title: Drobner, Bolesław

abstract: (1883–1968), Polish socialist politician. Bolesław Drobner (who used the pseudonym Jan Okoński) was born in Kraków to a well-known assimilated family. His grandfather had participated in the uprising of 1830 and his parents in that of 1863. In 1898, Drobner joined the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Silesia and between 1902 and 1906 was a member of the reformed Proletariat organization that took up the terrorist tradition of its predecessors and also organized strikes in the Kingdom of Poland during the Revolution of 1905–1907. Drobner himself took part in its activities in Warsaw, Łódź, and Sosnowiec.

imgDesc: Bolesław Drobner with (left to right) daughter Irena, wife Luba, and sister-in-law Ida Hirszowicz, Kraków, ca. 1914. Photograph by Adela. (YIVO)

text: Kraków

text: Galicia

text: Silesia

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Chełm


title: About this Article (Poetry)

abstract: This entry includes articles on poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish, respectively. For further discussion of works in those languages, see Hebrew Literature; and Yiddish Literature. For works by Jews in other languages, see Belarusian Literature; Czech Literature; German Literature; Hungarian Literature; Polish Literature; Romanian Literature; Russian Literature; and Ukrainian Literature.

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

text: Hebrew Literature

text: Yiddish Literature

text: Belarusian Literature

text: Czech Literature

text: German Literature

text: Hungarian Literature

text: Polish Literature

text: Romanian Literature

text: Russian Literature

text: Ukrainian Literature


title: Ivano-Frankivs’k

abstract: (Formerly Stanyslaviv; Pol., Stanisławów; Ger., Stanislau; Rus., Stanislav), city in Ukraine. Jews first settled in Stanisławów just after its establishment in 1654; provisions for the community’s autonomy were guaranteed by the town’s owner in 1662. By 1736, Jews constituted 1,470 of the town’s 3,321 inhabitants, working primarily as leaseholders, artisans, and merchants, the latter in competition with local Armenians throughout the Polish period. In 1772, the city was incorporated into the new province of Galicia in the Austrian Empire.

imgDesc: Street scene and view of the temple, Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukraine), ca. 1910. Many of the founders of this synagogue were active in local and international Zionist organizations. The synagogue was heavily damaged during World War I but reopened in 1922. Postcard, publisher unknown. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Galicia

text: Horowitz family

text: Galicia

text: Holocaust

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Zionism

text: Markus Braude

text: Galicia

text: charity

text: yeshiva

glossary: Haskalah yeshiva


title: Ahad Ha-Am

abstract: (1856–1927), Zionist thinker. Born in Skvira, Ukraine, Ahad Ha-Am (born Asher Ginzberg; Heb., more properly Aḥad ha-‘Am, a pen name that translates as “One of the People”) was a Hebrew essayist of singular power and authority, a Jewish nationalist leader who publicly eschewed politics while seeking to fundamentally change the priorities of Zionism and, more broadly, the Jewish people as a whole. Although his impact on Hebrew culture was extensive, his political imprint was equivocal.

imgDesc: Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-Am, Tel Aviv, ca. 1920s. Photograph by Avraham Susskin. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Zionism

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Hasidism

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Leon (Lev) Pinsker

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Wissotzky

text: Russia

text: Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky

text: Yehoshu‘a Ravnitski

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: land of Israel

text: assimilation

text: antisemitism

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Chaim Weizmann

glossary:
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Münz, Mosheh

abstract: (ca. 1750–1831), rabbi. Born in the village of Minkowitz (Podolia), Mosheh Münz studied with Meshulam Igra of Tysmenitsa. After marrying the daughter of a prominent rabbi, he settled in Brody where he headed a yeshiva. Later, he served as the rabbi of Vishnawitz and subsequently of Radivil. He corresponded with Yeḥezkel Landau of Prague, who regarded him highly and recommended his appointment as rabbi of Alt-Ofen (Óbuda), the second most important community in Hungary. Münz served in this post for 40 years until his death.

text: Meshulam Igra

text: Brody

text: yeshiva

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Prague

text: Óbuda

text: Hungary

text: Haskalah

text: Arad

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Moravia

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: approbation

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah responsa


title: Nussbaum, Hilary

abstract: (1820–1895), activist, journalist, and cofounder of the Jewish integration movement in Warsaw. Born in Warsaw, Hilary (Hillel) Nussbaum graduated from rabbinical school and taught at an elementary school. He then became a merchant, possibly under the influence of his father-in-law, the prominent maskil Mosheh Tannenbaum (1795–1849).

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Jutrzenka

text: Russia

text: Lwów


title: Kalecki, Michał

abstract: (1899–1970), economist. Michał Kalecki was born in Łódź to a middle-class Jewish family. His regular studies were made difficult by familial and financial problems, so he mastered mathematics and economics on his own. His research on economic fluctuations resulted in an appointment to a position at the Institute of Business Cycles and Prices, a position from which he resigned in 1936 to protest the firing of two colleagues for political reasons. Kalecki gained international acclaim after he published Próby teorii koniunktury (An Essay on the Theory of the Business Cycle; 1933), a study that anticipated the theories of John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, he married Adela Szternfeld.

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Warsaw


title: TSYSHO

abstract: Di Tsentrale Yidishe Shul-Organizatsye (Central Yiddish School Organization), commonly known by its acronym, TSYSHO or CYSHO, was established in Warsaw in June 1921. Led primarily by members of the Bund and Left Po‘ale Tsiyon, its founders sought to create a network of secular Yiddish schools under socialist auspices. Headed by the Bundist Beynish Mikhalevitsh, the first chairman of the organization, TSYSHO was administered by a central office in Warsaw and a central education committee in Vilna. The latter was largely autonomous and less politicized than the institutions in central Poland. The administration prepared curriculum outlines, chose or published textbooks, and compiled vocabulary lists to meet the needs generated by subjects being taught for the first time in Yiddish. The curriculum consisted of Yiddish language and literature, Jewish history and culture, the sciences, math, music, physical education, arts and crafts, and, for some, Hebrew. In addition, Polish language, literature, and history were taught in the Polish language.

imgDesc: “Protecting Birds. Take care of the birds in winter: give them food, protect them from frost and snow.” Yiddish panel from an exhibition mounted by students from the TSYSHO school of the Medem Sanatorium, Warsaw, 1933. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Vilna

text: Poland

text: Czernowitz Conference

text: Malke Frumkin

text: Max Weinreich

text: Białystok

text: Medem Sanatorium

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Yiddish literature

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Khayim Shloyme Kazdan

text: Lithuania

text: ghettos


title: Seminary

abstract: From the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were attempts to reform the training of rabbis and teachers in Europe. Such programs were conducted at seminaries that were modeled on elite state schools under Enlightened absolutism and on ecclesiastical seminaries, and combined traditional learning with the modern sciences; what was novel was the instruction in secular subjects as well as homiletics. The idea of rabbinical and teachers’ seminaries was developed by maskilim, under both the pressure and the protection of the state. At times there were also open-minded traditional rabbis and teachers among the founders of the seminaries, who intended to anticipate and moderate changes dictated by the state or by radical Jewish reformers.

imgDesc: Pages from a certificate issued by the rabbinical seminary to 20-year-old Khaim Aronov”evich Efron from Antokol, Vilna, 1869. Among the secular subjects studied were algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, astronomy, world history, Russian history, Russian language, geography, and handwriting and drawing. Efron received the grades of “satisfactory” for arithmetic and Russian and “poor” for geography and handwriting and drafting. (YIVO)

text: Peter Beer

text: Herz Homberg

text: yeshivas

text: Prague

text: Warsaw

text: Abraham Stern

text: Jakob Tugendhold

text: Antoni Eisenbaum

text: Warsaw

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Vilna

text: Zhitomir

text: Breslau

text: Budapest

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Tsevi Hirsh Katzenellenbogen

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Eli‘ezer Zweifel

text: Haskalah

text: rabbinate

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Riga

text: Adolph Landau

text: Avraham Harkavy

text: Odessa

text: Minsk

text: Russia

text: Sabbath

text: Ha-Karmel

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

text: Tsevi Hirsh Katzenellenbogen

text: Lev Levanda

text: Kahal

text: Kiev

text: Aharon Lieberman

text: Poland

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Hungary

text: Vilmos (Wilhelm) Bacher

text: Lajos (Ludwig) Blau

text: David Kaufmann

text: Ignác Goldziher

text: cantors

text: Holocaust

text: Slovakia

text: Transylvania

text: Banat

text: József Bánóczi

text: Holocaust

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
maskil
Haskalah
Talmud
get
Kahal
halakhah

subconcepts:
Vilna and Zhitomir
Breslau
Budapest


title: Kopelian, Efim Zakharovich

abstract: (1912–1975), Soviet theater and cinema actor. Born in Rechitsa, Belorussia, Kopelian moved to Leningrad with his parents and began his studies at the Architecture Faculty of the Leningrad Academy of Arts, at the same time performing as an extra with the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater (BDT). In his second year of studies he transferred to the BDT studio school, joining its troupe in 1935. He continued to perform at the BDT throughout his life, appearing on stage in 80 different roles.

text: theater

text: cinema

text: Belorussia

text: Leningrad

text: Grigorii Kozintsev


title: Kolín

abstract: Town in the Czech Republic, located 55 kilometers east of Prague. The earliest record of Jewish settlement in Kolín (earlier Nový Kolín; Ger., Kolin or Neu Kollin) dates from the beginning of the fourteenth century; a religious community and synagogue were probably active in the early fifteenth century. During the years 1541–1549 and 1561–1564, Jews were expelled from the town, but by 1574 some 33 Jewish men (and possibly families) lived there again. A communal record book, dating from 1598, has been preserved.

text: Czech Republic

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: yeshiva

text: charity

text: Zionist

text: Terezín

text: Maharal

text: Prague

text: Holocaust

text: Ignaz Petschek


title: Suceava

abstract: Town in southern Bucovina. Scant documentation from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries indicates that Suceava (known also as Suczawa in Polish or by its Yiddish name, Shots) had a presence of Jewish merchants, doctors, and diplomats from Poland and Turkey. In 1707, Jews were granted permission to live in the town. When Bucovina was annexed to the Habsburg Empire in 1774, the Jewish population of Suceava was 203.

text: Bucovina

text: Poland

text: trade

text: crafts

text: leasing

text: Moldavian

text: Siret

text: Câmpulung

text: Hasidic

text: Zionist

text: Romania

text: youth movements

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Bund

text: heder

text: Beys Yankev

text: Me’ir Shapira

text: Transnistria

glossary: Rebbe heder


title: Bick, Ya‘akov Shemu’el

abstract: (1772–1831), Hebrew writer, satirist, translator, and merchant. Ya‘akov Shemu’el Bick was one of the most prominent figures in the first generation of Galician maskilim but was eventually drawn to Hasidism. He was born in Brody in eastern Galicia, a major commercial town that became famous, in those years, as a focal point in the conflict between Hasidism and its opponents.

