of the seventeenth century and engaged mainly in trade and services to local residents. In 1857, approximately 3,500 Jews (60% of the total population) lived there; by the end of the nineteenth century the numbers had reached about 6,600.

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

text: Lithuania

text: Kovno

text: trade

text: Russia

text: Misnagdim

text: Lubavitch

text: heders

text: Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Rabinovich

text: yeshiva

text: Eliyahu David ben Binyamin Rabinowitz-Te’omim

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: crown rabbi

text: Bund

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionist

text: ORT

text: Yosef Kahaneman

text: Maccabi

text: Ha-Po‘el

text: Lithuania

text: Soviet Union

glossary: Misnagdim Talmud Torah yeshiva


title: Russian Theater (Theater)

abstract: Despite early governmental prohibitions against Jewish participation in the theater, the period of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century saw strong and even leading Jewish contributions to all aspects of theatrical production, as performers, writers, and directors. This degree of involvement, as well as the changing depiction of Jews on stage over time, in many ways mirrors the history of relations between Russians and Jews and, later, of the Soviet government stance toward Jews.

imgDesc: Costume design by N. N. Nabokov for a Jewish role in A. N. Serova’s opera Iudif’ (Judith), 1863. Paper, gouache. (P 6.8. 62302. © Federal State Institution of Culture “A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatrical Museum,” Moscow)

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Shtetl

text: Zionism

text: censorship

text: Moscow

text: Sholem Asch

text: Saint Petersburg

text: David Aizman

text: Semen Iushkevich

text: Osip Dymov

text: Jewish–Christian relations

text: pogroms

text: Aleksandra Brushtein

text: Antisemitism

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Riga

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: communism

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Habimah

text: Aleksandr Tairov

text: Grigorii Kozintsev

text: Leonid Trauberg

text: Odessa

text: Leonid Utesov

text: Isaac Babel

text: Arkadii Raikin

glossary:
Diaspora
Pale of Settlement


title: Economic Trials

abstract: Cases mounted in the first half of the 1960s in the Soviet Union involving a disproportionately high number of Jewish defendants. The nature of the Soviet regime—in which state ownership of all capital was a basic ingredient, and every sphere of life became highly politicized—made economic offenses political crimes of the first order. The phenomenon of economic trials dates from the regime’s inception, although the types of economic crime for which people were indicted and the harshness of the sentences varied from period to period.

text: Soviet Union

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Zionism


title: Buchach

abstract: City in Ukraine. The first mention of Jews in Buchach (Pol., Buczacz) is from 1500; the population grew steadily thereafter, reaching a recorded total of 1,358 Jews in 1765. The town and much of its Jewish population survived the 1648 Ukrainian uprising relatively unharmed; the brief Turkish occupation of 1672 led to much heavier loss of life. In 1699, the Jews’ community privilege was confirmed by the town’s owner, the Potocki family, which granted them residential and occupational equality with Christian residents. Many Jews made their living from commerce, whether local, regional (with Kraków), or international (with the Ottoman Empire and Hungary). The cattle trade was particularly important. Other Jews were involved in the liquor business, fur, or in crafts. Not renowned for its Talmudic learning, Buczacz became a center of Sabbatianism in the mid-eighteenth century.

text: Ukraine

text: Kraków

text: Hungary

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Sabbatianism

text: Galicia

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: S. Y. Agnon

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Yosef Shemu’el Bloch

text: Poland


title: Constanța

abstract: Port city on the Black Sea, in the Dobruja (Dobrogea) region of Romania. Named for a small Genovese local port from the twelfth century, Constanța (Gk., Tomis; Tk., Küstenje) was annexed to Romania in 1878. Archaeological evidence indicates the presence of a small Jewish settlement in the third century. Ashkenazic Jewish traders who accompanied the Russian army as suppliers during the Russian–Turkish war then reestablished Jewish settlement in 1828. In the 1830s, Sephardic Jews from Anatolia settled in the area, set up a community of their own, obtained a plot of land for a cemetery in 1853, and leased land to construct a synagogue in 1867. That same year, Ashkenazic Jews organized as a distinct community.

imgDesc: Members of the Zionist movement He-Ḥaluts from Poland and Russia on the way to Palestine, Constanța, Romania, 1923. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Romania

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Zionist organizations

text: Holocaust

text: Bessarabia


title: Beriḥah

abstract: A clandestine, Zionist-organized mass movement of about 250,000 Jews from Eastern and Central Europe following the Holocaust. The goal of Beriḥah (Heb., flight or escape) was to bring the Jews to Palestine. The term refers to both the migration itself and the organization that assisted it. The immigrants were mainly Polish, though Slovak, Romanian, and other Jews participated. Austria and Czechoslovakia served as transit countries from which Jews moved first either to Germany or Italy.

imgDesc: Jewish displaced persons waving goodbye to friends and relatives as they leave Germany for France en route to Israel, 1948, under the auspices of Beriḥah, the clandestine, Zionist-organized mass movement. Photograph by Alex Hochhauser. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Alex Hochhauser)

text: Zionist

text: Holocaust

text: Czechoslovakia

text: youth movements

text: Rivne

text: Vilna

text: Abba Kovner

text: Betar

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Lublin

text: Warsaw

text: Yitsḥak Zuckerman

text: Poland

text: Chernivtsi

text: Romania

text: Kraków

text: Tarnów

text: Rzeszów

text: Slovakia

text: Budapest

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Łódź

text: Central Committee of Polish Jews

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Prague

text: Terezín

text: Karlovy Vary

text: Kielce

text: Bratislava

text: Poland


title: Bihari, Sándor

abstract: (1856–1906), painter. Sándor Bihari (known as Alexander in the West) was one of the leading artists of late nineteenth-century Hungary, and a major representative of that country’s realist school of the 1880s. Although Bihari did not use specifically Jewish themes in his work, his career epitomized the contributions of Jews to Hungarian culture. Born in Rézbánya, a small town in Bihar county, he later lived in Debrecen and Nagyvárad (Rom., Oradea). Bihari was among the scores of Jews who freed themselves from the squalor of small-town life by utilizing their cultural and artistic abilities. In 1878, he made his way to Vienna where he studied painting under Carl Wurzinger and other Geneva masters; in Paris, he studied under Jean-Paul Laurens.

