title: Hebrew (Language)

abstract: Hebrew in Eastern Europe (traditionally called in Hebrew and Yiddish loshn koydesh, “the holy tongue,” or by modernizers loshn ivri, sefas ever, or ivris) was never strictly speaking a vernacular, though Jews lacking a shared language did sometimes use it as a lingua franca. Rather, as throughout the Diaspora, it was to varying degrees a medium of study, writing, and recitation, part of a Jewish “polysystem” of two or more languages. Aside from Hebrew proper, the least lettered Jew employed a large stock of Hebraisms, many Judaism-specific, many not, if he or she spoke Yiddish; indeed, Yiddish was an incubator that kept Hebrew alive among the masses. At the same time, to season one’s Yiddish with Hebraic erudition or wit was the mark of an intellectual. This entry treats Hebrew proper.

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

text: Poland

text: Bundist

text: assimilation

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Hasidism

text: Russia

text: Zionists

text: youth movements

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Devorah Baron

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Holocaust

text: Prague

text: Sabbath

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: David Gans

text: Haskalah

text: Land of Israel

text: Me’ir Leib ben Yeḥi’el Mikha’el

text: prose

text: poetry

glossary: Diaspora Ḥaredi Responsa Talmud Haskalah


title: Credit

abstract: The role played by moneylending, relative to other Jewish occupations, fluctuated with the times in Eastern Europe. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, moneylending was by far the most dominant profession in which Polish Jews, for example, were employed, as members of the aristocracy would use the services of Jews as sources for both income and credit. The public’s attitude toward these lenders was ambivalent. On the one hand, lenders were always in demand, thanks to their ability to help those in need of a loan; on the other hand, they aroused feelings of tension and of discord by the very fact that they demanded repayments of loans, and profited by collecting interest (or, as it was sometimes disparagingly referred to, usury).

imgDesc: Members of the managing committee and staff of a gemilut ḥesed (free loan society) in front of the organization’s building on Y. L. Peretz Street, Pinsk, Poland (now in Belarus), ca. 1935. (YIVO)

text: leasing

text: Poland

text: money

text: Lublin

text: charity

text: Vilna

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: shtetl

text: Minsk

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Romania

text: Bessarabia

text: Lithuania

glossary:
arenda
Council of Four Lands
Pale of Settlement


title: Transnistria

abstract: The name given by Ion Antonescu, Romania’s pro-German dictator, to the Ukrainian region between the rivers Dniester and Bug occupied following the German–Romanian attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews died there during the occupation. Many of the victims were deportees from Bucovina and Bessarabia; of the 147,000 Jews sent to Transnistria from these areas between 1941 and 1943, at least 90,000 died, the majority of typhus and starvation. The number of Ukrainian Jews who were murdered or died from disease in Transnistria from September 1941 to November 1943 ranges from 130,000 to at least 170,000. A large number of these were shot by Romanians, who executed 15,000–20,000 Jews in Odessa in October 1941 in reprisals for the blowing up of the Romanian army headquarters, massacred 43,000–48,000 Jews in the district of Bogdanovka, and handed several thousand others over to local German settlers, who murdered them.

imgDesc: Jews from Dorohoi, Bucovina, being transported over the Dniester River to Transnistria, 10 June 1942. (Yad Vashem)

text: Romania

text: Soviet Union

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Odessa

text: ghettos

text: Republic of Moldova

text: Ukraine


title: Aczél, György

abstract: (1917–1991), Communist ideologue, cultural tsar of Hungary in the post-1956 Kádár era. György Aczél grew up in an orphanage, worked in construction, and performed as an actor. He participated in the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir youth movement and later joined the underground Communist Party in 1935. Arrested in 1942, he worked as a forced laborer. During the German occupation, he participated in the resistance movement and in rescuing Jews.

text: Hungary

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Budapest


title: Ringelblum, Emanuel

abstract: (1900–1944), Polish Jewish historian, relief worker, political activist, and organizer of the underground Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw ghetto. Born in Buczacz, Emanuel Ringelblum moved to Nowy Sącz in 1914. Under the influence of two friends, Raphael Mahler and Artur Eisenbach (also to become noted historians) Ringelblum joined Po‘ale Tsiyon, moving to the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon after the party’s split in 1920. He played a major role in the organization’s cultural work, where his passionate devotion to Yiddish, dedication to the Jewish masses, and fascination with Jewish history all began.

imgDesc: Hersh and Bluma Wasser, surviving members of Oyneg Shabes, with a portion of the secret archive buried in tin containers for safekeeping and recovered soon after the war in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: ghetto

text: Buczacz

text: Raphael Mahler

text: Artur Eisenbach

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: YIVO

text: Landkentenish

text: pogroms

text: Zbąszyń

text: archives

text: Rokhl Oyerbakh


title: Salus, Hugo

abstract: (1866–1929), poet and physician. Born in the exclusively German-speaking town of Böhmisch-Leipa (now Česká-Lípa in the Czech Republic), Salus studied medicine in Prague and stayed on to work as a gynecologist. In the 1890s, however, he dominated the literary scene in Prague, publishing lyric poetry in prominent fin-de-siècle magazines and in popular collections such as Ehefrühling (Springtime of Marriage; 1900), Die Blumenschale (The Flower Vase; 1908), and Glockenklang (The Sound of a Bell; 1911).

text: Czech Republic

text: Prague

text: Max Brod

text: Bohemia

text: Fritz Mauthner

text: Zionist


title: Rosen, Mozes

abstract: (1912–1994), Romanian rabbi and community leader. Mozes Rosen was born in Moineşti, Moldavia, to an Orthodox rabbinical family from Galicia. His father, Avram Rosen, was the rabbi of the community of Fălticeni. Rosen studied at the yeshiva of Vienna but was forced to leave when the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938. He also studied law at the University of Bucharest.

text: Moineşti

text: Moldavia

text: Orthodox

text: Galicia

text: yeshiva

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

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

text: USSR


title: L’viv

abstract: (Yid., Lemberg; Ger., Lemberg; Pol., Lwów; Rus., Lvov; Latin, Leopolis), city in contemporary western Ukraine, about 65 km (40 miles) from the border with Poland. Jews lived in the city from the time of its establishment in the mid-thirteenth century; some, mostly merchants, were Sephardic residents who later mingled with Askenazic immigrants. In the mid-fourteenth century, after its conquest by King Casimir III, the town permitted Jews to establish a quarter of their own within the walls of a new section built by the king. Two communities thus coexisted: the original and the center within the new walls—known as the Vorstadt (suburban) community.

imgDesc: L'viv, eighteenth century.

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Karaites

text: Walachia

text: Hungary

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Żółkiew

text: Brody

text: Reizes brothers

text: blood libel accusation

text: Frank

text: Galicia

text: Jewish German school

text: Haskalah

text: Herz Homberg

text: Yehudah Leib Mieses

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Hasidism

text: Orenstein

text: Belz Hasidim

text: Russia

text: Abraham Kohn

text: Ḥayim Natan Dembitzer

text: Salomon Buber

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Agudas Akhim

text: Zionist movement

text: pogroms

text: theater

text: Chwila

text: Leon Reich

text: Labor camps

text: Soviet

glossary:
Karaites
Council of Four Lands
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Haskalah

subconcepts:
The Premodern Period
The Austrian Period
World War I
Independent Poland
World War II
Soviet and Post-Soviet Period


title: About this Article (Yiddish Literature)

abstract: To survey the development of Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe from earliest times until the present, this entry comprises two articles. The first treats early (“Old Yiddish”) literature; the second treats Yiddish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For discussion of the Yiddish language from a linguistic perspective, see the relevant articles in the entry Language. See also Printing and Publishing.