text: Hasidism

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Me’ir Letteris

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: agriculture

text: Efrayim Zalman Margoliot

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Yosef Perl

text: satire

text: Haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Yehudah Leib Mieses


title: Romania

abstract: Spread over 237,500 square kilometers and counting 22 million inhabitants, modern Romania (Rom., România) neighbors the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine to the northeast, Bulgaria to the south, the Black Sea to the east, Serbia to the southwest, and Hungary to the west. This is broadly the area in which the Romanian people developed, after Dacia—as the region was known in antiquity—was conquered by the Romans in 101–106 CE. Several Judaic cult items and inscriptions date to the Roman period (first to third centuries), indicating the presence of Jews in the Roman legions camped there.

imgDesc: Romania and Moldova, ca. 2000.

text: Republic of Moldova

text: Ukraine

text: Hungary

text: Walachia

text: Moldavia

text: Russia

text: World War I

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Banat

text: Transylvania

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: Sephardic

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Iaşi

text: Suceava

text: Botoşani

text: Siret

text: Bacău

text: Focşani

text: Galicia

text: Bucharest

text: pogroms

text: Minorities Treaties

text: crafts

text: bankers

text: industry

text: Dorohoi

text: Blank

text: Craiova

text: Davicion Bally

text: Constanța

text: Sephardim

text: Ashkenazim

text: assimilation

text: Haskalah

text: Galicia

text: Adolphe Stern

text: Moses Gaster

text: Iacob Isac Niemirower

text: Hasidism

text: Zionist

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Ruzhin

text: Vaslui

text: Buhuşi

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature

text: Iuliu Barasch

text: Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz

text: Menaḥem Braunstein

text: Land of Israel

text: Beniamin Schwarzfeld

text: Hayoets

text: Egalitatea

text: Curierul israelit

text: Iacob Psantir

text: Meyer Abraham Halevy

text: Yiddish theater

text: Odessa

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Vilner Trupe

text: historiography

text: Moise Ronetti-Roman

text: Galați

text: Karpel Lippe

text: Samuel Pineles

text: Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea

text: Max Wexler

text: Litman Ghelerter

text: Bund

text: Adolphe Stern

text: Joseph B. Brociner

text: Renaşterea noastră

text: Mântuirea

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Isac Ludo

text: Theodor Lavi

text: antisemites

text: Cernăuți

text: Chişinău

text: Mayer Ebner

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Yehudah Leib Zirelson

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: Tarbut

text: Horia Carp

text: Felix Aderca

text: Oradea

text: Transnistria

text: Câmpulung Moldovenesc

text: Rădăuți

text: Holocaust

text: Ana Pauker

text: Mozes Rosen

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Passover

text: Henri Wald

text: Nicolae Cajal

text: Alexandru Şafran

text: Cluj

glossary:
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Neolog
numerus clausus
Talmud

subconcepts: Political Antisemitism in Greater Romania


title: Schorr, Mojżesz

abstract: (1874–1941), historian, Semitic-language scholar, and rabbi. Born in Przemyśl, Galicia, Mojżesz (Mosheh) Schorr studied philosophy and history between 1893 and 1898 in Vienna at the University of Vienna and the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt. In 1897, he transferred to the University of Lwów and received his Ph.D. in history in 1898. Two years later he was ordained as a rabbi.

imgDesc: Mojżesz Schorr (standing, center) at a gathering organized by the Institute for Judaic Studies in memory of Felix Warburg, president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Warsaw, 1937. Photograph by Leo Forbert. (YIVO)

text: Przemyśl

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: historiography

text: Warsaw

text: Shemu’el Poznański

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Ostróg


title: Autobiography and Memoir

abstract: The general scholarly consensus has, until recently, held that autobiography is essentially foreign to the communal orientation of traditional Jewish literature and mentality. According to this school of thought, Jewish autobiography is viewed as an exclusively modern phenomenon deriving from those whose attachments to Jewish tradition have been attenuated or severed. The great majority of Jewish autobiographies of pre-Rousseauian origin are indeed best viewed as texts that include autobiographical elements, rather than as autobiography proper. A discussion of Jewish autobiographies must focus largely upon Hebrew and Yiddish texts because those written by East European Jews in German and the Slavic languages belong, with rare exceptions, more comfortably to the literary environment of those languages, rather than to the sphere of Jewish literature. The great exception is the first Rousseau-style autobiography of an East European Jew, Salomon Maimon, which was written in German. Maimon, however, was a trailblazer and, in his day, egregious in almost every respect; moreover, at the time in which he composed his autobiography, any form of secular literature in Hebrew, let alone Yiddish, was virtually nonexistent.

imgDesc: First page of “Ikh vil nisht shtarbn: mayn skeletishe oytobiografye farn kankurs fun YIVO” (I do not want to die! My skeletal autobiography for the YIVO contest), 1934, an entry in one of the autobiography contests for Jewish youth sponsored by YIVO in Vilna in the 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Prague

text: Yom Tov Lippman Heller

text: Yiddish literature

text: Maks Erik

text: Purim

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: pogroms

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: prose

text: Natan Note Hannover

text: Ber of Bolechów

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Mosheh Wassercug

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

text: Poznań

text: Lwów

text: Salomon Maimon

text: childhood

text: Poland

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: conversion

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: heder

text: Haskalah

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature

text: religious reform

text: Odessa

text: Odessa

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: pogroms

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: poetry

text: Ḥayim Nahṃan Bialik

text: prose

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Buczacz

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: shtetl

text: Lithuania

text: yeshiva

text: Daniel Tsharni

text: memory

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Warsaw

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: YIVO

text: gender

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Holocaust

text: Pauline Wengeroff

text: assimilation

text: shtetl

text: Yiddish literature

text: Holocaust

text: memory

text: yizker-bikher

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk

text: historiography

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Henryk Erlich

text: Marc Chagall

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Mandel’shtam

text: Isaac Babel

text: Perets Markish

text: Solomon Mikhoels

glossary:
gzeyres takh vetat
maskil
heder
Haskalah
yeshiva
Diaspora

subconcepts:
Early Modern Autobiographical Texts
The Modern Period
The Early Twentieth Century
Postwar Period


title: Reghin

abstract: Town in eastern Transylvania, at the confluence of the Mureş and Gurghiu Rivers, 32 km north-northeast of the city of Târgu Mureş. The first reference to Reghin (Ger., Sächsisch-Reen; Lat., Regun; Hun., Szászrégen) dates to 1228. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it experienced substantial economic development and was designated as a free royal town in 1863.

text: Transylvania

text: Târgu Mureş

text: Bucovina

text: Galicia

text: Jewish Congress

text: Hungary

text: Orthodox

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: Cluj

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: ghettos


title: Bratislava

abstract: (Ger., Pressburg; Hun., Pozsony; Yid., Preshborg), capital of the Republic of Slovakia. Situated on the Danube River at the crossroad of major highways, Pressburg was a gateway into the Kingdom of Hungary. Until the rise of Budapest in the nineteenth century, it was the most important commercial center of Hungary, as well as its capital, serving as the seat of the kingdom’s administration until 1784 and the site of the Diet until the Revolution of 1848.

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

text: Slovakia

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Poland

text: shtadlonim

text: Akiva Eger

text: Meshulam Igra

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: yeshiva

text: yeshiva

text: Orthodoxy

text: Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin

text: Simḥah Bunem

text: Haskalah

text: Adolf Neustadt

text: pogroms

text: Prague

text: Mór Ballagi

text: Tiszaeszlár blood libel

text: Budapest

text: Land of Israel

text: Uzhhorod

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Ḥayim Sofer

text: Akiva Yosef Schlesinger

text: Jewish Congress

text: Zionism

text: Sámuel (Samu) Bettelheim

text: Mizraḥi

text: youth movements

text: Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Gisi Fleischmann

text: Mikha’el Dov Ber Weissmandel

text: Holocaust

text: Slovakia

glossary:
bet midrash
yeshiva
Torah
Haskalah
Talmud
Kolel
Neolog
Status Quo


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

abstract: (Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo po Zemel’nomu Ustroistvu Trudiashchikhsia Evreev v SSSR [All-Union Association for the Agricultural Settlement of Jewish Workers in the USSR], best known by its abbreviation OZET; Yid., GEZERD). Established in January 1925 in Moscow, OZET was headed by Iurii Larin (1882–1932) and his deputy Abram Bragin (1893–?). According to OZET’s charter, membership was open to individuals over 18 provided they had no criminal record as well as to groups with the exception of religious associations and political parties (e.g., He-Ḥaluts, Po‘ale Tsiyon). Initially, OZET’s main assignments were to publicize inside and outside the USSR the plans of Komitet po Zemel’nomu Ustroistvu Evreev (the State Committee for Settling Jews on the Land; KOMZET) to foster Jewish agriculture, and to collect funds for implementing those plans.

imgDesc: Dais at the first conference of GEZERD, Moscow, 1926. (Seated, first from right) Khaye Malke Lifshits (Ester Frumkin). (YIVO)

text: Moscow

text: Iurii Larin

text: Abram Bragin

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: USSR

text: agriculture

text: Evsektsiia

text: Zionists

text: Moscow

text: assimilation

text: Semen Dimanshtein

text: Tribuna

text: Birobidzhan


title: Bucharest

abstract: Capital of Romania. The first written reference to Bucharest (Rom., Bucureşti) is in a document dated September 1459, issued by Prince Vlad Țepeş (known as Vlad the Impaler) and referring to the “citadel of Bucureşti.” Situated in the south of Romania, Bucharest became, with occasional interruptions, the capital of Walachia as early as the sixteenth century. The town’s geographic location enabled it to expand by integrating and assimilating several villages, and it also experienced significant population growth during the eighteenth century. Given its economic importance, Bucharest attracted, besides Romanians from various regions of the country, a large number of foreigners, mainly from neighboring Balkan areas. Thus the city acquired a strong cosmopolitan character, with foreigners constituting approximately one-quarter of the population around the year 1800.

imgDesc: Bucharest, ca. 1927.

text: Romania

text: Walachia

text: Sephardic Jews

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Moldavia

text: Haskalah

text: Iuliu Barasch

text: Me’ir Leib ben Yeḥi’el Mikha’el

text: Haskalah

text: banking

text: Maurice Blank

text: pogroms

text: Egalitatea

text: Curierul Israelit

text: Mântuirea

text: Adam

text: theater

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: State Yiddish Theater

text: Adolphe Stern

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: Iacob Isac Niemirower

text: Şafran

text: Transnistria

text: Mozes Rosen


title: Patai, József

abstract: (1882–1953), poet, scholar, and Zionist leader. In his life and work, József Patai is representative of the first generation of Hungarian Zionist intellectuals. He changed his name from Klein to Patai after his birthplace, Gyöngyöspata, a small village in northern Hungary. Patai’s father was a grocer and Talmudic scholar, a follower first of the rebbe of Belz and then of the rebbe of Satmar. It was this world that Patai depicted in his lyrical social study, his most enduring prose work, A középső kapu (1927; new ed., 1998 [published in English as The Middle Gate; 1994]).