text: Hungary

text: Debrecen

text: Oradea

text: Adolf Ágai

text: Tiszaeszlár trial


abstract: An educational and civic association devoted to the acculturation of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (known in Russian as Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia Mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii; OPE) was founded in 1863 during a period of liberalization. It remained active until it was forced to close in 1929 under the Bolshevik government’s program to abolish independent political and cultural institutions. The OPE experienced three phases of programming, reflecting the internal state of the Jewish community in Russia and adjusting to its changing relations with the Russian government.

imgDesc: Boys entering the Mefitse Haskalah (Disseminators of the Enlightenment) school, affiliated with the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia, Vilna, 1929. (YIVO)

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russia

text: Evzel’ Gintsburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ha-Melits

text: Odessa

text: Lev Pinsker

text: antisemitism

text: Iakov Brafman

text: pogroms

text: Maksim Vinaver

text: heders

text: Odessa

text: Zionists

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ben-Ami

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Riga

text: Bund

text: Hrodna

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
Kahal
Talmud
Torah


title: Mikhailov, Mikhail Efimovich

abstract: (1902–1938), Communist Party activist. Mikhail Mikhailov (Katsenelenbogen), son of a bookkeeper, was born in Vitebsk (Bel., Vitsyebsk) and subsequently moved with his family, first to Pokrov and later to Moscow. Mikhailov attended gymnasium in all three cities but never graduated. He began working as a photographer at the age of 15 while at the same time continuing his self-education. Mikhailov joined the Komsomol (Communist youth organization) in 1918 and the Communist Party in 1919. While in the Red Army from 1919 to 1921, he served as a political instructor and deputy head of the political division of the western front.

text: Communist Party

text: Vitsyebsk

text: Moscow


title: Akiva

abstract: General Zionist youth movement. Akiva’s beginnings, and its main followers, were in western Galicia and Silesia. Its origins can be traced to a Zionist youth group formed in Kraków in 1901. Members of that group founded Agudat ha-No‘ar ha-‘Ivri ‘Akiva (Association of Hebrew Youth) in 1924.

imgDesc: Yehudah Orenstein delivering a lecture at a summer camp for members of the Akiva Zionist youth movement, Bańska Wyżna, Poland, ca. 1935. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: General Zionist

text: Galicia

text: Silesia

text: Kraków

text: youth movements

text: assimilation

text: Poland

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Zionism

text: Land of Israel

text: Sabbath

text: communism


title: Eisenbaum, Antoni

abstract: (1791–1852), director of the Warsaw Rabbinical School and leader of the radical integrationist movement in the Kingdom of Poland. Born in Warsaw, Antoni Eisenbaum was orphaned at an early age and received an incomplete secular secondary education. As a young man he was fluent in Polish, German, English, French, and Italian but never mastered Hebrew. He first earned his living as a private teacher and bookkeeper.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: kahal

text: rabbinate

text: Dostrzegacz Nadwiślański

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: religious reform

glossary: kahal Haskalah


title: Braşov

abstract: City in central Romania, in the Bîrsei Depression at the foot of the Tîmpa Massif. Braşov has been variously called Kronstadt (Ger.), Corona (Lat.), and Brassó (Hun.); from 1950 to 1960 its official name was Stalin City. The first references to the town’s Jewish population date from the fifteenth century. In the 1500s, Jewish traders supplied guilds in Braşov with wool and dyes from the Ottoman Empire. Once Jewish residence was restricted to the city of Alba Iulia in the 1600s, there was no further mention of a Jewish presence in Braşov until a plague in Walachia in 1811 compelled several Jewish families to take refuge in this city.

imgDesc: Manin Rudich (second from left) with friends at a Purim ball organized by the Democratic Jewish Community (the Jewish section of the Communist Party in Romania), Braşov, Romania, 1947. (Centropa)

text: Romania

text: guilds

text: Alba Iulia

text: Walachia

text: trade

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Holocaust


title: Thon, Ozjasz

abstract: (1870–1936), rabbi, sociologist, and political leader. Ozjasz (Yehoshu‘a) Thon was one of the main initiators and theoreticians of the Zionist movement in Poland. Born in Lwów, he received a traditional education. Thon was fascinated with the Haskalah and joined the Mikra Kodesh society in Lwów, which soon transformed itself into the first Zionist organization in Galicia, renamed Tsiyon.