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

text: Language

text: Printing and Publishing


title: Mysticism and Mystical Literature

abstract: In the period between the early thirteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, East European acquaintance with and creativity related to Jewish mysticism reflected the impact of Jewish mystical traditions that had originated in other major centers of Jewish culture: Germany, Spain, Italy, and Safed. East European interest in mysticism began in Bohemia and moved slowly eastward until the mid-eighteenth century, at which point the center of creativity in Jewish mystical literature was the eastern part of the region under scrutiny. In Eastern Europe, a minor center of Jewish population in the first centuries of this period, Jews were more receptive to mystical traditions than Jews in other areas of Jewish settlement, and became much more creative, original, and influential at its end. This survey attempts to highlight some main topics of the diverse body of East European Jewish literature that is described in scholarship as (vaguely) mystical, flowering in the different provinces of East European Jewish settlement over six centuries.

imgDesc: Wine cup. Poland, ca. 1890. Silver. Among some Hasidim, it was customary for rebbes to bless silver coins and bestow them upon their followers as protective amulets. These coins, known in Yiddish as shmires (protections) were sometimes melted down into kiddush cups. As seen in this rare example, the cups often had the Hebrew inscription “zeh ha-kesef shel tsadikim” (this is the silver of the righteous) and were decorated with a shield flanked by a lion and unicorn, symbols that carried messianic meaning. (Gross Family Collection)

text: Ashkenaz

text: Prague

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Mülhausen

text: Avigdor Kara

text: Land of Israel

text: Kiev

text: Kraków

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Horowitz

text: Prague

text: Natan Note Spira

text: Shimshon of Ostropol

text: Poland

text: Tsevi Hirsh Koidanover

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: kloyz

text: Brody

text: Hasidism

text: Misnagdim

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: Shklov

text: Salomon Maimon

text: magic

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Golem legend

text: Ḥayim Tyrer of Tshernovits

text: Zhidachov

text: Avraham Yitsḥak ha-Kohen Kook

text: Land of Israel

glossary:
Kabbalah
Torah
Rashi
Zohar
Lurianic Kabbalah
musar
Misnagdim
Gaon
tsadik
Diaspora


title: Liepāja

abstract: (Ger., Libau), Baltic port and the second largest city in Latvia. Jews began to arrive in Liepāja in 1795 and numbered more than 10,000 before World War I (for population, see Table 1).

imgDesc: Children from a children’s home maintained by the Central Jewish People’s Relief Committee in Liepāja, a center of Jewish life in Courland, on a forest outing, ca. 1920s. Photograph by E. Jacubovits. (YIVO)

text: Latvia

text: Russia

text: industry

text: Haskalah

text: rabbinate

text: pogroms

text: Bund

text: banks

text: credit

text: Soviet Union

glossary:
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Mark, Yudl

abstract: (1897–1975), Yiddish linguist, educator, and political activist. Born in Palanga, Lithuania (in the Russian Empire), Yudl Mark was educated by private Jewish teachers and at local Russian schools. From 1915 to 1918, he studied at the historical-philological faculty of Petrograd University. He belonged to historian Simon Dubnow’s intellectual circle, whose followers formed the Folkspartey, or Jewish People’s Party.

imgDesc: Letter from Yudl Mark to Nokhem Shtif, 1924. From Yudl Mark in Ukmergė, Lithuania, to Nokhem Shtif in Berlin (?), 15 July 1924. Mark is writing on behalf of one Nakhmen Dimanshteyn and another friend in Rezhitze to request that Shtif write an introduction to the duo's book of folk songs. Mark also mentions that he has recommended Shtif for the post of editor of Dos folk and apologizes for doing so without asking for Shtif's permission. He also discusses fundraising for a Jewish secondary school, and appeals to Shtif to lecture more widely on the subject of Yiddish literature. Yiddish. RG 3, Yiddish Literature and Language Collection, F2440. (YIVO. Published with permission.)

text: Lithuania

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Folkspartey

text: Zelig Kalmanovitch

text: Latvia

text: YIVO

text: Kovno

text: Di yidishe shprakh

text: Max Weinreich


title: Youth Movements

abstract: Jewish youth movements in Eastern Europe, particularly in the interwar period, achieved extraordinary strength, numbers, and influence as a result of a number of interelated contemporaneous factors, in addition to the particularly pressured conditions under which, for example, all of Polish Jewry lived. Factors included the tremendous expansion of state education (school attendance became mandatory in Galicia in 1867, and in all of Poland after World War I); the postponement of employment and marriage to a more advanced age; the new psychological and educational theories that recognized childhood and adolescence as stages of life with needs distinct from those of adulthood; and the undermining of traditional religious values, which in turn empowered young people to propose their own solutions to social and national problems.

imgDesc: Tsukunft meeting, Warsaw, 1930s. The speaker (standing, left) is Zalmen Fridrich. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: marriage

text: childhood

text: Russia

text: Bund

text: Zionist

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: sports

text: Yugnt

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Gordonia

text: Betar

text: Tseirey Agudas Yisroel

text: Folkism

text: Tsukunft

text: Bin

text: Max Weinreich

text: Zjednoczenie

text: Yugnt

text: General Zionists

text: Akiva

text: Revisionist

text: Tse‘ire Mizraḥi

text: Łódź

text: gender

text: Ukraine

text: Dror

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Mizraḥi

text: Tarbut

text: TSYSHO

text: Beys Yankev

text: Orthodox

text: Land of Israel

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Latvia

text: Slovakia

text: Carpathian Rus’

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Transylvania

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

text: Soviet Union

text: Silesia

glossary:
Congress Poland
Talmud
Torah
Diaspora

subconcepts:
Major Movements and Subdivisions
Links to Larger Organizations
Youth Movements outside Poland
Postwar Youth Movements in Poland


title: Vishniac, Roman

abstract: (1897–1990), photographer and biologist. Roman Vishniac’s photographs of East European Jewish life, which he took in the mid- to late 1930s, are today among the most widely familiar images of this “vanished world.” Though these photographs were but a small part of Vishniac’s lifework, they remain his best-known accomplishment as a photographer.

imgDesc: Bar Mitzvah boy, Lublin, Poland, ca. 1935-1938. Photograph by Roman Vishniac. (@ Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy The International Center of Photography, print courtesy YIVO)

text: photographer

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Czechoslovakia

text: YIVO

text: piety

text: Holocaust


title: Kuh, David

abstract: (ca. 1818–1879), journalist, politician, and poet. Born in Prague, David Kuh studied medicine and law there and in Vienna. From 1842 to 1844 he was a private tutor, first in Vienna and then briefly in Moravia. Kuh spent some time traveling with a group of itinerant actors. He subsequently founded German-language newspapers in Budapest and Pécs (Fünfkirchen). His agitation against the Slavs led to a two-year jail sentence (1848–1850).

text: Prague

text: Moravia

text: Budapest

text: Siegfried Kapper

text: Czechoslovakia


title: Litvak

abstract: (pl., Litvakes), Yiddish term for a Jew of historical, or “greater,” Lithuania. The Litvaks’ territory of origin is significantly larger than the borders of both the independent Lithuanian Republic of the interwar period (1918–1940)—which did not include the center of Litvak culture, Vilna (Vilnius)—and the contemporary state of Lithuania. From a Jewish cultural and historical perspective, Lite (Yiddish for Lithuania; Heb., Lita) includes large swaths of northeastern Poland (notably the Białystok and Suwałki regions), northern and western Belarus (notably the Grodno [Hrodna], Minsk, Slutsk, Pinsk, Brisk [Brest Litovsk], Shklov, Mogilev [Mohilev], Gomel [Homel’], and Vitebsk [Vitsyebsk] regions), southern Latvia (notably the Dvinsk [Daugavpils] region), and northeastern Prussia (notably the region of the Baltic port city Memel [Klaipėda]). This expansive definition of Lithuania in Jewish historiography and culture corresponds roughly to the large territory under the jurisdiction of the Lithuanian Jewish Council (Va‘ad Medinot Lita), which governed Lithuanian Jewish communal affairs from 1623 to 1764.