imgDesc: Múlt és Jövő, September 1916. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Hungary

text: Belz

text: Satmar

text: heder

text: yeshivas

text: Sátoraljaújhely

text: seminary

text: Múlt és Jövő

text: Emil Makai

text: Budapest

text: liturgy

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Avigdor Hame’iri

text: Miksa Szabolcsi

glossary: rebbe heder Neolog


title: Stein, August

abstract: (1854–1937), Hebrew scholar, translator, journalist, editor, and a founder of the Czech Jewish movement. August Stein was born in Nový Knín, near Dobříš, into a family of a liberal rabbi and teacher of religion. Stein studied law in Prague at the Charles Ferdinand University and received a doctorate in 1880. As a student, he worked as a clerk in the law office of Alois Zucker, a criminal law professor. At the same time, he served as private tutor to Bohuš Rieger, future professor and son of František Ladislav Rieger, leader of the Old Czech Party. Stein originally supported this party before becoming a Social Democrat.

text: Prague

text: Czechoslovakian republic

text: Gustav Sicher

text: Prague

text: Silesia


title: Social Conduct

abstract: East European Jewish civilization generated constantly evolving concepts of social conduct formed in relation to class, regional character, ideology, gender, and Jews’ relationships to non-Jews and non-Jewish culture. There was a continual tension between behavior that might be considered dictated by Jewish law and conduct beyond the strict scope of the law, and between that which was regarded as ethics and what was merely etiquette.

text: gender

text: relationships to non-Jews

text: yikhes

text: Litvak

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Musar movement

text: Hasidism

text: clothing

text: Haskalah

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

glossary: halakhah Torah Gaon Musar rebbe maskil Haskalah


title: Silberstein, Yesha‘yahu

abstract: (1857–1930), halakhist and Orthodox leader. Born in the southern Hungarian town of Zenta, Yesha‘yahu Silberstein was two years old when his family moved to Jerusalem. There he received his initial formal education within the framework of the traditionalist Yishuv system. He returned to Hungary as an 11-year-old, when his father was appointed rabbi of Bodrogkeresztúr. Throughout his early adulthood he continued to study under his father’s tutelage and to assist him in his rabbinical positions and in his yeshiva. Upon his father’s death in 1884, Silberstein succeeded him as chief rabbinical judge of the Orthodox community in Vác (Waitzen), not far from Budapest.

text: Hungary

text: yeshiva

text: Budapest

text: Orthodoxy

text: David Tsevi Katzburg

text: conversion

text: Zionism

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: approbation

text: Jewish Congress

text: Land of Israel

glossary:
Yishuv
yeshiva
Gaon
responsa
Neolog
Status Quo
Torah
Maimonides


title: Fuchs, Rudolf

abstract: (1890–1942), poet, playwright, essayist, translator, and promoter of Czech culture. After graduating from secondary school, Rudolf Fuchs completed a series of courses at the German Commercial Academy in Prague. From 1909 to 1911, he worked as a clerk in an export firm first in Berlin and then in Prague. He was conscripted in 1917; upon returning from the front, he continued in his job until his emigration to Britain in 1939.

text: Prague

text: Franz Werfel


title: Jakobovits, Tobias

abstract: (1887–1944), historian, librarian, and rabbi. Tobias Jakobovits was born in Lakompak (Lackenback), in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy. He studied at the yeshiva in Bratislava (Pressburg), and continued at a rabbinical seminary in Berlin and in the philosophical faculty at the German University in Prague.

imgDesc: Tobias Jakobovits sorting books from confiscated Jewish libraries under orders from the Nazis, Prague, ca. 1942. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: yeshiva

text: Bratislava

text: seminary

text: Prague

text: Czech lands

text: guilds

text: Kolín

text: Altneuschul

glossary: yeshiva Talmud


title: About this Article (Rabbinic Literature)

abstract: To survey religious and scholarly writings by East European rabbis, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first covering the period up to 1800 and the second from 1800 until 2000. For the role of the rabbi, see Rabbinate. For prayers and prayer books, see Liturgy; for sermons, see Preachers and Preaching. See also Talmud Study.

imgDesc: Title page of Seder tefilot ke-minhag ashkenaz u-polin (Order of the Prayers According to the Custom of Germany and Poland), by Rabbi Ya‘akov ben Yitsḥak Ashkenazi of Janów (Amsterdam, 1751). This book, first published in 1590, was written especially for women and included the complete text of the Tsene-rene, a popular Yiddish adaptation and paraphrase of the Pentateuch, haftarot, and megilot. (YIVO)

text: Rabbinate

text: Liturgy

text: Preachers and Preaching

text: Talmud Study


title: Katzenelson, Yehudah Leib-Binyamin

abstract: (1846–1917), Russian and Hebrew writer. Born in Chernigov, Russia, Yehudah Leib-Binyamin Katzenelson, who adopted the pseudonym Buki ben Yogli (the name of the head of the biblical tribe of Dan), grew up in Gomel. In 1861, he began his yeshiva education in Bobruisk, and while there he grew interested in the Haskalah.

imgDesc: Yehudah Leib-Binyamin Katzenelson. Painting by M. S. Yoffe, 1901. The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. (Image courtesy The Jewish National and University Library)

text: Russia

text: Gomel

text: yeshiva

text: Bobruisk

text: Haskalah

text: seminary

text: Zhitomir

text: Saint Petersburg

text: pogroms

text: agriculture

text: Ha-Yom

text: Yehudah Leib Kantor

text: Ha-Melits

text: Hebrew literature

text: Zionism

text: David Frishman

text: Ha-Dor

text: Simon Dubnow

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

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah Talmud


title: Merin, Mosheh

abstract: (1906–1943), Jewish council leader in Sosnowiec during World War II. A businessman active in local politics, Mosheh Merin became a Zionist representative on the Sosnowiec Jewish community council in January 1939. When the Germans occupied the city on 4 September of that year, he presented himself as the council’s representative, although he was not officially its chair. That same month, however, he was appointed head of the Sosnowiec Jewish council.

imgDesc: Mosheh Merin (right), the head of the Judenrat in the Sosnowiec ghetto, with Khayim Mordkhe Rumkowski, head of the Judenrat in the Łódź ghetto, during Merin’s visit to Łódź, ca. 1942. Photograph by Maliniak. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Silesia

text: ghettos

text: Judenräte

text: Bund

text: Będzin

text: labor camps

text: He-Ḥaluts


title: Eidel’man, Natan Iakovlevich

abstract: (1930–1989), historian, writer, and publicist. From 1947 to 1952, Natan Eidel’man studied history at Moscow State University. Despite his academic brilliance, he was unable to pursue graduate studies (aspirantura) after his father, the journalist Iakov Eidel’man, was arrested in 1950 on charges of “bourgeois nationalism.” Natan Eidel’man instead found a position teaching history at a night school near Moscow, where he worked from 1952 to 1955.

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union


title: Jászi, Oszkár

abstract: (1875–1957), sociologist, political scientist, editor, and politician. Born in the town of Nagykároly (Rom., Carei or Careŭ Mare), Oszkár Jászi came from a family whose original name was Jakubovits. In 1881, the family converted to Calvinism. Jászi was brought up in this spirit and never considered himself a Jew.

text: Budapest

text: Cluj

text: Romania

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Hungary


title: Hirschhorn, Samuel

abstract: (1876–1942), journalist, poet, translator, and political leader. Born into an affluent family in Slonim, Grodno province, Samuel (Shmuel) Hirschhorn moved to Warsaw when he was 13, where he completed commercial studies in addition to receiving a religious education. He began a career in journalism with the progressive Polish press, to which he contributed articles and poems, both original and translated from French and Russian.

text: Warsaw

text: Zionism

text: Kraków

text: Moriah

text: Jewish Writers and Journalists Association

text: Der moment

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Poland


title: Marczali, Henrik

abstract: (1856–1940), historian. Born Henrik Morgenstern, Marczali’s father was Mór Morgenstern (1824–1889), the Neolog rabbi of Marcali, Hungary (the family’s name change in 1875 was inspired by the town). Marczali attended Benedictine high schools in Győr and Pápa. He was 14 when he started studies at the University of Budapest, earning his history and geography teacher’s diploma in 1873. Between 1875 and 1877, he attended universities in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, and Oxford, and in 1878 earned a doctorate at the University of Budapest. Marczali became the most significant Hungarian historian from the 1880s until the first decade of the twentieth century.

text: Hungary

text: Pápa

text: Budapest

text: assimilation


title: Ullmann Family

abstract: Prominent family in nineteenth-century Hungary; active as rabbis and business leaders. The Ullmann (Ulman) family originated in Fürth and was related to the Steinhardt family. Isser Yisra’el Ullmann’s four sons—Shalom (d. 1825), Avraham (d. ca. 1823), Mosheh, and Zalman—went to Hungary in the late eighteenth century. The oldest brother, known as Shalom Ḥarif because of his sharp mind, served as rabbi of Ansbach, Germany, later of Stompfa (Stampfen) between 1792 and 1799, of Somogy county from 1799 to 1802, and of Frauenkirchen (Boldogasszony), before establishing an important yeshiva in the Burgenland community of Lakenbach (Lakompak).

text: Hungary

text: yeshiva

text: Burgenland

text: Orthodoxy

text: Oradea

text: Henrik Marczali

text: Jewish Congress

text: Temesvár

text: Zsigmond Kornfeld

text: Pressburg

text: Wodianer

text: banking

glossary:
yeshiva
Status Quo


title: Dance (Hasidism)

abstract: From the beginning of Hasidism, teachers associated with the movement considered dance, along with music, an avenue of worship. In Hasidic thought and literature, dancing is both an expression and a stimulator of joy, and as such has a therapeutic effect. It purifies the soul and produces spiritual uplift, unites the community, and enhances social relationships; the tsadik’s dance may even encourage repentance.

imgDesc: Tańczący chasydzi (Dancing Hasidim). Maurycy Gottlieb, ca. 1875. Pencil on paper. (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)

text: dance

text: music

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Mosheh Leib of Sasov

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Aharon Roth

text: Sandz

text: Vizhnits

text: Sabbath

text: Bratslav Hasidim

text: Lubavitch

text: Slonim

text: weddings

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

glossary: tsadik Torah Zohar rebbe


title: Ornea, Zigu

abstract: (1930–2001), literary historian and editor. Zigu Ornea (Orenstein) was born in Frumuşica, a village near Botoşani in northern Moldavia. In 1941, when racial laws enforced by Antonescu’s regime forcefully transferred Jewish inhabitants from their villages to the administrative center of each county, Ornea’s family moved to Botoşani, where he attended a Jewish high school. He studied philosophy at Bucharest University between 1951 and 1955, graduating after writing a dissertation on Romanian thought in the mid-nineteenth century.