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

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: Haskalah

text: Mikra Kodesh

text: Galicia

text: Kraków

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Silesia

text: Tarbut

text: Warsaw


title: Löw, El‘azar

abstract: (1758–1837), rabbi and yeshiva head. El‘azar Löw was born in Wodzisław, Poland to a rabbinical family; his father, Aryeh Leib, was a wealthy merchant. El‘azar studied with his grandfather Pinḥas Zelig, author of ‘Ateret paz, until the age of 16. After his marriage the following year, he was elected a dayan (rabbinic judge) of his native town. At age 20 he was appointed rabbi of Pilica, Poland, where he served for two decades. In 1800, he became the rabbi of the Moravian community of Triesch (now Ťrešt’), at the recommendation of Moravia’s chief rabbi, Mordekhai Benet.

text: yeshiva

text: Poland

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Slovakia

text: religious reform

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Kolín

text: Yirmiyahu (Jeremiás) Löw

text: Sátoraljaújhely

text: Orthodox

text: Hungary

text: Orthodoxy

text: Debrecen

text: Seminary

text: Budapest

text: Law of Reception

text: Nathan Birnbaum

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

glossary:
yeshiva
pilpul
responsa
Torah
Status Quo


title: Leżajsk

abstract: Town now in the southeastern Polish province of Rzeszów. A royal town founded in the fourteenth century, Leżajsk (also Leżańsk; Yid., Lizhensk) had a Jewish presence by 1521. In 1538, seven Jewish families paid the poll tax, and by 1577 the number of taxpayers had increased to 12. A synagogue was first mentioned in 1626; in that same year, Jews and Christians struggled over the right to trade in leather.

imgDesc: Hasidim on pilgrimage to the grave of Rabbi Elimelekh ben Eli‘ezer Lipman, Leżajsk, Poland, ca. 2005. (A. Olej/K. Kobus—Travelphoto)

text: Rzeszów

text: Przemyśl

text: Elimelekh ben Eli‘ezer Lipman

text: Hasidism

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: pilgrimage

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Tarbut

text: Beys Yankev

text: Holocaust


title: Huberman, Bronisław

abstract: (1882–1947), violinist. Bronisław Huberman was born in Częstochowa, Poland and was a child prodigy who began to take violin lessons at the age of six. He appeared in public for the first time a year later, playing at a benefit concert for the poor. Huberman studied violin in Warsaw, with, among others, Isidor Lotto at the Warsaw Conservatory. He began to study with Joseph Joachim in Berlin in 1892, and also took lessons briefly with Hugo Heermann in Frankfurt and Martin Marsick in Paris.

text: Poland

text: Warsaw


title: Radnóti, Miklós

abstract: (1910–1944), poet and translator. Considered one of the great Hungarian poets of the twentieth century, Miklós Radnóti was born Miklós Glatter, of Jewish parents, although he remained indifferent toward his Jewish roots all his life, converting formally to Catholicism in 1943. “I do not feel Jewish,” he wrote in a 1942 letter to Hungarian Jewish literary critic Aladár Komlós. “I was never taught to be religious, I do not feel a need for it, I don’t practice it. Race, blood ties, unseverable roots, ancient pangs quivering in every fiber—I consider such things utter nonsense, and not the defining characteristic of either my intellectuality, my spirituality, or my poetry.” Yet he died as a persecuted Jew. In 1944, during a forced march westward across Hungary, Radnóti and members of his labor battalion were shot dead by their Hungarian guards. After the war, his body was removed from a mass grave, and his last poems, his most gripping, were discovered in his coat pocket. His final, prophetic “Razglednica,” or Postcard, is dated 31 October 1944:

text: Aladár Komlós

text: Hungary

text: István Vas

text: Shimon Markish


title: Talmud Study

abstract: The Talmud was a central focus of the education of males from the beginning of Jewish settlement in Europe. Boys generally began studying Talmud somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10 (occasionally earlier), after completing an elementary course in the study of the Torah, generally lasting three years. While most students completed their studies around the age of 14, the most promising students, if they had sufficient financial wherewithal, would go on to study in a yeshiva, sometimes for an extended period. As Jews began to move east in large numbers (starting at the end of the fifteenth century and extending into the early sixteenth), they brought with them the same commitment to the study of the Talmud; it was the central focus of all educational efforts, from the most elementary to the most advanced.

imgDesc: Young men posing studying the Talmud for a studio portrait, Złoczew, Poland (Yid., Zlotshev; now Zolochiv, Ukr.), 1930s. (YIVO)

text: yeshiva

text: heder

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Ya‘akov ben Yosef Pollak

text: Prague

text: Shalom Shakhnah ben Yosef

text: Lublin

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: rabbinic literature

text: riddles

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Efrayim Shelomoh ben Aharon of Luntshits

text: Yesha‘yahu Horowitz

text: Ashkenazic

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Vilna

text: Aryeh Leib Gintsburg

text: Minsk

text: Lithuania

text: Volozhin

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Poznań

text: Ḥayim Soloveichik

text: Brest

text: Belorussia

text: Aryeh Leib Heller

text: Ya‘akov ben Ya‘akov Mosheh Lorbeerbaum

text: Yosef ben Mosheh Babad

text: Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Rabinovich

text: Ponevezh

text: Shim‘on Yehudah Shkop

text: Telz

text: Slobodka

text: Avraham Yesha‘yahu Karelits

glossary:
Talmud
Torah
yeshiva
heder
Talmud Torah
Rashi
Tosafot
halakhah
pilpul
Shulḥan ‘arukh
gzeyres takh vetat
Gemara
Naḥmanides
Gaon
Mishnah
Maimonides
get

subconcepts:
Pilpul in Eastern Europe
Opposition to Pilpul
Talmud Study after 1800


title: Dinezon, Yankev

abstract: (1856?–1919), Yiddish author, editor, and literary activist. Yankev Dinezon was born in the Kovno region of Lithuania; the date of his birth is uncertain and may have been as late as 1862. He received a traditional education and showed a passion for writing at an early age. Dinezon’s father died before the writer was 12, and he was subsequently raised in Mohilev (mod. Mogilev-Podol’skiy) by an uncle. In Mohilev, Dinezon studied at a yeshiva until he was 16. Hired by Bodona Horowitz, a rich Mohilev merchant’s wife, to tutor her children in Hebrew, Dinezon received his first secular education in their home, and grew familiar with German and Russian. Dinezon ultimately became a family confidant and business agent, traveling on behalf of their interests.