imgDesc: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Partitions of Poland. Boundaries shown are ca. 1795.

text: Lithuania

text: Vilnius

text: Poland

text: Białystok

text: Suwałki

text: Belarus

text: Hrodna

text: Minsk

text: Slutsk

text: Pinsk

text: Brest

text: Shklov

text: Homel’

text: Vitsyebsk

text: Latvia

text: Daugavpils

text: Prussia

text: Klaipėda

text: historiography

text: Council

text: Kaunas

text: Šiauliai

text: Russia

text: Hungary

text: Romania

text: Yiddish literature

text: music

text: theater

text: folklore

text: Galitsianers

text: food

text: dress

text: Galicia

text: Russian Empire

text: bet midrash

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Hasidism

text: Misnagdim

text: yeshivas

text: piety

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Holocaust

text: Volozhin

text: Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak of Volozhin

text: Mir

text: Slobodka

text: Slutsk

text: Telz

text: Musar Movement

text: Yisra’el Lipkin

text: Haskalah

text: Zionism

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

glossary: Torah Mishnah Talmud Misnagdim tsadik rebbe Gaon pilpul Haskalah


title: Franzos, Karl Emil

abstract: (1847/48–1904), writer, novelist, journalist, and publisher. Karl Emil Franzos was born in Czortków in Podolia (now Chortkiv, Ukr.), the son of a Galician mother and a physician father who was of Sephardic origin. After his father’s death in 1858, the family moved to Bucovina, where Franzos attended secondary school. He then studied law in Vienna and Graz, and during his university years belonged to a German nationalist student organization. From 1874 to 1876 he traveled to the eastern borderlands of the Habsburg monarchy and to Russia and Romania; these travels yielded material for the ethnographic vignettes that Franzos published first in the press and later as a book in a collection of “cultural pictures” titled Aus Halb-Asien (From Half-Asia; 1876). He next issued his first collection of stories, Die Juden von Barnow (The Jews of Barnow; 1877), depicting shtetl life. In 1877 he married Ottilie Benedikt in Vienna.

text: Bucovina

text: Russia

text: Romania

text: shtetl

text: Galicia

text: assimilation


title: About this Article (Prose)

abstract: This entry includes articles on fiction writing and the development of the novel 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: Malkah Shapiro, Poland, ca. 1910. (Nehemia Polen)

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: Sabbatianism

abstract: A messianic movement, established around Shabetai Tsevi (1626–1676), Sabbatianism (often Sabbateanism) erupted in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century and spread widely among Jews in Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

imgDesc: Areas of Sabbatian, Frankist, and Beshtian activity, eighteenth century. (Based on map 46, prepared by Michael K. Silber, in Evyatar Freisel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History, rev. ed. [New York, 1990], p. 50)

text: messianic movement

text: Vilna

text: Kraków

text: Berekhyah Berakh

text: Lwów

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

text: conversion

text: Poland

text: Slovakia

text: Russia

text: Lublin

text: Bohemia

text: Mordekhai of Eisenstadt

text: Prague

text: Żółkiew

text: Lithuania

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref

text: Mosheh ben Aharon ha-Kohen of Kraków

text: Yehudah Ḥasid ha-Levi

text: Ḥayim Malakh

text: Yehudah Leib Prossnitz

text: Yehudah Ḥasid

text: Ḥayim Malakh

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl Epstein

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Frankist

subconcepts:
Before the Apostasy
After the Apostasy


title: Zamenhof, Ludwik

abstract: (1859–1917), ophthalmologist, linguist, and inventor of Esperanto. Ludwik Zamenhof was born in the Polish border city of Białystok. Both his father, Markus, and his grandfather worked as foreign-language instructors. Zamenhof completed heder at 13 and from 1869 on attended a public secondary school. In 1873, his parents moved to Warsaw, where he began studying at a private secondary school that specialized in languages. From his youth Zamenhof occupied himself with poetry and drama; he wrote, among other pieces, a five-act tragedy based on the myth of the Tower of Babel.

imgDesc: Memorial ceremony at the tomb of Ludwik Zamenhof, in the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw, ca. 1917. The inscription on the tombstone is in Esperanto. (YIVO)

text: Białystok

text: heder

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Zionist

text: Grodno

text: World War I

text: Poland

glossary: heder Torah


title: Pipe, Shmuel Zaynvl

abstract: (1907–1943), Yiddish folklorist. Born in Sanok, central Galicia, Shmuel Pipe learned the tailoring trade from his father. He was active in the youth organization Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, advancing to the position of youth leader and educator. He became an enthusiastic collector for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna, submitting Yiddish folktales and songs, children’s games, and other folklore materials.

imgDesc: Letter from Moses Bruner to Shmuel Zaynvl Pipe, 1938. From Moses Bruner (Emil W. Brunner) in Lwów, Poland (now L'viv, Ukr.), to Shmuel Zaynvl Pipe in Vilna, 12 December 1938, reporting that he is sending him heder-related riddles and that Agudas Yisroel organized a literary evening in his honor at the largest hall in Lwów. Yiddish. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: YIVO

text: Vilna

text: songs

text: games

text: folklore

text: Yehudah Leib Cahan

text: Russia

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Mikhl Gordon

text: Przemyśl


title: Zuckerman, Yitsḥak

abstract: (1915–1981), Polish Zionist youth leader who was prominent in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Born in Vilna, Yitsḥak (Antek) Zuckerman studied at Tarbut schools and joined the Zionist youth movement He-Ḥaluts ha-Tsa‘ir. In 1936 he went to a hakhsharah (agricultural training) farm in Grochów near Warsaw and worked at the central office of He-Ḥaluts ha-Tsa‘ir. In 1938 he was appointed secretary general of the movement.

imgDesc: Yitsḥak Zuckerman delivering a speech at a memorial ceremony on the ruins of the former headquarters of the Warsaw ghetto Jewish council (Judenrat), 1947. Standing next to Zuckerman is Adolf Berman. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leah Lahav)

text: Zionist

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Tarbut

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Kraków

text: Lublin

text: armed resistance

text: youth movements

text: Dror

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Akiva

text: ghettos

text: labor camps

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland

text: Beriḥah

text: Mordekhai Anielewicz


title: Lejbowicz, Herszek

abstract: Eighteenth-century Lithuanian artist and engraver. Herszek Lejbowicz seems to have been born in Sokal, a small settlement not far from Minsk, sometime in the 1720s or 1730s. Nothing is known of his childhood years or education. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Lejb Zyskielowicz, working as a coppersmith and engraver. In the spring of 1747, Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł invited father and son to his palace at Nieśwież to prepare an album of family portraits.