text: Botoşani

text: Moldavia

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea


title: Rakous, Vojtěch

abstract: (1862–1935), pseudonym of Adalbert Östreicher, writer and journalist. Vojtěch Rakous attended school in a Czech village and at age 12 spent a year at a Jewish school in Brandýs nad Labem. At 13 he left for Prague and worked as an apprentice for a haberdashery; he also began to learn German. After nine years of vocational training, he returned to his native Brandýs area and lived in the village of Mrátín, working as a peddler and a grain merchant. In 1895 he went back to Prague, where he and his brother founded a footwear company; his brother operated the head office while Vojtěch took charge of the Libeň branch. Rakous was recognized by his contemporaries as a solid tradesman, but he apparently had a rough demeanor. Ultimately his business failed when a rival company entered the market.

text: Prague

text: Filip Bondy

text: Czech literature

text: pogroms

text: Galicia

text: assimilation


title: About this Article (Literary Criticism and Scholarship)

abstract: To treat the development of critical and scholarly writing about Jewish literature, this entry includes three articles. The first two treat criticism of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, respectively, detailing the major critics and scholars of literature in each language, the journals in which their writings appeared, and the major critical genres. Russian Literary Criticism takes note of important Jewish figures who developed the major schools of Russian criticism from the formalists through the Tartu School. See also Literary Journals.

imgDesc: Zalmen Reyzen, Poland, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Literary Journals


title: Weiss, Yitsḥak Hirsh

abstract: (1815–1905), scholar of rabbinic literature. Born in Velké Meziříčí (Ger., Gross-Meseritsch) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Yitsḥak Hirsh Weiss (known also by the German form of his name, Eisik Hirsch Weiss) attended heder in his native town. At the age of eight, he began studying at the local yeshiva, and spent the years 1828–1834 attending various other yeshivas in Moravia and Hungary.

text: rabbinic literature

text: Moravia

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Eisenstadt

text: Mikulov

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: seminary

text: Kolín

text: Poland

glossary:
heder
yeshiva
Talmud
tsadik
Mishnah
Bet ha-midrash


title: Brody

abstract: A town in present-day Ukraine, about 80 kilometers northeast of L’viv (Pol., Lwów). Brody (Yid., Brod) was founded at the ford over the Styr River (bród is Polish for ford) in 1586 by Stefan Żółkiewski. Jewish settlement began at the end of the sixteenth century and the local kehilah was subordinated to that of Lwów. In the early seventeenth century, an imposing masonry synagogue was built, generally referred to as Brody’s “old fortress synagogue.”

imgDesc: Jewish gymnasium (high school) students, Brody, Austrian Empire (now in Ukraine), 1906. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: L’viv

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Żółkiew

text: Council

text: crafts

text: Luts’k

text: kloyz

text: Hasidic movement

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Odessa

text: Haskalah

text: Shelomoh ben Yehudah Kluger

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Ya‘akov Shemu’el Bick

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Haskalah

text: Joseph Roth

text: Soviet Union

glossary: kehilah Haskalah


title: Mill, John

abstract: (1870–1952), political leader and Bundist activist. John Mill (also known as Yoysef Shloyme Mil) was one of the founders of the Jewish Labor Bund and a central activist during its first two decades. He was born in Panevėžys (Kovno province, Lithuania; then in tsarist Russia) to a family of acculturated Jews. Despite being exposed to some Yiddish at home, his first language was Russian, he studied in Russian public schools, and most of his childhood friends were Russian-speaking.

text: Bund

text: Panevėžys

text: Lithuania

text: Russia

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Rosa Luxemburg

text: Kovno

text: Białystok


title: Hirszfeld, Ludwik

abstract: (1884–1954), bacteriologist and serologist, creator of the Polish school of immunology. Ludwik Hirszfeld was born in Warsaw and studied medicine at the universities of Würzburg and Berlin, where he was graduated with highest honors in 1907. He then obtained a post at the Institute for the Study of Cancer in Heidelberg. Following his groundbreaking work, he transferred to the Institute of Serology, where in 1910 in collaboration with Emil von Dungern he demonstrated the hereditary factors of different blood groups. In 1911, he became a professor in the department of hygiene at the University of Zurich. During World War I he was in Serbia, where he organized efforts to combat a typhoid epidemic and discovered paratyphoid C. He was awarded honorary citizenship for his work by the king of that country.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Prague

text: Lublin

text: Wrocław


title: Ḥibat Tsiyon

abstract: Established in Russia and Romania in the early 1880s when concepts promoting modern Jewish nationalism began to spread from intellectual circles to the masses, the Ḥibat Tsiyon (Hibbat Zion; Love of Zion) movement was a pre-Zionist Jewish nationalist movement; its followers were called Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion). The founders of the movement were Perets Smolenskin, Mosheh Leib Lilienblum, and Eli‘ezer Perlmann (later Ben-Yehudah), who in the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s applied modern theories of nationalism to Jewish circumstances.

imgDesc: Delegates to the conference at which the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement was founded, Katowice, Poland, 1884. (Front row, center) Lev (Leon) Pinsker, author of the proto-Zionist manifesto Autoemancipation. (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Romania

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Land of Israel

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Lev (Leo) Pinsker

text: Katowice

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Romania

text: Ahad Ha-Am

glossary:
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Pale of Settlement
Diaspora
Uganda Project


title: Sterian, Margareta

abstract: (1897–1992), painter, set designer, woman of letters, and translator. Born in Buzău, Romania, to a middle-class family, Margareta Sterian attended the Ranson Academy and the École du Louvre in Paris between 1926 and 1929. On her return to Romania in 1929, she studied sociology at the University of Bucharest and participated in ethnographic research conducted by Dimitrie Gusti in the village of Drăguş. As a result of this experience, she produced a series of portraits, titled Copii din Drăguş (The Children of Drăguş), which was exhibited with other works at her first personal exhibition, organized in 1929 at the Mozart Hall in Bucharest.

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Marcel Iancu

text: Max Hermann Maxy

text: Budapest

text: Warsaw


title: Barukh ben Yeḥi’el of Mezhbizh

abstract: (ca. 1756–1811), Hasidic leader in Podolia. Barukh was the younger son of Odl, the Ba‘al Shem Tov’s daughter, and the brother of Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim of Sudilkov. As a child Barukh knew his famous grandfather, and after the Ba‘al Shem Tov’s death Barukh continued to be raised among the Hasidic leader’s most important disciples, among them Pinḥas of Korets, Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye, and Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh.

text: Hasidic

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim of Sudilkov

text: Pinḥas of Korets

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Land of Israel

text: Medzhibizh

text: Hershele Ostropolyer

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

glossary: tsadik Magid


title: Bernshtein, Sergei Natanovich

abstract: (1880–1968), mathematician. Born in Odessa, Sergei Bernshtein studied mathematics at both the Sorbonne and Göttingen, receiving his doctorate from the former in 1904. His dissertation presented the solution to Hilbert’s Nineteenth Problem, which dealt with analytic solutions of elliptic differential equations. Three famous mathematicians—Jacques Hadamard, Émile Picard, and Henri Poincaré—accepted his thesis. Upon arriving in Russia in 1905, however, Bernshtein learned that he would need to take general examinations and submit new dissertations for both master’s and doctoral degrees in order for his credentials to be recognized; he completed this work at Kharkov University.

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Kharkov

text: Moscow

text: USSR

text: Leonid Kantorovich


title: Krochmal, Naḥman

abstract: (1785–1840), leading figure of the Galician Haskalah; philosopher, biblical critic, and historian. Naḥman Krochmal was born in Brody; lived most of his life in Żółkiew (punctuated by a brief stay in Lemberg [Lwów]); and after a brief return to Brody, died in Tarnopol. He was an important influence on virtually all of the thinkers associated with the Haskalah in Eastern Europe, among them Shimshon Bloch, Tsevi Hirsh Chajes, Yitsḥak Erter, Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon, Me’ir Letteris, Tsevi Menaḥem (Hirsh Mendel) Pineles, Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, and Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr.

text: Haskalah

text: Brody

text: Żółkiew

text: Lemberg

text: Tarnopol

text: Haskalah

text: Tsevi Hirsh Chajes

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Me’ir Letteris

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: Galicia

text: rabbinic literature

text: Orthodoxy

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

glossary: Haskalah Kabbalah Maimonides Naḥmanides Talmud maskil Torah halakhah Mishnah Gemara agadah


title: Kaminski Family

abstract: Yiddish actors and theater directors. Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (1870–1926) and Avrom-Yitskhok Kaminski (1867–1918) were husband and wife; the most famous of their three children was their daughter Ida (1899–1980).

imgDesc: Yidishe bine (The Yiddish Stage), no. 2 (1924). A portrait of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, with the caption “The Mother of Yiddish theater,” appears on the cover of this journal of the Jewish Artists Association in Poland. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: shtetl

text: Grodno

text: Warsaw

text: Goldfadn

text: Russian Empire

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Zygmunt Turkow

text: Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater

text: Lwów

text: Moscow

text: Łódź

text: Wrocław


title: Makai, Emil

abstract: (1870–1901), poet, journalist, dramatist, and translator. In his life as well as in his work, Emil Makai was a paradigmatic figure for the first generation of Hungarian Jewish writers. His career exemplifies the path of Jewish intellectuals as they moved from the framework of Jewish life and literature into national Hungarian culture (writer József Kiss followed a similar pattern).

text: József Kiss

text: Hungarian literature

text: operetta

text: Hungary

text: love

text: Tamás Kobor

text: antisemitism


title: Romanian State Yiddish Theater

abstract: Established in Bucharest on 1 August 1948, the first Romanian State Yiddish Theater was located on the premises of the Baraşeum Theater in the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, where Jewish actors had given Romanian-language performances during World War II. Between 1944 and 1948, Yiddish actors performed for private groups or were subsidized by various cultural associations.

imgDesc: Actors of the Romanian State Yiddish Theater in Jacob Gordin’s Hershele Dubrovner, Bucharest, 1960. (YIVO)

text: Bucharest

text: Theater

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Transnistrian

text: Ury Benador

text: Israil Bercovici

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: S. An-ski

text: The Dybbuk

text: Habimah


title: Bragin, Abram Grigor’evich

abstract: (1893–?), agronomist and Soviet Jewish activist. Abram Bragin was a key figure in the movement to establish an official Jewish territory in the Soviet Union. Born in Krasnopole, Ukraine, Bragin studied law at Kiev University and belonged for a time to the socialist Zionist party Tse‘ire Tsiyon. His connection with Tse‘ire Tsiyon’s form of labor Zionism got Bragin interested in movements to the land as “solutions” to the “Jewish question.” Bragin therefore became more interested in agronomy and eventually became a leading agronomist who combined his training in agricultural production with principles of socialist Zionism to devise a program for settling Jews in farming colonies within the USSR.