imgDesc: Yankev Dinezon (seated), with Y. L. Peretz and a framed portrait of Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh), ca. 1890s. Published in the Russian Empire, n.d. (YIVO)

text: Kovno

text: Lithuania

text: yeshiva

text: Vilna

text: Romm

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Melits

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Yiddish literature

text: Shomer

text: Kiev

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Zalmen Reyzen

glossary: yeshiva Magid


title: Uherský Brod

abstract: Town in southeastern Moravia, in the present Czech Republic. Jews probably settled in Uherský Brod (Ger., Ungarisch Brod) as early as the thirteenth century, but they are first mentioned in a municipal document dating from 1470. In 1558, there were 4 Jewish families, presumably attracted by the growing trade between the German lands and Hungary, and in 1615 the number rose to 18.

text: Czech Republic

text: trade

text: Hungary

text: Slovakia

text: Familiants Laws

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: yeshiva

text: Holocaust

text: Terezín

text: Adolf Frankl-Grün

text: Budapest

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
yeshiva


title: Shapiro, Moyshe

abstract: (1899–1973), Yiddish linguist. Born in Khmelnik, Ukraine, into a religious teacher’s family, Moyshe Shapiro received a traditional education but also attended a Russian high school. In 1923 he was appointed director of a Yiddish school, in which he taught Yiddish and Russian language and literature, as well as mathematics. He graduated from the Kiev Pedagogical Institute in the late 1920s, and also received a degree in mathematics via a correspondence course.

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Kharkov

text: Elye Spivak

text: Ayzik Zaretski

text: Moscow

text: Sovetish heymland


title: Jewish Historical Institute

abstract: (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH), research institute, archive, library, and museum in Warsaw. The Jewish Historical Institute grew out of the Jewish Historical Committee (Żydowska Komisja Historyczna), a Holocaust research body organized in Lublin in August 1944. Among the founders were Filip Friedman, Nachman Blumental, Józef Kermisz, and Abba Kovner. In December 1944, the commission became an agency of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKŻP) and was renamed the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna).

imgDesc: The Great Synagogue (right), the Judaic Studies Library, and the Institute of Judaic Studies (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny), Warsaw, ca. 1936. Postcard printed in Poland. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Holocaust

text: Lublin

text: Filip Friedman

text: Abba Kovner

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland

text: Ringelblum

text: Artur Eisenbach


title: Singer, Ludvík

abstract: (1876–1931), lawyer and politician. Ludvík Singer was a leader of Czech-speaking Zionists in Bohemia. He was born in Kolín and studied law at the Czech University in Prague, where he became involved in the Czech Jewish movement. In his first job as a lawyer in Liberec (Reichenberg) in northern Bohemia, he was confronted with the Czech–German national conflict, which apparently shook his belief in Czech Jewish assimilation.

text: Zionists

text: Bohemia

text: Kolín

text: Prague

text: assimilation

text: Židovská Strana


title: Rudnicki, Adolf

abstract: (Aron Hirszhorn; 1909–1990), prose writer and essayist. Born into a Hasidic family, Adolf Rudnicki rebelled against his father and the Orthodox community. Settling in Warsaw in the early 1930s, Rudnicki joined a circle of young writers. In 1939, he fought the invading Nazis as a soldier in the Polish army, and after escaping German captivity, he went to Soviet-occupied Lwów, and later, in 1942, to Warsaw, where he lived on the Aryan side and took part in underground literary life and efforts to assist Jews.

text: prose

text: Warsaw

text: Lwów

text: Antoni Słonimski

text: Polish literature

text: assimilation

text: Hasidic

text: antisemitism

text: Holocaust

text: Khayim Rumkowski

text: Łódź

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ida Kamińska

text: Ger

text: Yiddish literature


title: Tseirey Agudas Yisroel

abstract: Male youth movement of Agudas Yisroel. As an Orthodox party, Agudas Yisroel viewed the thousands of young men who devoted years to the study of the Talmud and its commentaries not only as a source of future strength for the Aguda, but also as a key to the survival of the Jewish people. For those young people who had to stop their formal education, the party wished to establish a youth movement that would keep them within the ideological fold. In practice, however, a large part of the membership consisted of students still in yeshivas.

imgDesc: (From left to right) Ze’ev Aharonowicz, Natan Wiszinski, and Gershon Rajngwirc, members of the Mława (Pol.) branch of Tseirey Agudas Yisroel, at a hakhsharah (training farm) at Kibbutz Khofets Khayim (Ḥafets Ḥayim), Palestine, 1930s. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: youth movement

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Orthodox

text: Poland

text: Zionist

text: Galicia

text: Aleksander Zysha Frydman

text: Latvia

text: Slovakia


title: Grodzenski, Ḥayim Ozer

abstract: (Often Grodzinski; 1863–1940), religious scholar and community leader. “Reb Khayim Oyzer” (as he was widely known, using the Yiddish form of his name) was a major twentieth-century Jewish rabbinic authority and one of the most prominent leaders of Lithuanian Orthodox Jewry. Even in his childhood, Grodzenski exhibited superlative memory and Talmudic pilpul (casuistry) skills. He studied at the yeshivas of Eishishok (Pol., Ejszyszki; now Eisiskes, Lith.) and Volozhin (now Valozhyn, Bel.) and became known as the “prodigy of Ivya,” after his birthplace in Lithuania (Pol., Iwje). In Volozhin, he befriended Ḥayim Soloveichik of Brisk (Brest Litovsk), but was not influenced by the latter’s innovative methods of study.