imgDesc: Portrait of Barbara Radziwiłłowa. Herszek Lejbowicz. Copper engraving. From Icones familiae ducalis Radivillianae (Portraits of the Ducal Radziwiłł Family), 1758. (Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw)

text: Minsk

text: Lithuania

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Poland

text: Warsaw


title: Weltsch, Robert

abstract: (1891–1984), Zionist activist, journalist, and essayist. Robert Weltsch was born in Prague to one of the oldest and most respected Jewish families in the city. His father, attorney Theodore Weltsch, was active in local Jewish public affairs and at the turn of the century served as director general of the Centralverein zur Pflege Jüdischer Angelegenheiten (Central Society for Handling Jewish Affairs), founded in Prague in 1885.

text: Zionist

text: Prague

text: Bar Kochba

text: Selbstwehr

text: Hugo Bergmann

text: Hans Kohn


title: Reizes Brothers

abstract: (also Reizeles; Raices; and Ickowicz), rabbis and martyrs. Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak Reizes (1687–1728), a wealthy and educated man who knew Latin, served as a rabbi in Kamionka and a rabbinic judge in Lwów, and was a delegate to the Ruthenian Jewish council. His brother Yehoshu‘a ben Yitsḥak (1697–1728) was head of a yeshiva in Lwów.

text: Lwów

text: yeshiva

text: conversion


title: Moineşti

abstract: Town in the Moldavian region of Romania, in the county of Bacău. Located in an area of petroleum exploitation, Moineşti experienced Jewish settlement in the second half of the eighteenth century: one tombstone from the Jewish cemetery dates from 1748, another from 1787. In 1820, Moineşti was home to 42 Jewish taxpayers; by 1831, there were 93 Jews in the town; and in 1899, a total of 2,398 Jews represented 50.6 percent of the population. Later, this number diminished: in 1910, it had fallen to 2,141; in 1930 to 1,761; and in 1941 to 1,325. Jews were employed in crafts, local commerce, and the petroleum industry. Many were Hasidim, followers of Yitsḥak Friedman of Buhuşi or of Hersh Tsevi Landman of Bacău.

imgDesc: Srul Rayes with his youngest son, Moineşti, ca. 1900. (YIVO)

text: Moldavian

text: Romania

text: Bacău

text: crafts

text: Buhuşi

text: Bacău

text: Mozes Rosen

text: Land of Israel

text: Bessarabia

glossary: responsa Yishuv


title: Lima, Mosheh ben Yitsḥak Yehudah

abstract: (1605–1658), rabbi, halakhic authority, and author. Lima served as rabbi of Slonim (1637), Vilna (prior to 1650), and Brisk (1655). In Vilna he presided over the prestigious rabbinical court, where his associates included Efrayim ben Ya‘akov ha-Kohen and Shabetai ben-Me’ir ha-Kohen. Other prominent members of the court were Aharon Shemu’el ben Yisra’el Koidonover and Hillel ben Naftali Tsevi.

text: Vilna

text: Brisk

text: Shabetai ben-Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Aharon Shemu’el ben Yisra’el Koidonover

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh ben Yisra’el Isserles

text: Kraków

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
responsa


title: Tsefirah, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew newspaper. Ha-Tsefirah (The Morning or The Dawn) was the first Hebrew newspaper in Poland, founded in Warsaw and issued between 1862 and 1931. Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski established the paper as a weekly whose primary purpose was to report news concerning Jews and to provide popular articles about natural sciences and the latest inventions.

imgDesc: Ha-Tsefirah, 1862. An article in the paper’s first issue explaining the working of the telegraph one year after the first transcontinental telegraph system was established in North America and several years before the first successful transatlantic cable. (The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem)

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Hasidic

text: Zhitomir

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionism

text: Land of Israel

text: chess

text: humor

text: Yiddish literature

text: Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Ha-Asif

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ha-Melits

text: Russian Empire

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Yehudah Steinberg

text: Lipman Levin

text: David Shimonovitz

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Devorah Baron

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Sholem Asch

text: censors

text: David Frishman

text: Shemu’el Tchernowitz

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Fishel Lachower


title: Pinski, Dovid

abstract: (1872–1959), Yiddish prose writer and playwright. Dovid Pinksi was born in Mogilev, Belorussia, where he received a traditional and secular education and became acquainted with Russian literature and theater. At age 13, he moved to Moscow and tried his hand at writing in Russian. In 1890–1891, Pinski lived in Vitebsk and was active in the local chapter of Ḥoveve Tsiyon. A year later, on his way to Vienna, hoping to study medicine, Pinski stopped in Warsaw, where he met Y. L. Peretz. Pinski remained in that city from 1892 to 1896. His first pieces in Yiddish were marked by his close collaboration with Peretz and the latter’s circle, who were developing new and radical approaches to modern Yiddish literature in particular, and Jewish culture in general.

imgDesc: Dovid Pinski (right) with his cousins Hirshe Zhorov from Orenburg (seated, left) and Yoysef Tsaytlin (standing) from Mohilev, Russia (now in Belarus), 1894. Photograph by L. Perelmann. (YIVO)

text: prose

text: Belorussia

text: theater

text: Moscow

text: Vitebsk

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yiddish literature

text: censorship

text: Russia

text: Zionist

text: Habimah

text: Theater


title: Dymov, Osip

abstract: (1878–1950), Russian and Yiddish writer, playwright, and journalist. Osip Dymov (also Dymow; Yosef Perelman) was born in Białystok, where his father was a merchant; Dymov’s brother, Iakov (1882–1942), was a well-known popular-science writer. Following graduation from a technical high school in 1896, Dymov studied land surveying at the Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg. He began his literary career as a columnist for Teatr i iskusstvo (Theater and Art), a weekly in that city. As was the case with many Yiddish writers of his generation, Dymov immigrated to the United States.

text: Białystok

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Habimah


title: Gintsburg, Il’ia Iakovlevich

abstract: (1859–1939), sculptor. A child prodigy, Gintsburg was born in Grodno; he became a student of Mark Antokol’skii, who took him to Saint Petersburg in 1870. Gintsburg entered the Russian Academy in 1878 and received the official title of “academician” or professor in 1911. In the formative years of his career, he enjoyed a high degree of commercial success, concentrating in portraiture and small, highly detailed narrative sculptures. He was known primarily for his rendering of contemporary cultural figures “at work.” These included his portraits of the painter Vasilii Vereshchagin, the chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev, the writer Leo Tolstoy, and the composer and conductor Anton Rubinstein, most of whom he knew personally and described in his memoirs.

text: Grodno

text: Mark Antokol’skii

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow


title: Folk Songs

abstract: The Yiddish folk song was sung and disseminated by Jews primarily of Eastern Europe. It constitutes a lyrical reflection of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the Jewish people in Yiddish. The songs shed light on religious and secular practices and customs, holidays, and celebrations and convey personal insights into daily life and historical events. Manuscript collections of folk songs exist from as far back as the sixteenth century, although systematic collection and publication did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century.

imgDesc: 60 folks lieder mit notn by Menakhem Kipnis, 1918. Cover of Menakhem Kipnis, 60 folks lieder mit notn (60 Folk Songs with Notes; Warsaw: E. Gitlin, 1918). RG 112, Music Collection, F80. (YIVO)

text: Sabbath

text: holiday

text: wedding

text: dance

text: riddl

text: money

text: Shabetai Tsevi

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: pogroms

text: Odessa

text: Kiev

text: Białystok

text: Vilna

text: Kishinev

text: World War I

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Love

text: yikhes

text: Yiddish literature

text: Haskalah

text: Moisei Beregovskii

text: Haskalah

text: theater

text: Berl Broder

text: Elyokem Tsunzer

text: Mikhl Gordon

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz

text: Mark Varshavski

text: Mordkhe Gebirtig

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Odessa

text: liturgy

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yehudah Leib Cahan

text: Warsaw

text: Sha’ul M. Ginsburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Warsaw

text: Yo’el (Yoyel) Engel

text: Society for Jewish Folk Music

text: Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society

text: Ukraine

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Menakhem Kipnis

text: Shmuel Lehman

text: Shloyme Bastomski

text: YIVO

text: Shmuel Zaynvl Pipe

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Aleksandr Krein

glossary: Torah Haskalah

subconcepts: Songs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries


title: Weichert, Michał

abstract: (1890–1967), theater director, historian, critic, and communal activist. Born in Podhajce in eastern Galicia and raised in Stanisławów, Michał Weichert (Mikhl Vaykhert) received his education at heder and in Polish schools. He attended law and humanities programs at universities in Lwów, Vienna (receiving his J.D. in 1916), and Berlin; in the latter city, he studied avant-garde theater with Max Reinhardt. In 1918, Weichert settled in Warsaw.