text: Soviet Union

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Zionism

text: Crimea

text: agriculture

text: Mikhail Kol’tsov

text: Evsektsiia

text: Birobidzhan


title: Ballagi, Mór

abstract: (1815–1891), advocate of Magyarization, Protestant theologian, and Hungarian linguist. Born Moritz (Mordekhai) Bloch, Mór Ballagi’s first memories were of his father, a tenant farmer, imprisoned a year for debt, and of his mother searching for wild berries in the forest to feed the family. At an early age, Bloch learned to fend for his livelihood, sleeping in synagogues and living off charity. He studied at yeshivas in Nagyvárad (1829) and Pápa (1831), and only while working as a tutor at Mór and later Surány when he was 20 was he first exposed to Greek and Latin classics. In time, he also taught himself Hungarian, and studied classics, math, and history at the Pápa secondary school.

text: Nagyvárad

text: Pápa

text: Hungary

text: Löw Schwab

text: Pressburg

text: conversion

text: Leopold Löw

text: Ignác Goldziher

text: Yosef Natonek


title: Târgu Mureş

abstract: Town in north central Romania, on the Mureş River. A documented reference to Târgu Mureş (also Tîrgu Mureş; Ger., Neumarkt am Miresch, Marktstadt; Lat., Forum Siculorum; Hun., Maros-Vásárhely, Székelyvásárhely) dates to 1300. The first Jew who was granted the right to settle in the town, in 1828, was Iosif Vojtitz, a goldsmith. By 1830, the town had two Jewish families; and in 1833, there were 16 Jews living there. The census of 1838 recorded the presence of five Jewish families, made up of 36 inhabitants.

imgDesc: Synagogue service, Târgu Mureş, 1950s. (Centropa)

text: Romania

text: Congress of Jews

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary

text: ghettos

glossary: Neolog Talmud Torah


title: Wassercug, Mosheh

abstract: (d. after 1819), Polish Jewish memoirist. Born in the mid-eighteenth century in Skoki, near Poznań, the son of a textile and clothing merchant, Mosheh Wassercug seems to have died in Płock. His parents saw to it that he received a broad Jewish education, and he remained traditionally observant all his life. After his father’s death, he tried to continue in his footsteps but was unsuccessful and lost his inheritance.

text: Poznań

text: Poland


title: Poznański, Shemu’el Avraham

abstract: (1864–1921), rabbi, scholar, and bibliographer. Born in Lubraniets (Pol., Lubraniec), Shemu’el Avraham Poznański received a general and Jewish education from private tutors. In 1880, he moved to Warsaw and completed his studies in a realgymnasium (modern high school). In 1890, Poznański began to study at a number of institutions, including Berlin University, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (a rabbinical seminary and center for the scientific study of Judaism), and the Veitel Heine Institute. Greatly influenced by the bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), Poznański submitted his doctoral dissertation in philosophy and Semitic philology to the University of Heidelberg in 1894, and two years later was ordained as a rabbi in Berlin.

text: Warsaw

text: seminary

text: Moritz Steinschneider

text: Warsaw

text: Zionist movement

text: Tarbut

text: Mizraḥi

text: Karaites

glossary: Karaites Gaon


title: Sol’ts, Aron Aleksandrovich

abstract: (1872–1945), revolutionary and Soviet public figure. Aron Sol’ts was born near Vilna to a well-established merchant family. While a student in secondary school, he became active in worker revolutionary circles in Vilna. In 1895, Sol’ts enrolled in Saint Petersburg University and simultaneously began studying Marxism; in 1898 he joined the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party) and helped distribute the illegal paper Rabochee znamia (Workers’ Banner). He was expelled from the university for participating in the student demonstrations in 1899.

text: Soviet

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yulii Martov

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Moscow


title: Gurland, Ḥayim Yonah

abstract: (1843–1890), Russian Jewish intellectual and crown rabbi. Born in Kleck, Belorussia (mod. Kletsk, Belarus), Ḥayim Yonah Gurland received a maskilic education at the Vilna rabbinical seminary. After graduating in 1860, he was accepted at the University of Saint Petersburg, where he studied Semitic languages under the convert Daniil Khvol’son (Daniel Chwolson), whose work on the Babylonian god Tammuz he translated into Hebrew. Gurland also translated the fables of Lockman (Ar., Lugmān) from Arabic into Russian, and in 1863 was awarded a gold medal for his thesis on the influence of Arabic philosophy on Maimonides.

text: crown rabbi

text: Belarus

text: Vilna

text: seminary

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Daniil Khvol’son

text: Firkovich

text: Karaite

text: Ha-Karmel

text: proverbs

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: calendars

text: Zhitomir

text: Odessa

text: pogroms

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprisings

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: crown rabbi


title: Orten, Jiří

abstract: (Ohrenstein; 1919–1941), poet. Jiří Ohrenstein was the second of three sons of an assimilated Jewish family in the town of Kutná Hora near Prague. His parents owned a haberdashery; his father’s death in 1936 further intensified Jiří’s close relationship to his mother, an amateur actress who passed some of her theatrical talent and character on to her sons. In 1937 Jiří began drama school in Prague, after having failed the entrance exams the previous year. As a student, he began publishing in literary magazines, taking in 1936 the pseudonym Orten; he also participated in theatrical life, acting, adapting texts for the stage, and conceiving a fateful and futile love for the actress Věra Fingerová. Poetry, however, gradually emerged as his first love and true calling.

text: Prague


title: Smushkevich, Iakov Vladimirovich

abstract: (1902–1941), military pilot and air force lieutenant general. Iakov Smushkevich (Vol’fovich) was born in Rokishkes, Lithuania, the son of an itinerant tailor. As a child, he studied in a heder. In 1915, together with other World War I refugees, Smushkevich and his family were evacuated to Russia. There he joined the Red Army and the Communist Party in 1918, and participated in fighting on the western front. He became commissar of a battalion and then of a regiment. In 1922, Smushkevich joined the air force and in 1931 was appointed commander and commissar of an air force brigade.

text: Lithuania

text: heder

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Finland


title: Banat

abstract: Region in the southwestern section of Romania, between the Mureş and Danube Rivers. The oldest traces of a Jewish presence in the area date to the Roman period in the second through fourth centuries. A second-century coin issued by Shim‘on bar Kokhba discovered in Pojejena, as well as golden plates with Hebrew characters and Judaic symbols found in Dierna-Orşova, prove the existence of Jews among Roman colonists. After Banat became part of the medieval Hungarian kingdom in the eleventh century, the earliest reference to a Jew from the region dates to 1521 in the area of Caransebeş.

imgDesc: Third-century Hebrew inscription invoking God, from a golden plate found in Dierna-Orşova, Romania. (Centrul pentru Studiul Istoriei Evreilor din Romania)

text: Romania

text: Timişoara

text: Sephardic

text: Hungary

text: industry

text: trade

text: Poland

text: Tolerance Edict

text: crafts

text: guilds

text: Holocaust

text: Transylvania

text: Lugoj

text: assimilation

text: Zionism


title: Ignotus, Hugó

abstract: (1869–1949), writer, poet, critic, and editor. Hugó Ignotus’s father, Leo Veigelsberg (1846–1907) was a publicist and editor in chief of the leading German-language Hungarian daily Pester Lloyd. Ignotus (he formally adopted this pseudonym) was born in Pest but spent his childhood with his maternal grandfather in the Hungarian great plains. He went to high school in Budapest and completed law studies. While still young, he joined the editorial staff of the modernist literary weekly Hét (The Week), founded by József Kiss in 1890, and worked there between 1891 and 1906. Ignotus’s first book, A slemil keservei (Complaints of the Schlemiel; 1891), a narrative poem, received a favorable review by the leading literary critic of the time, Pál Gyulai.

text: Budapest

text: József Kiss

text: psychoanalysis

text: Hungary

text: assimilation

text: Lajos Hatvany

text: Miksa Fenyő

text: Aladár Komlós

text: Miklós Radnóti


title: Ceremonial and Decorative Art

abstract: The earliest examples of Ashkenazic Judaica (art used in the service of Jewish ceremony in the home or synagogue) date only to the High Middle Ages. Although texts confirm the existence of some types in prior centuries, there are no extant examples before the fourteenth century when the first kiddush cups, Hanukkah lamps (menorahs), and wedding rings were found at various sites in the German lands. Two new types were added in the sixteenth century: the tower-form spice container (used for the Havdalah service) and the Torah shield.

imgDesc: Spice container. Poland, 1810–1820. Silver: repoussé, cast, engraved, filigree, and parcel-gilt. The H. Ephraim and Mordecai Benguiat Family Collection, JM 34-51. Photograph by John Parnell. The Jewish Museum, New York (© The Jewish Museum / Art Resource, NY)

text: Poland

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: shpanyer arbet

text: paper-cut

text: calendars

text: Passover

text: Ashkenaz


title: Mincs, Vladimirs

abstract: (Mintz; 1872–1945), surgeon. Vladimirs Mincs’s father, Jehil Mikelis Mincs, moved to Riga from Daugavpils. Vladimir and his brother Pauls became prominent figures in Latvia and its Jewish community.

text: Riga

text: Daugavpils

text: Pauls

text: Latvia

text: Tartu

text: Estonia

text: Moscow

text: Fannie Kaplan


title: Piety

abstract: The complex of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors usually comprehended in the Hebrew phrase yir’at shamayim (lit., “awe [or reverence] of Heaven”) or the Yiddish word frumkayt, piety in Judaism is marked by a constant striving to live in God’s presence and to fulfill His will, both by conforming to the norms of strict Jewish practice and in terms of the inner direction of the heart. While there have been significant differences in the religious attitudes of Jews ranging across seven or eight centuries, across diverse subregions, and especially along the fault line of Hasidism and its opponents, some general characteristics of Jewish piety in Eastern Europe can still be described.

imgDesc: Women praying on Tishah b’Av, a day of fasting in commemoration of the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, Kraków, 1926. (Archiwum Dokumentacji Mechanicznej, courtesy Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)

text: Hasidism

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: poetry

text: Holocaust

text: life cycle

text: Ashkenaz

text: bet ha-midrash

text: tkhines

text: Tsene-rene

text: death

text: weddings

text: pilgrimage

text: Magid of Mezritsh

glossary:
Talmud
bet ha-midrash
halakhah
mikveh
Torah


title: Iser, Iosif

abstract: (1881–1958), painter and graphic artist. Born in Bucharest, Iosif Iser moved with his family to Ploieşti, where he completed his secondary education and showed early artistic promise. Beginning in 1899, he studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich, and had his first personal show upon returning to Ploieşti in 1904. He soon moved to Bucharest, where he worked as a cartoonist and caricaturist at the editorial office of the Adevărul newspaper. In 1905, he was part of the Tinerimea Artistică (Young Artists) group exhibit, and in 1906 had his first show in Bucharest.

text: Bucharest

text: Ploieşti

text: Romania


title: Igra, Meshulam ben Shimshon

abstract: (1742–1801), rabbi and halakhist. Born into a distinguished rabbinic family from Buczacz (Galicia), by age nine Meshulam ben Shimshon Igra had already presented a complex halakhic discourse in the study hall of the famous community of Brody. By age 17 he was appointed rabbi of Tysmenitsa (now Ukr., Tysmenytsya). There he attracted as students such future rabbinical leaders as Mordekhai Banet of Nikolsburg, Ya‘akov of Lissa, and Mosheh Münz of Óbuda.

text: Buczacz

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Mosheh Münz

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Bratislava

text: Hungary

text: Mosheh Sofer


title: Turán, Pál

abstract: (1910–1976), mathematician. As was the case with many of his contemporary mathematicians, Pál Turán (until 1919, Rosenfeld) entered a problem-solving contest sponsored by the Hungarian monthly journal Középiskolai Matematikai Lapok (Mathematical and Physical Journal for Secondary Schools). By the point at which the finest problem solvers entered the universities, they were already familiar with each other’s mathematical interests and strengths. At Pázmány Péter University, Turán was the student of Lipót Fejér, who came from a similar background. Turán received his Ph.D. in 1935.

text: Lipót Fejér

text: Pál Erdős

text: Seminary

text: Hungary

text: Budapest


title: Ganzfried, Shelomoh ben Yosef

abstract: (1804–1886), Hungarian rabbi and author. Born in Ungvár and orphaned at the age of eight, Shelomoh Ganzfried was raised by the chief rabbi of that city, Tsevi Hirsh Heller, and later followed him to Bonyhad. After his marriage he turned to commerce, but the failure of his business drew him to a rabbinical career.