imgDesc: Rosh Hashanah card from the Va‘ad ha-Yeshivot (Yeshiva Schools Council), with a message from Rabbi Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski, one of its founders and its longtime leader, Vilna, 1939. (YIVO)

text: Orthodox Jewry

text: Volozhin

text: Lithuania

text: Ḥayim Soloveichik

text: Brest

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Vilna

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Russia

text: Homel’

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Poland

text: Daas Toyre

text: Zionism

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: Mizraḥi

text: Yitsḥak Rubinstein

text: Sabbath

text: conversion

glossary: pilpul Torah


title: Auschwitz Protocols

abstract: Document describing killings of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prepared in late April 1944 by Oskar Krasniansky of the Slovakian Ústredňa Židov (Jewish Central Organization; UZ, an organization that functioned as a Judenrat) on the basis of testimony from two Jews, Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg) and Alfred Wetzler, who had escaped from the camp three weeks earlier. An expanded version was composed in June 1944 following receipt of additional information from two other escapees, Czesław Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin. The protocols detailed the operation of the killing center, offered a (high) estimate of the number of Jews killed to date, and warned of preparations for gassing 800,000 expected Jewish deportees from Hungary. The expanded version told of the killing of Greek Jews and of the deaths of the first Hungarian arrivals.

text: Judenrat

text: Hungary

text: Slovakia

text: Budapest

text: Bratislava

text: Mikha’el Weissmandel

text: Rezső Kasztner


title: Schorr, Barukh

abstract: (1823–1904), cantor and composer. Barukh Schorr was born in Lemberg. As a boy he reportedly traveled to Odessa with the famed cantor Betsal’el Shulsinger (Tsalel Odesser; d. ca. 1873) to become part of his choir, eventually joining the choir of Cantor Yeruḥam Blindman (Yeruḥam ha-Katon). Upon his return to Lemberg for his bar mitzvah, Schorr was sufficiently skilled to be able to lead services in the central synagogue. He then joined the synagogue choir in Jassy (Iaşi), Romania, where he met his wife.

imgDesc: Excerpt from the Musaf service for Yom Kippur. "V’hakohanim" (Veha-Kohanim). Words: Traditional. Music: Barukh Schorr. Performed by the Cantor’s Association of America, directed by Leon M. Kramer. Columbia E5155 mx. 59501-2, New York, 1916. (YIVO)

text: cantor

text: Lemberg

text: Odessa

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Bessarabia

text: Kamenets Podol’skii

text: Budapest

text: operetta

text: Passover

text: liturgy


title: Tighina

abstract: Town and district center on the Dniester River, presently in the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova. Tighina (Rus., Bendery; Yid., Bender) was part of Romania from 1918 to 1940 and was in the Moldavian SSR from 1944 to 1991. Jews settled there in Ottoman times; the first record of a Jewish presence dates to 1769. In 1770, a synagogue was built within the town’s fortress but was dismantled 76 years later as the community grew. The oldest Jewish cemetery has not been preserved; the earliest tombstone in the new one is dated 1781. Aryeh-Leib Wertheim (d. 1854), who was the son of Hasidic leader Shim‘on Shelomoh of Savran, settled in Bendery in 1814 and founded a Hasidic dynasty. Local tradition dictated the leaving of notes (Yid., tsetlekh) with requests for Wertheim’s intervention at his crypt.

imgDesc: Students and teachers in a class at a Talmud Torah maintained by the Bene ‘Aniyim (Brothers of the Needy), Bendery (now Tighina, Moldova), 1937. On the wall is a portrait of King Carol II of Romania and on the blackboard are quotations from the Talmud: “Be heedful of the children of the poor, for from them will go forth the law”; “He who teaches the son of his neighbor the Torah the scripture ascribes it to him as if it were his own child”; and “He who causes others to do good is greater than the doer.” (YIVO)

text: Moldova

text: Romania

text: Savran

text: Zionist parties

text: Transnistria


title: Kisch, Guido

abstract: (1889–1985), lawyer and historian. Guido Kisch (son of Rabbi Alexander Kisch and an older brother to noted medical scholar Bruno Kisch) was born in Prague; he studied law at the German university there and received his habilitation from the University of Halle in 1915. Kisch became professor of the history of German law in Königsberg in 1920; he returned to Prague in 1921; and from 1922 he taught at the University of Halle. He was forcibly retired in November 1933 by the Hitler regime and worked thereafter as a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. In 1935, Kisch moved to the United States, where he taught Jewish history at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. He moved to Basel in 1962.

text: Alexander Kisch

text: Prague

text: Königsberg

text: Prague

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

text: Samuel Steinherz

text: Bohemia


title: Schulman, Kalman

abstract: (1819–1899), maskil and Hebrew writer whose work was significant in the development of modern Hebrew literature. Kalman Schulman was born to a Hasidic family in Stary Bykhov, in the Mogilev district of Belorussia. He studied at the Volozhin yeshiva for about six years, subsequently learning German and developing an interest in Haskalah literature. In 1843, Schulman settled in Vilna, joining that city’s circle of maskilic authors, especially Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn (Mikhal), with whom he shared a close friendship. From 1849 to 1861, Schulman taught Hebrew at the secondary school connected to the state rabbinical seminary. Later he devoted himself entirely to literary activity, receiving encouragement and support from Saint Petersburg’s Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia.

text: Hebrew literature

text: Belorussia

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Vilna

text: Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Land of Israel

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Zionism

glossary: maskil yeshiva Haskalah


title: Varga, Evgenii Samuilovich

abstract: (1879–1964), political economist. Born in Hungary, Evgenii Varga, known in Hungarian as Jenő Varga, studied in Berlin, Paris, and Budapest and became a professor of economics at the University of Budapest. In 1919, he took part in the Communist Revolution and became a commissar of finance and then chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of Béla Kun. Following the collapse of the revolution, he emigrated to Austria and then to the USSR, where he worked as a close adviser to Lenin and Stalin, mainly as an economist and expert on the world economy and the capitalist system.