imgDesc: Members of the Jewish Repertory Theater in a scene from the third act of Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death), by Georg Büchner, directed by Michał Weichert, at the Nowości Theater, Warsaw, 1930. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: theater

text: Galicia

text: Stanisławów

text: heder

text: Lwów

text: Warsaw

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Sholem Asch

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Hershele Ostropolyer

text: stage design

text: Yung-teater

text: Vilna

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Yiddish Actors Union

text: Kraków

text: ghettos


title: Yafeh, Mordekhai ben Avraham

abstract: (1525 or 1530–1612), rabbi, Talmudist, and kabbalist. Born in Prague, Mordekhai ben Avraham Yafeh (or Jaffe; called Ba‘al ha-Levushim [Author of the Levushim], after the name of his works) moved as a boy to Poland, where he studied under Shelomoh Luria and Mosheh Isserles. It was probably under the latter’s influence that he took up the subjects of astronomy and philosophy. Yafeh also studied Kabbalah under Matityahu Delacrut.

text: Prague

text: Poland

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: yeshiva

text: Bohemia

text: Grodno

text: Lublin

text: David Gans

text: Yehudah Leib

text: Poznań

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Ashkenazic Jews

text: Tykocin

text: Yehoshu‘a Falk

text: Binyamin Aharon Slonik

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel of Kraków

glossary:
Kabbalah
yeshiva
Council of the Four Lands
Rashi
Torah
halakhah
Arba‘ah turim
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Maimonides
Talmud


title: Naiditsch, Yitsḥak Asher

abstract: (1868–1949), manufacturer, Zionist activist, and philanthropist. Born in Pinsk where his father was a distiller, Yitsḥak Naiditsch was raised as a Karlin Hasid, though when he completed his heder education he was taught modern subjects and Russian by a tutor. At age 15, Naiditsch joined the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and formed a friendship with Chaim Weizmann. In 1889, Naiditsch settled in Moscow, where he built factories to produce liquor and invented a method to extract alcohol from potatoes. The Russian Ministry of Finance sent him abroad to promote trade.

text: Zionist

text: Pinsk

text: Karlin Hasid

text: heder

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Moscow

text: Ha-Zeman

text: USSR


title: Broda, Avraham ben Sha’ul

abstract: (ca. 1650–1717), rabbi and Talmudist. Born in Prague, Avraham ben Sha’ul Broda studied in Poland with Yitsḥak ben Ze’ev Ḥarif, later chief rabbi of Kraków. Returning to Bohemia, Broda lived in Bunzlau (Mladá Boleslav). He served as a rabbi in Lichtenstadt (Hroznětín) before 1692, and in Raudnitz (Roudnice) from 1692 to 1693.

text: Prague

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Bohemia

text: Mladá Boleslav

text: Ya‘akov Bassevi

text: yeshiva

text: David Oppenheim

text: Sabbatianism

text: Sabbath

glossary: yeshiva pilpul Talmud Torah


title: Prostějov

abstract: (Ger., Prossnitz), manufacturing town in the fertile Hána region of Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. Known as Jerusalem of the Hána, the Prostějov Jewish community, which was founded in the second half of the fifteenth century by Jews who had been expelled from Olomouc (Olmutz) in 1454, remained the second largest community in Moravia until the second half of the nineteenth century, rivaled only by Mikulov (Nikolsburg).

text: Moravia

text: Czech Republic

text: Mikulov

text: Menaḥem Krochmal

text: Gershon Ashkenazi

text: Sabbatianism

text: Yehudah Leib Prossnitz

text: Frankism

text: Brno

text: Haskalah

text: religious reform

text: Moritz Steinschneider

text: Löw Schwab

text: Holocaust

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Orthodoxy


title: Yehoshu‘a ben Aleksander ha-Kohen

abstract: (1555–1614), rabbinical scholar and halakhic authority. Yehoshu‘a ben Aleksander ha-Kohen, also known as Sema‘ (an acronym of the title of his Sefer me’irat ‘enayim, which is a commentary to the Ḥoshen mishpat portion of the Shulḥan ‘arukh) and by the name Falk, was born in Kraków, where he studied under his cousin, Mosheh Isserles. Subsequently, he moved to Lublin to study under Shelomoh Luria. For a while, he served as a rabbi in Ludmir. He married Beila, a learned daughter of Yisra’el Edels, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Lwów. (Beila Falk introduced two new rules regarding the lighting of candles on holidays; several prominent rabbis, including Yeḥezkel Segal-Landau, Ḥayim Yosef David Azulay, and the Ḥatam Sofer, endorsed her opinion as halakhah. After being widowed, she immigrated to Jerusalem.)

imgDesc: Woman at the tombstone of Yehoshu‘a Falk (ca. 1555–1614), rabbi and author of Sefer me’irat ‘enayim, a commentary on a portion of the Shulḥan ‘arukh, Lwów, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Kraków

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Lublin

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Ludmir

text: Lwów

text: yeshiva

text: Yesha‘yahu ben Avraham Horowitz

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Prague

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
halakhah
yeshiva
Council of Four Lands
Arba‘ah turim
responsa
Mishnah
Torah
Rashi


title: Apt Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Hasidic dynasty of the Heshel family, originating in the nineteenth century. Its main influence was in Podolia, Bucovina, Moldavia, and Bessarabia. The founder of the Apt dynasty was Avraham Yehoshu‘a Heshel (ca. 1748–1825), a disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk. Heshel was born in Żmigród Nowy in Galicia to a distinguished rabbinical family. By about 1786 he was rabbi of Kolbuszowa, where he first became acquainted with Hasidism and began to function as a rebbe. In 1800, Heshel went to serve as the rabbi of Apt (Opatów), and, as the “Apter Rebbe,” was known by the name of that town for the rest of his life, even when he became rabbi of Jassy (Iaşi; 1809) and, later, of Mezhbizh (Międzyboż, Medzhibizh; from 1814 until his death).