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum

text: Leszno

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Avraham Danzig

text: Jewish Congress

text: seminary

text: Hungary

text: Orthodox

text: Avraham Danzig

glossary:
Torah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Neolog
mikveh
Talmud
Zohar


title: Rosenthal Family

abstract: Leading maskilim and shtadlanim (political leaders) of Hungarian Jewry. Naftali Rosenthal (Naftali Mohr; 1727–1798) was, after Koppel Theben, the most important lay national figure of eighteenth-century Hungarian Jewry. Eliyahu Rosenthal (Eliah Komorn; 1758–1833), Naftali’s elder son, was an adviser to the government on issues of Jewish rights. Later members of the family, including Naftali’s younger son Shelomoh Rosenthal (Shelomoh [Solomon] Mohr; 1763–1845), were active in the Haskalah and in Jewish cultural life.

text: Hungarian

text: Koppel Theben

text: Haskalah

text: Budapest

text: yeshiva

text: Prague

text: Pressburg

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Moravia

text: Mosheh Yisra’el Landau

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: rabbinate

text: Löw Schwab

text: Mosheh Kunitz

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Salomon Löwisohn

text: Moritz Gottlieb Saphir

text: seminary

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Warsaw

text: archives

text: Moscow

glossary: Haskalah yeshiva Talmud maskil Zohar Kabbalah


title: Imber, Shmuel Yankev

abstract: (1889–1942?), Yiddish and Polish author and critic. Shmuel Yankev Imber was born in the provincial town of Jezierna in eastern Galicia; his father was Shemaryahu Imber, a maskil Zionist author and nephew of Naftali Herz Imber (who wrote “Hatikvah”). In addition to obtaining a traditional Jewish education, Imber also studied at Polish gymnasiums in Zloczów and Tarnopol. He traveled briefly to Palestine in 1912 and began studying German and Oriental studies at the university in Lwów. In 1915, he was recruited into the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and was therefore unable to graduate.

imgDesc: “Vandere-glik” by Shmuel Yankev Imber, n.d. Poem by Shmuel Yankev Imber, “Vandere-glik” (Vagabond luck), n.d. "To Yoysef A. . . . My young friend—You laugh . . . you laugh . . . / My young friend . . . / Your teeth are like pearls— / My young friend. . . ." Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F5.5.5. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Tarnopol

text: Lwów

text: Shloyme Bikl

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Yiddish poetry

text: Warsaw

text: poetry

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Opinia

text: Chwila

text: Polish literature

text: Haynt

text: Soviet Union


title: Winter, Lev

abstract: (1876–1935), Czech Social Democratic politician, economist, theorist of socialism and social policy, commentator, and the author of numerous studies on economics and social law. After completing gymnasium, Lev Winter studied law and economics at Prague University. He was briefly active in Spolek Českých Akademiků Židů (Association of Czech Academic Jews) and then was a leading representative to the Kruhu Mladých Socialistických Intelektuálů (Circle of Young Socialist Intellectuals), where he worked with Alfred Meissner. Together the two also founded the socialist review Akademie.

text: Czech

text: Prague


title: Perl, Feliks

abstract: (1871–1927), leader of the Polish Socialist Party, writer, editor, and Polish parliamentarian. Born in Warsaw to a Polish-speaking, middle-class Jewish family, Feliks Perl was raised in a Polonizing household, his father having been arrested for participation in the anti-Russian Polish insurrection of 1863. After graduating from a Russian gymnasium in Warsaw, Perl entered the School of Law at Warsaw University, where he joined illegal radical circles and, in 1889, became active in an underground Polish revolutionary organization. In the wake of police repression, Perl fled to Germany in April 1892.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland


title: Rzeszów

abstract: (Yid., Rayshe, Reyshe), city in southeastern Poland. Founded in 1354, Rzeszów was a privately owned town until 1845. The first mention of Jews residing there dates from 1550. Rzeszów’s owners supported Jewish settlement, and by 1592, six Jews owned houses. Local Jews made their livings as traders and artisans. In 1648 the town’s Jewish population had risen to approximately 680, augmented by Jews fleeing westward from the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, 412 of the 473 merchants in Rzeszów were Jewish. By 1765, the number of Jews in the town had risen to about 1,200.

imgDesc: Great Synagogue, Rzeszów, Poland, ca. 1930 (Silent). Great Synagogue, built in the early 18th century, Rzeszów, Poland, 1930. (Film commissioned by landsmanshaft organizations in America: The Kolbuszower Relief Association and the Kolbuszower Young Men's Benevolent Society. While the film focuses on the town of Kolbuszowa, it also includes scenes from nearby villages and towns, such as Rzeszów.) (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Cossack uprising

text: Przemyśl

text: Zionist

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: ghetto

text: Holocaust


title: Levin, Khane

abstract: (1900–1969), Yiddish poet. Born in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Ukr., Dnipropetrovs’k) to the family of an undertaker, Khane Levin was educated at a school for poor children. She worked as a seamstress and a sales assistant. Initially, Levin wrote poems in Russian, but under the influence of Leyb Naydus, who lived in Ekaterinoslav in 1915, she switched to Yiddish. While living in Kharkov, she made her literary debut in the almanac Kunst-ring (Art Circle) in 1917. The following year, her poems appeared in the Petrograd weekly Folksblat (People’s Paper), edited by Nokhem Shtif.

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Leyb Naydus

text: Kharkov

text: Petrograd

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Perets Markish

text: I. J. Singer

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Yiddish literature

text: Minsk

text: literary journals

text: Di royte velt

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Khayim Gildin

text: Russia

text: folk songs

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Holocaust

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Chernivtsi

text: Birobidzhan


title: Iancu, Marcel

abstract: (1895–1984), plastic artist, architect, and art theorist. Marcel Iancu (Janco) was born in Bucharest. Even as a youth he contributed to the Simbolul review, and had occasion to meet Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea. He also studied painting and drawing with Iosif Iser. A pioneer of the avant-garde movement, Iancu’s style evolved from expressionism during the interwar period to an abstract mode during his later years in Israel.

text: Bucharest

text: Iosif Iser

text: Romania

text: Max Hermann Maxy

text: Habimah


title: Ghetto Police (Ghettos)

abstract: Officially called the Jewish Organization for the Maintenance of Public Order (Ger., Jüdischer Ordungsdienst; Pol., Żydowska Służba Porządkowa), Jewish police units were established under Nazi occupation in most East European ghettos. The establishment of a police force usually was connected with the creation of the ghettos, which excluded the Jewish population from general police jurisdiction and thus created a need for an alternative system of ensuring that the Jewish population complied with German occupiers’ orders. The absence of a general German order regarding the establishment of the Jewish police indicates that in all probability, it was the various local occupying forces—and not the Central Reich Government—that took the initiative to set up this force. Indeed, the composition of the Jewish police in different ghettos, their jurisdictional powers, and their status within the Jewish community varied from ghetto to ghetto, according to local conditions. A small ghetto could muster only a handful of individuals to join its police force, whereas the Warsaw ghetto police comprised more than 2,000 members.

imgDesc: Jewish police escorting Jews who were rounded up for deportation to the Auschwitz death camp during the summer of 1944, Łódź ghetto. Photograph by Henryk Ross. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Meed)

text: Warsaw

text: Judenräte

text: labor camps

text: killing centers

text: armed resistance

text: Soviet Union

text: Poland

text: Holocaust

text: honor courts


title: Criticism and Scholarship (Theater)

abstract: Criticism of and scholarship on Jewish theater in Eastern Europe have largely focused on Yiddish theater. Hebrew productions in Eastern Europe, however, nearly exclusively those of the Habimah company, were extensively reviewed in the contemporary Yiddish and Hebrew press, where they fueled a discourse on the issue of Jewish national rebirth. But histories of Habimah tend to focus on its work in Palestine and Israel. Jewish-themed theater in non-Jewish languages was regularly reviewed in the press, but little attention has been devoted to its history, with some recent exceptions. For Polish theater, there are studies by Michael C. Steinlauf, and critical and historical essays have been collected in a volume edited by Eleanora Udalska; for Russian theater, the work of Viktoriia Levitina is also to be noted.

text: Habimah

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Russian Revolution of 1905

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: heder

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Russian Empire

text: A. Vayter

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater

text: Yung-teater

text: Poland

text: Menakhem Kipnis

text: Haynt

text: Ber Karlinski

text: Der moment

text: Michał Weichert

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Jakub Appenszlak

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Kraków

text: Mojżesz Kanfer

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Der emes

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Soviet Union

text: communism

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Yitskhok Nusinov

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Yankev Shatzky

text: Zalmen Zylbercweig

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Aron Gurshteyn

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Holocaust

text: Khone Shmeruk

text: purim-shpiln

text: badkhn

text: Kraków

text: Łódź


title: Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich

abstract: (1890–1960), poet, prose writer, and translator. Boris Pasternak was raised in a highly cultured Moscow family. His mother Rozaliia (née Kaufman) was a pianist; his father, Leonid Osipovich, was a prominent artist and art professor. As a child, Pasternak first studied art and then music (Alexander Scriabin considered him a talented composer); he went on to study philosophy in Moscow and Marburg.

imgDesc: Title page of Sestra moia zhizn’ (My Sister, Life), by Boris Pasternak (Berlin, Petersburg, Moscow: Z. I. Grzebina, 1923). Portrait of the author by Iurii Annenkov. (YIVO)

text: Moscow

text: Leonid Osipovich

text: Soviet regime


title: Normalschulen

abstract: Originally the name of comprehensive elementary schools with four classes and a teachers’ seminar, established in the capital city of each province of the Habsburg monarchy in the 1770s. The Normalschulen were distinct from smaller schools (with one to three classes) in towns and villages, known as Hauptschulen and Trivialschulen. The term, however, soon became a synonym for all public schools that taught a modern curriculum, with an emphasis on secular subjects, and that applied a method focusing on an understanding of the subject (Normalmethode) rather than on mechanical repetitions.