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Béla Kun

text: USSR


title: Weisel, Leopold

abstract: (1804–1873), physician, ethnographer, and writer. Born in 1804 in the Czech city of Přeštice (Prestitz), Leopold Weisel devoted much of his literary career to the recovery of the oral traditions of Bohemian Jews. The son of a traveling cloth merchant, Weisel—whose original name was Joachim Löbl Weisel—spent his youth in Přeštice before moving to Prague to further his education. He lived as a medical student in Prague’s Jewish Town (Cz., Židovské město; Ger., Judenstadt) and supported himself as a private tutor for a number of Jewish families. During the 1830s and 1840s Weisel devoted most of his literary efforts to the collection and dissemination of Jewish folk tales from Prague, a project in which he collaborated with the non-Jewish folklorist Franz Klutschak (1814–1886), publishing some of his earliest efforts alongside those of Klutschak in the journal Panorama des Universums. Weisel was openly conscious of his status as a Jew who was losing contact with the world of traditional Jewish culture and he devoted this part of his career to capturing and preserving the rich folk traditions of the ghetto, which he accomplished by interviewing older residents of the Jewish quarter and recording their stories.

text: Bohemian

text: Prague

text: Wolf Pascheles

text: conversion


title: Bloch, Jan

abstract: (1836–1902), financier and economist. Born in Radom, Jan (Ivan) Bloch converted to Protestantism in 1851 and to Roman Catholicism in 1856. He began his career in Warsaw as a financier in the banking firm of Szymon Toeplitz. Between 1856 and 1864, Bloch lived in Saint Petersburg where he helped to establish the Warsaw–Petersburg railway; this project set the base for his substantial fortune.

text: Radom

text: Warsaw

text: banking

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kronenberg

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: conversion

text: economic life


title: Hurwitz, Sha’ul Yisra’el

abstract: (1861–1922), Hebrew essayist and editor. Born near Gomel in White Russia (mod. Homel’, Belarus), Sha’ul Hurwitz (also known as Shai Ish Hurwitz) received an enlightened Talmudic education and emulated the progressive tendentious scholarship of such authors as Mosheh Leib Lilienblum in Hebrew and Il’ia Orshanskii in Russian. After attending university classes in Saint Petersburg, Hurwitz studied Jewish laws concerning women, a project that culminated in his monograph Ha-‘Ivriyah veha-yehudiyah (Hebrew Woman, Jewish Woman; 1892).

text: Russia

text: Homel’

text: Belarus

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Il’ia Orshanskii

text: Saint Petersburg

text: banking

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Magid

text: Eli‘ezer Zweifel

text: Hasidism

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Hasidism

text: Hasidism

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Sabbatianism

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Russia

glossary: Magid Maimonides


title: Bíró, Lajos

abstract: (1880–1948), novelist, publicist, editor, dramatist, and screenwriter. As was the case with other writers of the second generation of Hungarian Jewish literature, Lajos Bíró saw himself not only as culturally Hungarian but also as a modernist in the artistic sense and as a political and social liberal. Members of his generation were active in the antifeudal opposition, a movement that developed and refined socialist liberal values. Most second-generation writers neither worked within Jewish frameworks nor participated in Jewish cultural affairs. When attacked, they defended the role of Jewish intelligentsia and their own attempts to assimilate; following the revolutions of 1918 and 1919, they responded to the counterrevolutionary regime’s open persecution of Jews.

text: Hungary

text: assimilation

text: Oradea

text: Transylvania

text: Hungarian literature

text: Budapest

text: Ferenc Molnár

text: Hungarian literature

text: Ferenc Molnár

text: Béla Balázs

text: assimilation


title: Munkatsh Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Ultraconservative Hungarian Hasidic sect. The spiritual progenitor of Munkatsh Hasidism was Tsevi Elimelekh of Dinov (d. 1841), an outspoken opponent of the Haskalah and prolific author who served briefly as rabbi in Munkács (Hun., more properly Muncács; Cz., Mukačevo; Yid., Munkatsh; now Ukr. Mukacheve; the most commonly used transliteration by English-language scholars is the semi-Polonized spelling Munkacz) from 1824 to 1826 before returning to Galicia in the wake of conflicts with the town’s other rabbis.