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

text: Bucovina

text: Moldavia

text: Bessarabia

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Galicia

text: Hasidism

text: Opatów

text: Iaşi

text: Medzhibizh

text: Land of Israel

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russia

text: approbations

text: Hasidism

text: Galicia

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Warsaw

glossary:
rebbe
tsadik
Pale of Settlement
Kabbalah
Torah
Ḥaredi


title: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

abstract: (1838–1933), prominent halakhic authority and Orthodox Jewish leader. Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen (Kagan; original surname Poupko), who became known as Ḥafets Ḥayim after the title of his first book, was one of the major rabbinical authorities of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has been regarded as a paragon of piety.

imgDesc: Funeral of Rabbi Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen (portrait inset), Radin, Poland, 1933. Photograph by R. Lejbowicz. (YIVO)

text: Orthodox

text: piety

text: Belarus

text: yeshiva

text: Vilna

text: Lithuania

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionist

text: Russia

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Shulḥan `arukh

glossary: yeshiva Talmud kolel Torah Mishnah


title: Ostrava

abstract: Coal-mining and industrial town in northern Moravia (near the Polish border) in today’s Czech Republic. Ostrava (Ger., Mährisch-Ostrau; known as Moravská Ostrava until 1918) was one of the youngest Jewish communities in Moravia. Like most mining towns in the Habsburg lands, Ostrava was off-limits to Jews until the late eighteenth century. One of its first Jewish inhabitants in modern times, a distiller, arrived in 1792, and the first regular prayer service took place in 1832. Jews began arriving in larger numbers after 1848, when Habsburg Jews were granted freedom of movement, and again after 1860, when residential restrictions were finally lifted.

text: Moravia

text: Czech Republic

text: Galicia

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Prague

text: Brno

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Jewish Party

text: Terezín

text: Silesia


title: Schnirelmann, Lev

abstract: (1905–1938), Soviet mathematician who contributed to the calculus of variations, topology, and number theory. Lev Schnirelmann went to Moscow in 1921, aged 16, and immediately enrolled at Moscow University. He was admitted without a formal high school diploma because mathematics professor Nikolai Luzin was impressed by his potential. Soon Schnirelmann became an active member of Luzitania, a group of young and talented mathematicians that formed around their professor. Later this group gave rise to the powerful Moscow mathematical school.

text: Soviet

text: Moscow


title: Fleck, Ludwik

abstract: (1896–1961), microbiologist and pioneer in the sociology of knowledge. Born in Lwów, Ludwik Fleck graduated from Lwów University’s medical school in 1920, eventually specializing in microbiology. In 1923 he married Ernestina Waldman; they had one son, Ryszard (Arieh), born in 1924. After 1925, Fleck headed a bacteriological laboratory at Lwów General Hospital and served as director of a private medical laboratory.

text: Lwów

text: Poland


title: Trumpeldor, Yosef

abstract: (1880–1920), Socialist Zionist leader; war hero. Yosef Trumpeldor was born in Piatigorsk, Russia, the son of a cantonist (a Jewish soldier inducted as a child into the army of Tsar Nicholas I). Trumpeldor grew up outside the Pale of Settlement, in Rostov-on-Don, and attended dentistry school but soon became active in the nascent Zionist movement. He was particularly attracted to its socialist camp, which was inspired by the ideas of Leo Tolstoy to “return to the land” and establish Jewish agricultural communes in Palestine.

imgDesc: Members of the Trumpeldor Zionist Organization celebrating on the eve of their departure for hakhsharah, a pioneer training farm, Riga, 1930s. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Russia

text: cantonist

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Rostov-on-Don

text: Zionist movement

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Revisionist Zionist

text: Betar

text: pilgrimage

text: memory


title: Doctors’ Plot

abstract: Antisemitic campaign that unfolded in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1953. The so-called Doctors’ Plot has historically been viewed as the culmination of the vicious antisemitic campaign undertaken by Stalin in the final years of his life. Stalin died before the last stage could be completed and since his death much speculation has grown up about his intentions, the extent of the action envisioned against the Jews, and the meaning of the episode in the context of the cold war.

text: Antisemitic

text: Soviet Union

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Moscow

text: Ilya Ehrenburg


abstract: (1916–1939; Yid., Fareyn fun Yidishe Literatn un Zhurnalistn in Varshe; Pol., Związek Literatów i Dziennikarzy Żydowskich w Warszawie), a trade union, advocacy group, and social meeting venue for writers. In March 1916—less then a year after Y. L. Peretz’s death—60 Jewish writers and journalists gathered at Hazomir Hall in Warsaw to establish a trade union. The first chair of the group was the Yiddish writer Yankev Dinezon and its initial location was at 13 Tłomackie Street, an address associated with the Jewish secular cultural movement. The premises functioned as a social meeting place not only for members, but also for actors, artists, teachers, guests from abroad, and others who were interested in Jewish secular culture. In addition, the association offered a large variety of literary and other activities, both for its members and for the general public.

imgDesc: (Bottom) Membership card from 1932 belonging to Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, from the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw, with (top) Singer’s press card as a reporter for Undzer ekspres from the same period. (YIVO)

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Warsaw

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Perets Markish

text: I. J. Singer

text: Yiddish literature

text: Bund

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Zeitlin

text: Sholem Asch


title: Mekhlis, Lev Zakharovich

abstract: (1889–1953), Communist Party activist and Soviet government official. Born in Odessa to the family of a minor official, from 1904 to 1911 Lev Mekhlis worked as a clerk and earned extra income by tutoring. From 1907 to 1910, he was a member of Po‘ale Tsiyon. Drafted in 1911, Mekhlis served as an artilleryman during World War I. In 1918 he joined the Bolshevik Party and was appointed to be a political officer in the Red Army with the rank of brigade commissar. He was later promoted to division commissar, eventually becoming corps commissar.

text: Communist Party

text: Odessa

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Moscow


title: Białystok

abstract: Industrial city in northeastern Poland, Białystok (Rus., Belostok) sits nestled in a heavily wooded area that divides central Poland from Belarus and Lithuania. The town, originally founded in 1320, remained part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1795, after which it became part of Prussia. In 1807, Białystok was incorporated into the Russian Empire, and in 1921 it fell under the aegis of the Second Polish Republic. As it shifted between these regimes, Białystok grew into a multiethnic, industrial city, home to Poles, Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, and an unusually large Jewish population—both in absolute numbers and in its percentage of the total population.

imgDesc: Jewish shops in Białystok with German, Yiddish, and Polish signs, during the German occupation of the city during World War I. (Left to right) M. Chodorowsky’s Wholesale Smoked Meats; Yitskhok Baran, Shoemaker; Wine, Beer, and Tea. (Tomasz Wisniewski, www.szukamypolski.com)

text: Poland

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: industry

text: Bund

text: Vilna

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Shemu’el Mohilewer

text: Ludwik Zamenhof

text: pogroms

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Zionism

text: World War I

text: philanthropy

text: Tarbut

text: Soviet Union


title: Reischer, Ya‘akov ben Yosef

abstract: (also known as Jakob Backofen or Back; ca. 1670–1733), rabbi, halakhic authority, and author. Probably born in Prague to a rabbinical family, Reischer studied under Rabbi Aharon Shim‘on Spira (presiding judge of the rabbinical court of Prague; 1610–1680) and Spira’s son Binyamin Volf Spira (d. 1715), the chief rabbi of Bohemia. Reischer married the latter’s daughter.