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Prague

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Herz Homberg

text: Haskalah

text: Yosef Perl

text: Tarnopol

text: Bucovina

text: Czernowitz

text: Suceava


title: Gertsa

abstract: Town in Ukraine, close to the Romanian border; now part of the region of Chernivtsi. Jews settled in Gertsa (Rom., Herța) in the second half of the seventeenth century, the result of a privilege granted in 1672 by Prince Gheorghe Duca (renewed in 1817 and 1824). A yeshiva had been founded there in the eighteenth century. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Rabbi Eli‘ezer Volf, a Hasid, settled in the town.

imgDesc: Jews performing the rite of tashlikh on Rosh Hashanah on the outskirts of Gertsa, 1928. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Romanian

text: Chernivtsi

text: yeshiva

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Transnistria

text: Dorohoi


title: Tavernkeeping

abstract: Jews in Poland began leasing taverns and village breweries in the sixteenth century. This line of work developed rapidly, and by the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a significantly greater proportion of Jews involved in activities related to the production and sale of beer and vodka than in other Jewish communities in Europe. According to the census of Jews in 1764–1765, about 80 percent of the Jews living in villages and about 14 percent of those living in towns and cities were involved in these activities. In Podlasie, Podolia, and Mazovia, innkeepers made up some 55 percent of the total Jewish population.

imgDesc: Zhidovskaia kartshma (Jewish tavern). E. Iakovlev, Russia, 1868. Lithograph. (Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: leasing

text: economic life

text: credit

text: servants

text: Passover

text: heders

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Russia

text: Lithuania

text: Kovno

text: Vilna

text: Ukraine

text: Berdichev

glossary:
melamed
Council of Four Lands


title: Efimov, Boris Efimovich

abstract: (Fridliand; 1900–2008), Soviet political caricaturist and memoirist who was, for some time, the world's oldest living Jew. During his heyday, which lasted from the 1920s to the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Efimov was an obedient satirist whose brilliant cartoons depicted Soviet policy on the pages of its major newspapers and magazines: Izvestiia, Pravda, and Krokodil. His career was interrupted for several years following the arrest in 1938 of his brother, the writer Mikhail Kol’tsov, who was shot as an enemy of the people in 1940. Efimov was devoted to his brother, trying to secure his release even after—unbeknownst to him—Kol’tsov had been killed. Either because he was valuable to Stalin or because of the peculiar randomness of the Soviet Terror, Efimov himself was spared and brought back to his former position, at first anonymously. He was the recipient of numerous Soviet medals and was named a member of the Academy of Arts. In addition to many collections of cartoons, he published four volumes of memoirs, beginning at age 70 and ending at 100.

imgDesc: “Tied by a Single String.” Cartoon by Boris Efimov, Izvestiia, 7 January 1975. Two vultures fly above the Middle East. The top vulture is labeled “Interests of Oil Monopolies”; the bottom vulture, “Military Adventurism.”

text: Soviet Union

text: Mikhail Kol’tsov

text: Kiev

text: Białystok

text: Khar’kov

text: Trotsky

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Boris Slutskii


title: Hungarian Literature

abstract: Magyar was not the first modern literary language of Hungarian Jews; few were conversant in that language before the mid-nineteenth century. Jews in Hungary had undergone an earlier stage of linguistic assimilation toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, shifting from Yiddish to German, the medium of instruction of the schools initiated by Joseph II (1780–1790), as well as the language of the kingdom’s more important trading centers populated largely by German burghers.

imgDesc: Borsszem Jankó (Tom Thumb). Budapest, 17 March 1907. A humor publication founded and in its early years edited by Adolf Ágai. (General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: Hungary

text: assimilation

text: Moritz Gottlieb Saphir

text: Karl Beck

text: Mór Ballagi

text: conversion

text: Ignác Einhorn

text: Adolf Neustadt

text: Leopold Löw

text: Pápa

text: Poland

text: József Kiss

text: Adolf Ágai

text: Ignác Acsády

text: Sámuel Kohn

text: Ignác Goldziher

text: Budapest

text: seminary

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle

text: Múlt és Jövő

text: József Patai

text: Ignotus

text: József Kiss

text: Tamás Kóbor

text: Emil Makai

text: Oszkár Jászi

text: Sándor Bródy

text: Tamás Kóbor

text: Béla Balázs

text: Ferenc Molnár

text: Lajos Bíró

text: Ernő Szép

text: Lajos Hatvany

text: Ernő Szép

text: Ferenc Molnár

text: humor

text: Oradea

text: Holocaust

text: István Vas

text: Antal Szerb

text: Miklós Radnóti

text: Lajos Hatvany

text: Károly Pap

text: Aladár Komlós

text: József Patai

text: Zionism

text: Aladár Komlós

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Péter Újvári

text: Aladár Komlós

text: Miklós Radnóti

text: Károly Pap

text: Oszkár Jászi

text: Lajos Hatvany

text: Imre Fortunatus

text: Aladár Komlós

text: poetry

text: Ferenc Molnár

text: Lajos Bíró

text: Sándor Scheiber

subconcepts: A Defining Cultural Role: The Second and Third Generations


title: Tarbut

abstract: A network of secular Zionist educational institutions that functioned in Poland in the interwar period; the language of instruction was Hebrew. The network operated kindergartens, elementary schools, high schools, teachers’ seminaries, and agricultural schools. Additionally it provided pedagogical courses, evening classes for adults, and lending libraries; and published pedagogical journals, educational textbooks, and children’s journals.

imgDesc: A nature lesson at a Tarbut school, Pinsk, 1936. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: heder

text: Moscow

text: Evsektsiia

text: Warsaw

text: Land of Israel


title: Dnipropetrovs’k

abstract: Industrial city in eastern Ukraine. The Jewish community of Dnipropetrovs’k, a city with a population of more than 1,000,000, was in decline at the end of the twentieth century, but remained one of the largest in Ukraine. According to the 2001 population census, the “core” Jewish population was 22,000. The “extended” Jewish population (those meeting the requirements of Israel’s Law of Return) was estimated between 35,000 and 50,000.

imgDesc: Shoemaking workshop at Jewish Children’s Home No. 7, Dnipropetrovs’k, 1929. A Yiddish inscription on the back of the photograph presents it as a memento to Yiddish writer Avrom Reyzen, a visitor to the school. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: trade

text: industry

text: Pogroms

text: Bund

text: Zionist parties

text: Society for Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land

text: Holocaust

text: antisemitism

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Lubavitch

text: JDC

glossary: Talmud kolel Ḥabad


title: Shefner, Borekh

abstract: (1896–1977), Yiddish journalist and cultural activist. Born in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Borekh Shefner moved to Łódź with his family while he was still an infant. After receiving a traditional education, he traveled to Vilna in 1913 to study, but returned to Łódź a year later. There he became an active member of the Bund.

text: Łódź

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Warsaw

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists

text: Poland


title: Joselewicz, Berek

abstract: (1764–1809), colonel in the Polish Army. Berek Joselewicz was born in Kretynga (Lith., Kretinga), a small town near the city of Polągi (Lith., Palanga). After receiving a traditional Jewish education, he acted as provisioner and agent to the local landowner, Bishop Ignacy Jakub Massalski (1726–1794), in which capacity he also traveled to Western Europe. With the fortune he amassed through entrepreneurial activities, Joselewicz settled in the Warsaw suburb of Praga, where he married his wife Rokhl around 1788 and became a supplier to the army.

imgDesc: Waleczny Berko szef szwadronu (Dov Ber, Mighty Man of Valor, Colonel in the Polish Army). Artist unknown, Poland, 1861. Lithograph honoring Berek Joselewicz, with Polish and Hebrew inscriptions. (Muzeum Narodowe, Kraków)

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Lwów


title: Reich, Koppel

abstract: (1838–1929), rabbi and Orthodox leader. Born to a well-known rabbinic family, Koppel Reich grew up in Vérbo (now Vrbové, Slovakia) and studied at the Pressburg yeshiva under his relative Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer (Ketav Sofer). In 1880, Reich returned to Vérbo as chief rabbi. He was an outstanding orator and a skillful and energetic organizer. These qualities, along with his longevity, elevated him to the pinnacle of Hungarian Jewish leadership during his extended tenure as rabbi of the independent Orthodox community in Budapest (1890–1929).

text: Orthodox

text: Slovakia

text: Pressburg

text: yeshiva

text: Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer

text: Budapest

text: Jewish Congress

text: Esriel Hildesheimer


title: Tiszaeszlár Blood Libel

abstract: An accusation of Jewish ritual murder in the Hungarian village of Tiszaeszlár (before 1918, in Szabolcs county) led to the arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, and eventual trial of 13 Jewish defendants, April 1882–August 1883. The Tiszaeszlár affair began with the disappearance of a 14-year-old Christian girl named Eszter Solymosi on 1 April 1882. Over the next few days—partly in response to an ambiguous conversation that they had with one of the eventual defendants and partly inspired by their own preconceived notions—the girl’s mother and aunt came to the conclusion that she had been kidnapped and murdered by local Jews. At first, officials responded with incredulity to the women’s claims, advising them instead to “put such thoughts out of [their] mind[s].” Indeed, for several weeks the Tiszaeszlár affair was nothing more than a case of a missing person. Eventually, though, a series of factors led to a serious accusation of Jewish ritual murder.

imgDesc: Eszter Solymosi, after an original painting by Ludwig Ábrányi. From Tisza-Eszlár in der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, by Géza von Ónody (Budapest: Grimm, 1883). (Jewish National and University Library)

text: Hungary

text: antisemites

text: Budapest

text: Sabbath

text: blood libel

text: Pressburg

text: Poland

text: Russian Empire

text: Bohemia

text: Kiev

text: Ukraine


title: Blood Libels and Host Desecration Accusations

abstract: The blood libel was an accusation of Jewish “ritual murder,” which held that Jews kidnapped and murdered innocent Christians (particularly young boys) in order to make use of the blood of their victims for purposes of Jewish religious ritual. It had important historical and thematic connections to the accusation that Jews bought or stole consecrated Eucharist wafers (Hosts) in order to pierce them with sharp objects, thereby both desecrating them and subjecting them to torture. Both forms of anti-Jewish discourse derived ultimately from medieval Christian convictions that salvation could be obtained only through the blood of Christ.