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

text: Hasidism

text: Tsevi Elimelekh of Dinov

text: Haskalah

text: Mukacheve

text: Galicia

text: Sandz

text: Reform

text: Hungary

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Misnagdim

text: Orthodoxy

text: dress

text: Zionism

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Gerer

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: Belzer

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Lublin

glossary:
Haskalah
Neolog
Shulḥan ‘arukh
rebbe
Misnagdim
Zohar
responsa
Status Quo
Talmud
Torah


title: Gornfel'd, Arkadii

abstract: (1867–1941), literary scholar, critic, and translator who played an important role in the development of Jewish literature in Russia. The son of a lawyer who had been one of the first Jews to receive a law degree from Kharkov University, Arkadii Gornfel’d suffered a serious childhood illness and remained disabled throughout his life. He studied Jewish subjects at home, and mastered German and French while still a child. After graduating from the Simferopol gymnasium, he studied law at Kharkov University (1886–1891) and simultaneously attended A. A. Potebnya’s seminar on the theory of literature. At the University of Berlin from 1891 to 1893, he took courses on philosophy and psychology, studying with Moritz Lazarus.

text: Russia

text: Kharkov

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Voskhod

text: Zionism

text: David Aizman

text: S. An-ski

text: Ben-Ami

text: Jakub Berman

text: Semen Iushkevich

text: Andrei Sobol’

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Brutskus

text: Yo’el Engel

text: Mikhail Gershenzon

text: Yisroel (Sergei) Tsinberg

text: Maksim Vinaver

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


title: Shalkovich, Avraham Leib

abstract: (1866–1921), Hebrew writer and publisher, known alternately by his pseudonym, Ben-Avigdor. Born in Zaludok, near Vilna, Shalkovich grew up in Zhetl, a village in the province of Grodno. Though he attended Lithuanian yeshivas, he became a maskil and subsequently traveled to Kovno, where he studied for his university entrance exams (though there is no evidence that he ever attended university). He was married to Tsiporah Blumgarten, sister of the Yiddish poet known as “Yehoyesh” (Solomon Bloomgarden).

text: Vilna

text: Grodno

text: Kovno

text: Zionism

text: Ha-Melits

text: Warsaw

text: Hebrew literature

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Ezra Goldin

text: David Silberbusch

text: Aleksander Ziskind Rabinovitz

text: Haskalah

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Tushiyah

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Kishinev

glossary: maskil Haskalah


title: Piatra Neamţ

abstract: City in the Moldavian region of Romania, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains and on the banks of the Bistrița River. Jewish settlement in Piatra Neamț dates back as far as the eighteenth century: a wooden synagogue was built in 1766; a burial society existed by 1771, and the cemetery includes tombstones from that period as well. At the end of the eighteenth century, Jewish professional guilds were established and continued to function until 1861.

imgDesc: Children and staff at a meal in the dining room of the summer camp sponsored by the Menorah Lodge, Piatra Neamţ Romania, 1937. (YIVO)

text: Moldavian

text: Romania

text: tombstones

text: guilds

text: crafts

text: trade

text: industry

text: banking

text: Zionists

text: Hasidic

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Victor Brauner


title: Slutskii, Boris Abramovich

abstract: (1919–1986), Russian poet. Boris Slutskii spent his childhood and youth in Kharkov. His serious early interests in literature, art, and history led him to attend the Moscow Institute of Law (1937) and then, on the recommendation of the well-known poet Pavel Antokol’skii (1896–1978), the Gorky Institute of Literature (1938). Slutskii’s studies at both places ended with the Nazi invasion of June 1941, when he volunteered for the front. A recipient of four battlefield medals, he was demobilized in 1946 and spent time in treatment for wounds and shell shock. Because of his talent and civic frankness, he became an unofficial leader of young poets. They looked to him both for advice about their craft and about living ethically in a totalitarian state.

text: Kharkov

text: Moscow

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Russia

text: Joseph Brodsky

text: Boris Pasternak

text: shtetl

text: Holocaust

text: antisemitism


title: Kook, Avraham Yitsḥak

abstract: (1865–1935), rabbinic leader, halakhist, theologian, and mystic. Best known as the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of modern Palestine and the major theologian of religious Zionism, Kook lived in Latvia and Lithuania before moving to the Land of Israel in 1904 at the age of 38.

imgDesc: Letter from Avraham Yitsḥak Kook to Rabbi Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski, n.d. From Avraham Yitsḥak Kook in Jerusalem to Rabbi Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski in Vilna, n.d., asking him to help spread awareness of the plight of Rabbi Ya‘akov Tuviah Rappoport of Minsk, a scholar and shoḥet (ritual slaughterer) who has been sentenced to eight years in prison by Soviet authorities. Hebrew. Copy of a letter, typed with handwritten corrections. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Zionism

text: Latvia

text: Lithuania

text: Land of Israel

text: Daugavpils

text: Haskalah

text: Eliyahu David Rabinowitz-Te’omim

text: Panevėžys

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Orthodoxy

text: Mordekhai Eliasberg

text: Musar movement

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

glossary: Ḥabad Haskalah yeshiva Musar Talmud responsa Kabbalah


title: Sel’vinskii, Il’ia L’vovich

abstract: (1899–1968), Russian poet, playwright, and novelist. Il’ia Selvinskii’s achievements include the epic poem Ulialaevshchina (The Lay of Ulyalaev; 1924, pub. 1927) and the novel in verse Pushtorg (Fur Trade; 1928). He was one of the first Soviet poets to write about the Holocaust.

text: Holocaust

text: Krymchak

text: Russian Civil War

text: Moscow

text: Birobidzhan


title: Tsypkin, Leonid Borisovich

abstract: (1926–1982), writer and physician. Leonid Tsypkin’s grandmother and other relatives were murdered in the Minsk ghetto during World War II, a fate he and his parents narrowly avoided when they managed to escape at the last moment on foot. After the war, he returned to Minsk where, in 1947, he graduated from medical school, in keeping with family tradition. For the rest of his life Tsypkin worked as a physician and medical researcher. In the course of his medical career he published nearly 100 articles in Soviet and international professional journals.