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: yeshiva

text: David Oppenheim

text: Sabbatians

text: Passover

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
yeshiva
responsa
Kabbalah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud


title: Rosenboim, Shimshon

abstract: (1860–1934), politician and Zionist leader. Born in Pinsk, Shimshon Rosenboim studied at the Volozhin yeshiva and, after obtaining a high school diploma, went on to study law at universities in Vienna and Odessa. He established a law practice in Minsk and was involved in a number of cases of a political character and seeking redress for pogrom victims. He was also very active in the Zionist movement, becoming one of its leaders in Russia and participating in the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and many subsequent congresses (he was among the leaders of the opposition to Herzl’s so-called Uganda plan in 1903). In 1906, he was elected to the Russian Duma (parliament), objecting strenuously when it was disbanded.

text: Zionist

text: Pinsk

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Odessa

text: Minsk

text: pogrom

text: Russia

text: minority rights


title: Morgenshtern, Yankev

abstract: (1820–1890), Yiddish author. Born in Piotrków, Poland, Yankev Morgenshtern subsequently moved to Łódź. He acquired the nickname Yankl Lerer (Yankl the Teacher) from his job teaching poor women the rudiments of elementary Hebrew and Yiddish writing. To make ends meet, he worked as a wedding jester and tried his hand at matchmaking. He later used the pseudonym Y. Katchko for his writings.

text: Piotrków

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Sabbath

text: demons

text: satire

text: Warsaw

text: Yung-teater

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk


title: Mosheh ben Aharon ha-Kohen of Kraków

abstract: (Johan Kemper; d. 1716), Sabbatian kabbalist; after his conversion to Christianity, lector in Hebrew at the University of Uppsala. Little is known about Mosheh ben Aharon’s early activity. It is certain that he was active in one of the groups linked to Yehudah Ḥasid, which around 1695 began to prepare to immigrate to Palestine in order to await Shabetai Tsevi’s second coming in Jerusalem.

text: Sabbatian

text: conversion

text: Yehudah Ḥasid

text: Grodno

text: conversion


title: Approbation

abstract: An approbation or haskamah (Heb., lit., “agreement” or “approval”; pl., haskamot) is an endorsement or expression of approval of the contents of a book intended for publication, usually placed near the beginning of the text. The practice of publishing haskamot arose from diverse and sometimes overlapping motivations notably as a consequence of efforts by Italian Jewish communal governments to avoid conflict with the church. There were independent motivations as well. Thus, some early haskamot sought to establish a form of copyright protecting the author or the printer. Haskamot endorsed and praised books and their authors, which increased their appeal to potential purchasers. Present from the beginning of printing in Eastern Europe, haskamot were the fruit of negotiations involving printers, authors, and endorsers.

imgDesc: An example of a haskamah from Nivḥar me-ḥaruts: Kitsur sefer ha-‘ikarim (Żółkiew, 1722). (YIVO)

text: Sabbatians

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Shemu’el ben Yisakhar Ber Segal

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: Yisra’el the Magid of Kozhenits

text: Sandzer rebbe

text: Yosef Sha’ul Natanson

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Haskalah

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

glossary: halakhah Haskalah maskil


title: Łomża

abstract: Town in northeastern Poland in the Mazovia region. By the fourteenth century, Jews had settled in Lomza, engaging mainly in trade in timber, salt, raw materials and in various crafts. In 1566 the town received the right de non tolerandis Judaeis (nontoleration of Jews), and so Jews resettled in suburbs and villages nearby. Only at the beginning of the eighteenth century did Jews return to Lomza itself, but their numbers were small, reaching 157 in 1808.

imgDesc: Rabbi Peysekh Golezynski, head of the Łomża Yeshiva from ca. 1885 until 1920, Łomża, 1923. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: trade

text: crafts

text: Misnagdim

text: Hasidim

text: Ger

text: Aleksander

text: Eliyahu ?ayim Meisel

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Puah Rakovsky

text: Zionists

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Mizra?i

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Revisionist Zionist

text: youth movements

text: He-?aluts

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: theater

text: sports

glossary:
de non tolerandis Judaeis
Misnagdim
Talmud
Torah
yeshiva
Haskalah
heder


title: Legal Institutions

abstract: The Jewish courts of Eastern Europe were for centuries a central dimension of autonomous Jewish life in the region: a fully functioning judicial system exercised authority over many aspects of Jewish communal life. The Jewish court system gradually fell into a state of decline, however, and by the early part of the twentieth century was limited in its authority to matters of ritual and family law. Earlier, the rabbinical courts (Heb., bate din; sg., bet din) and lay courts of individual communities and the regional courts of each medinah (province) not only determined matters of ritual law, but also served as the central courts with respect to commercial matters, family law, intercommunal disputes, and even many criminal matters.

imgDesc: Drawing depicting a Jew in kuna (stocks) in the anteroom of a synagogue. From Toyznt yor Pinsk (Thousand-Year-Old Pinsk) by Benzion Hoffmann (New York: Pinsker Branch 210, Workmens Circle, 1941). (Courtesy Roberta Newman)

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: yeshiva

text: Council

text: Lithuania

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Akiva Eger

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidism

text: Misnagdim

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Kraków

text: Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Mosheh Sofer

glossary:
halakhah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
responsa
yeshiva
Haskalah
Misnagdim
rebbe
Gaon
Torah
Council of Four Lands
Talmud

subconcepts: The Breadth and Scope of Judicial Autonomy


title: Everyday Life (Hasidism)

abstract: By the end of the eighteenth century, Hasidism, in its various groupings, was striking a responsive chord in ever-broadening circles of East European Jews. The central feature of Hasidism from its inception has been allegiance to a holy master (rebbe or tsadik) who has loyal followers. People do not qualify as Hasidim, no matter how great their admiration for Hadisic ideas, unless they are loyal to a particular rebbe, whether Belz, Satmar, Bobov, Lubavitch, Ger, or the like. The place where the rebbe resides defines where his “court” is located (the regal analogy holds), whence the Hasidim of that dynasty receive particular rules and acquire their individual identity and contribute to the upkeep according to their means. Thus, in pre-Holocaust times, the Belzer rebbe resided in Bełz in Galicia and the Gerer rebbe in Gur (Ger in Hasidic parlance) in Poland; the Belzer Hasidim, in the larger towns, had their Belzer prayer houses and the Gerer theirs. After the Holocaust, the rebbes who survived retained their old town names but, of course, lived elsewhere: the Belzer rebbe, for example, in Jerusalem, and the Gerer rebbe in Ashkelon.

imgDesc: The Stoliner Rebbe (either Yisra’el or Mosheh Perlov) and his followers on the way to his son’s wedding, Stolin, Poland (now in Belarus), n.d., ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Belzer

text: Galicia

text: Gerer

text: Poland

text: Sabbath

text: Sabbath

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Orthodox

text: bet midrash

text: yeshivas

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Prague

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: piety

text: Misnagdim

text: beards

text: dress

text: Hasidic dance

text: sexual

text: wedding

glossary:
rebbe
tsadik
Torah
Talmud
mikveh
Rashi
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Misnagdim


title: Bobruisk

abstract: City in the Mogilev province of Belarus. Bobruisk was home to a Jewish population by the end of the sixteenth century. In 1765, 395 Jews were recorded as having paid a poll tax. Bobruisk was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1793 and in 1808 had 504 Jews.

imgDesc: View of Bobruisk, ca. 1915. Postcard printed by L. Z. Dukhin Book Company, Bobruisk. (YIVO)

text: Belarus

text: Volozhin

text: yeshiva

text: Liepāja

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Bund

text: Zionist

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: heder

text: Fareynikte

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Blood libel

text: pogrom

text: antisemitism

text: calendars

glossary: yeshiva heder Magid Torah Aktion


title: Painting and Sculpture

abstract: [This entry focuses on artists in Russian lands. For discussion of visual artists of other regions, see the biographical entries on those listed in the "Visual and Performing Arts" section of the Synoptic Outline.]

imgDesc: The Watchmaker. Yehudah Pen, 1914. Oil on canvas. (National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus)