imgDesc: “Mendel Beilis.” Postcard commemorating the blood libel trial of Mendel Beilis, ca. 1911. Artwork by Mitchell Loeb. The Yiddish verse reads: “Oh! This is the martyred Jew / Now his name is known around the world / He languished for years in prison / In the dark land of pogroms . . .” (YIVO)

text: Poznań

text: Kraków

text: Hungary

text: Breslau

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: conversionary

text: Kiev

text: Warsaw

text: Żytomierz

text: Frankists

text: Kamieniec–Podolski

text: Lwów

text: Council of Four Lands

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Daniil Khvol’son

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Tiszaeszlár

text: Ukraine

text: Hilsner

text: Mendel Beilis

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Kielce

text: Soviet Union

glossary:
Talmud
Council of Four Lands
Va‘ad Arba‘ Aratsot


title: Iakir, Iona Emmanuilovich

abstract: (1896–1937), military figure. Iona Iakir (also rendered Yona Yakir) was born in Kishinev to the family of a pharmacist. In 1913, he graduated from a Kishinev professional school and continued his studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. During World War I, he returned to Russia and studied at the Kharkov Institute of Technology. In 1915, he was sent as a conscript to Odessa, where he worked as a lathe operator in a military factory.

text: Kishinev

text: Russia

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: February 1917 Revolution

text: Bessarabia

text: Kiev

text: Ukraine

text: Crimea


title: Cajal, Nicolae

abstract: (1919–2004), scientist and Jewish community leader. Nicolae Cajal was born in Bucharest, the son of Marcu Cajal (1885–1972), a professor and one of the first specialists in pediatrics in Romania. Cajal graduated as a doctor in medicine and pharmacy from the Faculty of Medicine at Bucharest University (1946) and eventually took his degree as a doctor of medical sciences (1959). Specializing in microbiology and virology under the guidance of Ştefan Nicolau (1896–1967), Cajal became his professor’s spiritual heir and collaborator in 1945.

text: Bucharest

text: Romania


title: Brociner Family

abstract: Intellectual family, active in Romanian law, the arts, and the military during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The four Brociner brothers were born in Iaşi into a well-to-do maskilic family of Galician origin; they were related to Galician and Moldavian rabbinic families. Joseph B. Brociner (1846–1918) was a legal expert; Marco Brociner (1852–1942) a writer; Mauriciu Brociner (1855–1946) a military leader; and Andre Brociner (1856–1930) a communal activist.

text: Iaşi

text: Galician

text: Moldavian

text: Galați

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea

glossary:
publicist
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Ghelerter, Litman

abstract: (1873–1945), physician, socialist activist, and writer. Born in the Romanian city of Iaşi, Litman (Leon) Ghelerter attended a commercial high school. As a student at the Faculty of Medicine in Iaşi, he also took courses in law and taught at the Cultura school in Iaşi, a renowned “Israelite–Romanian” institution. Ghelerter earned his medical degree in 1899; his defense of his thesis on alcoholism revealed an interest in social medicine that informed his entire career.

text: Iaşi

text: Bucharest


title: Wexler, Max

abstract: (1870–1917), socialist activist and journalist. Max Wexler (Wechsler) was born in Iaşi, Romania. He studied philosophy in Brussels and completed his formal education at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Iaşi, where he then worked as a librarian.

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Leon (Litman) Ghelerter

text: Russia


title: Ronetti-Roman, Moise

abstract: (1847/53–1908), writer. Moise Ronetti-Roman (Aron Blumenfeld) was born into a Hasidic family in Jezierzany, Galicia (now Ozeryany, Ukr.); as a teenager, he moved to Moldavia and worked as a Hebrew tutor. In 1869, Ronetti-Roman left for Berlin to study medicine, philosophy, and philology, but did not graduate. In the same period, he contributed articles in Hebrew to Ha-Magid under the name Mosheh Roman. Throughout his life he avoided using his true surname and even kept his given name a secret.

text: Galicia

text: Moldavia

text: Ha-Magid

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Zionist

text: Iaşi


title: Psantir, Iacob

abstract: (1820–1902), historian and musician. Iacob Psantir (originally surnamed Zelig) was born in Botoşani, Romania, where his father, Asher, worked as an interpreter for the nobleman Scarlat Calimachi, and then for the French consulate in Iaşi. An orphan at the age of 11, Psantir finished his education at the Israelite Confessional Elementary School in Iaşi, where he learned to pray in Hebrew; the rest of his education was in Yiddish.

text: Botoşani

text: Romania

text: Iaşi

text: Moses Gaster

text: Iuliu Barasch


title: Stern, Adolphe

abstract: (1848–1931), politician, lawyer, diplomat, and man of letters. Adolphe (Avner) Stern was born in Bucharest, where his father was a jeweler. After completing high school in that city, Stern moved to Berlin to study law. He then defended a doctoral thesis in legal and administrative sciences, earning his degree in Leipzig in 1869. He was the first Jewish lawyer in Romania.

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Zionist

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: assimilation

text: Renaşterea Noastră


title: Mosheh Leib of Sasov

abstract: (ca. 1745–1807), Hasidic master in eastern Galicia. Mosheh Leib was born in Brody; his main teacher was Shemu’el Shmelke Horovitz, leader of a Hasidic center in Ryczywol and from 1766 head of the rabbinical court in Sieniawa. After returning from a stay with his master, Mosheh Leib settled in Apt (Opatów) and probably led a small Hasidic community there. During the 1780s, he moved to Sasov (Yid., more properly Sasev).

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Opatów

text: Hasidism

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon


title: Musar Movement

abstract: Educational movement and ethical program designed to promote and develop the teachings and practices introduced by Yisra’el Lipkin (Salanter; 1810–1883). Salanter’s broad notions for reinvigorating Jewish society gave way at the hands of his disciples to programs of educational reform within the circumscribed though culturally significant ambit of Lithuanian yeshivas, while his ideas gradually underwent dramatic reinterpretation and revision. Three schools of Musar had emerged by the close of the nineteenth century: the patient, pious self-cultivation of Kelem (Lith., Kelme), the near-humanist consciousness of Slobodka, and the ascetic radicalism of Novaredok (Nowógrodek; Novogrudok).

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

text: Yisra’el Lipkin

text: yeshivas

text: Slobodka

text: Kovno

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Lithuania

text: Telz

text: Finland

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Volozhin

text: Haskalah

text: Zionism

text: Slobodka yeshiva

text: Telz

text: Ha-Melits

text: Mir

text: Łomża

text: Slutsk

text: Shim‘on Shkop

text: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: Poland

text: Avraham Yesha‘yahu Karelits

text: Chaim Grade

text: Holocaust

glossary: Musar publicist kolel responsa Torah yeshiva Haskalah


title: Wat, Aleksander

abstract: (1900–1967), poet, prose writer, and publicist. Aleksander Wat (born Chwat) studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Warsaw. As a young poet, Wat cofounded the Polish futurist movement and participated in the drafting of its manifestos. He also coedited avant-garde literary journals and expressed his pro-Communist sympathies in the left-wing press. Imprisoned by the Soviets in 1940–1941, he spent the remainder of World War II in Kazakhstan and returned to Poland in 1946. Seriously ill, Wat traveled several times for treatment to France, where he eventually settled in 1963.

imgDesc: Portrait of a Man (Aleksander Wat). Aleksander Rafalowski, 1956. Oil on canvas. (© Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw, Poland / The Bridgeman Art Library)

text: Warsaw

text: Poland


title: Chorin, Aharon

abstract: (1766–1844), pioneer Reform rabbi. Aharon Chorin’s parents, Kalman Chorin and Schöndel, the daughter of Yesha‘yahu Donath of Boskowitz (Cz., Boskovice), engaged in modest petty trade, and moved to Deutschkreutz (Hun., Németkeresztur; Zehlemone) of Hungary’s “seven communities” in Burgenland in 1780. He attended the yeshiva at nearby Mattersdorf but spent his formative years in Prague during 1782 and 1783 studying at the yeshiva of Yeḥezkel Landau. Besides acquiring a first-class education in rabbinical literature, he became acquainted with other intellectual currents, such as the Enlightenment and mysticism.

text: Boskovice

text: Hungary

text: Burgenland

text: yeshiva

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Sabbatians

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Arad

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Moravia

text: Mosheh Münz

text: Sabbatianism

text: approbation

text: Mosheh Kunitz

text: religious Reform

text: Sabbath

text: Leopold Löw

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Timişoara

text: Pressburg

text: Újhely

text: Pest

text: Löw Schwab

text: Orthodoxy

text: Hungary

glossary: yeshiva Kabbalah maskil halakhah


title: Ginzburg, Moisei Iakovlevich

abstract: (1892–1946), architect, theorist, teacher, and a leader of the Constructivist group in Soviet avant-garde architecture. Moisei Ginzburg was born in Minsk into an architect’s family. With limited access to higher education in Russia, he went abroad for his architectural training. He gained a classical education in this field at the Academia di Belli Arti in Milan and then opted for more technical training at the Riga Polytechnical Institute, graduating in 1917. After spending four years in Crimea studying Tatar folk architecture, Ginzburg settled in Moscow, where he taught architectural history and theory at the Moscow High Technical School and in the architecture faculty at the Vkhutemas Art School.

text: Minsk

text: Russia

text: Riga

text: Crimea

text: Moscow


title: Zeman, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew newspaper. Published from 1903 to 1915, Ha-Zeman (The Time) was founded and edited by the journalist Bentsiyon Katz. Beginning publication in February 1903, during its first year it was published twice weekly in Saint Petersburg. At the end of 1903, the newspaper faced a financial crisis, and Katz enlisted the help of a wealthy Jewish businessman, Ya‘akov Eliyahu Rivkin, who accepted financial responsibility for issuing the newspaper and appointed his son-in-law, Feivel Margolin, as manager.

text: newspaper

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Russia

text: Shemu’el Leib Zitron

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Shemu’el Tchernowitz

text: Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Zionist

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Devorah Baron

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Kishinev


title: Volynskii, Akim L’vovich

abstract: (Pseudonym of Ḥayim Leibovich Flekser, 1861–1926), literary critic, historian, editor, and art theoretician (especially of ballet). Born in Zhitomir, Akim Volynskii was the son of a bookseller. He studied in a Russian high school in Zhitomir, but was expelled because of a conflict with a teacher, so that he did his matriculation exams as an extern. His first publication was a letter to the Jewish Russian newspaper Razsvet about an orphanage in Saint Petersburg (published in 1880). During the 1880s, he wrote articles on Jewish themes for the Jewish Russian periodicals Razsvet, Russkie evrei, and Voskhod. In 1884, he served as an editor of the Russian-language anthology Palestina, in which he published a review of Lev Pinsker’s Autoemancipation. In 1885, Volynskii published his essay “Teologo-politicheskoe uchenie Spinozy” (Spinoza’s Theological-Political Teaching) in Voskhod, and also wrote articles on the poet Shimen Frug and on the Bible in Russian poetry.

text: Zhitomir

text: Razsvet

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Voskhod

text: Lev Pinsker

text: Shimen Frug

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Nikolai Minskii

text: Russian literary criticism

text: Leah Goldberg