text: Minsk

text: Soviet Union

text: refusenik

text: Russia


title: Brodskii Family

abstract: Prominent Jewish family in the Russian Empire. The Brodskiis originated in Brody, Galicia, with the family name Schor; the name Brodskii was taken by Me’ir (Mark) Schor when he moved to the small town of Zlatopol’ in Kiev province in the early nineteenth century. The family had a pedigree of some distinction, as Me’ir’s grandfather had been Rabbi Aleksander Schor, author of a work on Jewish law entitled Simlah ḥadashah. One of Me’ir’s five businessmen sons, Izrail’ (Yisra’el; 1823–1888), began to invest in the nascent sugar industry in the 1840s, eventually leasing, managing, and finally owning his own plants. Izrail’ Brodskii moved his family and base of operations to Kiev in 1876; his refinery was one of the largest factories in the city, and he built a sugar empire that eventually came to control a quarter of the sugar production in the Russian Empire. His brothers Iosif, Solomon, and Isaak also became prominent entrepreneurs in Kiev.

text: Russian Empire

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Kiev

text: philanthropy

text: pogroms

text: Haskalah

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Zionist movement

text: Gintsburgs

text: Odessa


title: Dembitzer, Ḥayim Natan

abstract: (1820–1892), Orthodox community leader, religious court judge, and chronicler. Ḥayim Natan Dembitzer was born in Kraków, where he served from 1849 as a dayan (religious court judge) and magid (preacher); by 1856 he was appointed head of one of the community’s religious courts. In the 1850s, he was active in the first stages of Galician Orthodoxy’s response to the challenges of modern culture, organizing a group of rabbis who took defensive stands in several public halakhic controversies. The leader of the group was Dembitzer’s teacher, the dayan Shelomoh Kluger of Brody.

text: Kraków

text: Orthodoxy

text: Shelomoh Kluger

text: Brody

text: Land of Israel

text: Passover

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: councils

glossary: magid Diaspora


title: Kahaneman, Yosef Shelomoh

abstract: (1886–1969), rabbi, head of yeshiva, and communal activist. Kahaneman was born in Kool (Kuliai), Lithuania. In 1896 he left home to study in the nearby small town of Plungian (Plunge) and in 1901 continued his education at the Telz yeshiva, where he remained for six years. After an additional short stay at the Novaredok yeshiva, he moved in 1908 to Radin, studying at the yeshiva of Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen (known as Ḥafets Ḥayim; 1838–1933). In 1910 Kahaneman was appointed rabbi of Vidze, Lithuania, married Feige Rubin, and shortly thereafter founded a yeshiva. During World War I, he remained in Lithuania, and in 1919 was appointed rabbi of Panevėžys (Ponevezh), a position he held for 20 years. While in Panevėžys, he founded a yeshiva that gained national fame.

text: yeshiva

text: Lithuania

text: Telz yeshiva

text: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Panevėžys

text: yeshiva

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Ponevezh yeshiva

text: Holocaust


title: Nusinov, Yitskhok

abstract: (1889–1950), Soviet Yiddish and Russian literary critic and scholar. Yitskhok Nusinov was born in the Volhynian town of Chernigov, where his father, a maskil, held a lease on a glass factory. Involved in Bundist revolutionary activity from 1905, Nusinov graduated as an external student from a Warsaw secondary school in 1910, and two years later helped organize one of the first Yiddish schools in Ukraine. Subsequently, he traveled to Italy and Switzerland for medical treatment, also studying literature and philosophy at Lausanne University and participating actively in the cultural life of the Russian émigré colony.

imgDesc: Jewish cultural figures who would become members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee signing an appeal to world Jewry to support the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany, Moscow, 1941. (Front row, left to right) Dovid Bergelson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Ilya Ehrenburg; (second row) David Oistrakh, Yitskhok Nusinov, Yakov Zak, Boris Iofan, Benjamin Zuskin, Aleksandr Tyshler, Shmuel Halkin. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Martin Smith)

text: Warsaw

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Bund

text: Kiev

text: Evsektsiia

text: Kultur-lige

text: Moscow

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Soviet Union

text: György Lukács

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Itsik Kipnis

text: Der Nister

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: Yiddish literature


title: Aleksander Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: The Aleksander dynasty, the second most important Hasidic dynasty in Poland after Ger, was based in the small town of Aleksandrów Łódzki, near Łódź. The founder of the dynasty was Shraga Feivel of Gritsa (Grójec), who moved to Aleksander after his teacher, Yitsḥak of Vurke (1779–1848), died at the end of Passover, 1848. Shraga Feivel died six months later on Shemini Atseret of 1848. His son, Yeḥi’el (1828–1894), did not wish to succeed him as rebbe, but became a close disciple of Menaḥem Mendel of Vurke (1819–1868), the son and successor of Yitsḥak of Vurke. After Menaḥem Mendel’s death, Yeḥi’el became a disciple of Berish of Biała (d. 1876) and was finally persuaded to become a rebbe in Aleksander only after Berish’s death, living on the stipend he received as rabbi of the town. Yeḥi’el’s teachings followed the Vurke emphasis on concern for the Jewish community, love of Torah, joy, and simple faith. He wrote no books, but his sayings were preserved in his son’s book, Yismaḥ Yisra’el (1911).

imgDesc: The young heir to the Aleksander Hasidic dynasty at a summer resort, Ciechocinek, Poland, 1926. The photographer wrote, “He strolls about the resort accompanied by three Hasidim and stands at attention if one asks to photograph him.” Photograph by Menakhem Kipnis. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Ger

text: Łódź

text: Passover

text: Vurke