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: guilds

text: Kraków

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Zionist

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Aleksander Lesser

text: Maurycy Trębacz

text: Szmul Hirszenberg

text: Poland

text: Izidor Kaufmann

text: Hungary

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Russia

text: Alfred Nossig

text: Galicia

text: Leopold Pilichowski

text: Kishinev

text: Marc Chagall

text: Isaak Levitan

text: Leonid Pasternak

text: Sándor Bihari

text: Mark Antokol’skii

text: Léon Bakst

text: Robert Fal’k

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Vitebsk

text: Lithuania

text: Mordekhai Tsevi Mane

text: Vilna

text: Belarus

text: Minsk

text: Warsaw

text: Haynt

text: Marc Chagall

text: El Lissitzky

text: Solomon Iudovin

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: folk songs

text: ceremonial objects

text: proverbs

text: Gintsburg

text: S. An-sk

text: Ukraine

text: Jewish Ethnographic Museum

text: Natan Al’tman

text: El Lissitzky

text: Yisakhar Rybak

text: Kultur-lige

text: Passover

text: theater design

text: Kultur-lige

text: Aleksandr Tyshler

text: State Yiddish Chamber Theater

text: Yung-yidish

text: Soviet

text: shtetl

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Isaak Brodskii

text: memory

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

text: Artur Szyk

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

glossary: © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

subconcepts: The Genealogy of Jewish Art in Eastern Europe


title: Traditional and Instrumental Music (Music)

abstract: By the later sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries in Bohemia and then in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jewish musicians began to form their own guilds. The formation of guilds raised the social status of Jewish musicians, and led to the abandonment of the older term leyts (scoffer, clown), applied in Central Europe to singers, instrumentalists, clowns, and dancers, in favor of the new, more respectable term klezmer (from kele zemer, musical instruments or vessels of song; pl., klezmorim), designating exclusively an instrumentalist. The term klezmer made its way to Germany only in the eighteenth century, with the influx of Jewish musicians from Bohemia and Poland. Klezmer was a more favorable term for a Jewish musician, in contrast to the derogatory muzikant. This distinction persisted until the later nineteenth century, when Jews gained admission to conservatories in Russia and Austria-Hungary in significant numbers.

imgDesc: Klezmer musicians, Russia, ca. 1912. (The Russian Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia)

text: Bohemia

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: guilds

text: Russia

text: Hungary

text: Vilna

text: Lwów

text: Moldavia

text: Iaşi

text: badkhonim

text: Iaşi

text: weddings

text: crafts

text: Bessarabia

text: Holocaust

text: Soviet Union

text: dance

text: Purim

text: Passover

text: Sabbath

text: Lubavitch

text: Buhuşi

text: Bucovina

text: Prague

text: tsimbl

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: Moisei Beregovskii

text: Galicia

text: Transylvania

text: Berdichev

text: Brody

text: Tarnopol

text: Beltsy

text: Vitebsk

text: Galați

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yo’el Engel

text: Aleksandr Krein


title: Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim of Sudilkov

abstract: (1737/48–ca.1800), Hasidic author. Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim was born in Międzyboż (Yid., Mezhbizh; mod. Ukr., Medzhibizh); his mother, Edel, was the daughter of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht); his father was Yeḥi’el Mikhl Ashkenazi of Mezhbizh; and his younger brother was Barukh of Mezhbizh. Mosheh Ḥayim was a preacher in Sudylków (Yid., Sudilkov), Volhynia, where he lived until shortly before his death. He is remembered chiefly as the author of Degel maḥaneh Efrayim, which was printed by his son, Ya‘akov Yeḥi’el, in Korets in 1810. The book includes traditions and stories about the Besht, with whom Mosheh Ḥayim lived until the age of 12.

text: Medzhibizh

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Pinḥas Shapira of Korets

text: Misnagdim

text: Hasidism

glossary: Torah tsadik Misnagdim


title: Aszód, Yehudah

abstract: (1796–1866), rabbi and halakhic scholar. A leading figure in the Hungarian Orthodox rabbinate during the mid-nineteenth century, Yehudah Aszód achieved renown both as an expert halakhic adjudicator and as an outspoken opponent of educational and religious reform. Unlike some of his younger Hungarian contemporaries, however, Aszód did not promote a uniformly strict and antimodernist approach. Instead, he exemplified a more pragmatic and less doctrinaire Hungarian Orthodoxy than that which later became the norm. Toward the end of his life, he also gained a reputation as one who possessed great mystical abilities.

text: rabbinate

text: religious reform

text: Orthodoxy

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: yeshiva

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer

text: Slovakia

text: circumcision

text: seminary

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Eisenstadt


title: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

abstract: (1787–1859), original and controversial Hasidic thinker and leader. Menaḥem Mendel (originally surnamed Morgenstern) studied in the yeshiva of Zamość, where his academic talents impressed his teachers and fellow students. He was attracted to Hasidism and found his way to the court of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the Seer of Lublin; 1745–1815). There he also discovered a kindred spirit and mentor in Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Rabinowitz (the Holy Jew; 1766–1813) of Pshiskhe (Przysucha), and after the latter’s death he became a disciple of Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe (1765–1827).

text: yeshiva

text: Zamość

text: Hasidism

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

text: Vurke

text: piety

text: Passover

text: Ger dynasty

text: Poland

text: Sokhachev

text: Aleksander

text: Izhbits-Radzin

glossary: yeshiva tsadik Torah


title: Maccabi Movement

abstract: Zionist gymnastics and sports organization. The establishment at the end of the nineteenth century of a national Jewish gymnastic society in Europe can be explained as a reaction to mounting nationalism across the continent, with concomitant exclusion of minorities and heightened antisemitism. The Slavic Sokol (Hawk) gymnastics movement, founded in Prague in 1862, stood as a successful East European model to evoke national spirit on the athletic field.

imgDesc: Maccabi boxing team assembled  in a square, Kraków, Poland, ca. 1938. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Fred Eichner)

text: Zionist

text: sports

text: Prague

text: Bar Kochba

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: Kraków

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Russia

text: Odessa

text: Karlovy Vary

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: USSR


title: Samizdat

abstract: (lit., self-publication), the publication and circulation of uncensored materials in the Soviet Union. Samizdat was not exclusively a Jewish phenomenon: Soviet dissidents of all nationalities had recourse to this mode of expressing nonconformity and disseminating ideas from the late 1950s until glasnost. Jewish samizdat—uncensored works on Jewish subjects, produced by Jews for a Jewish readership, and disseminated among Jews—included periodicals, pamphlets, and even books.

text: Soviet Union

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Riga

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Holocaust

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Shimen Frug

text: assimilation

text: Leningradskii Evreiskii Al’manakh


title: Transportation

abstract: Jewish entrepreneurs and workers were concerned with various modes of transportation that navigated the great expanses of Eastern Europe began before the advent of the modern era. Widespread activity by Jews in domestic and interstate commerce led to an intimate knowledge of the passages and highways of Eastern Europe. The first Jewish merchants operated in groups and traveled in convoys, while simultaneously establishing inns, managing refreshment stations, and providing fodder for horses of other Jewish travelers. From this familiarity with travelers’ needs, the Jewish teamster was born. That Jews dominated this profession may be seen from the fact that the Hebrew word for coachman, ba‘al ‘agalah (Yid., balagole), was absorbed into a number of East European dialects.

imgDesc: Eight-four-year-old Pinkhus Karlinskii, supervisor of the Chernigov floodgate, on a ferry dock along the Marinskii Canal system, Russia, 1909. Photograph by Sergei Mikailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Prokudin-Gorskii Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsc-03951)

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Gdańsk

text: Riga

text: Gintsburg family

text: industry

text: Warsaw

text: Leopold Kronenberg

text: Jan Bloch

text: Ukraine

text: Łódź

text: Poliakov family

text: Kharkov

text: Pale of Settlement

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
Congress Poland


title: Crime and Criminals

abstract: In Western tradition, a number of factors combined to create the image of Jews as a group with a special propensity for criminal activity. Theological considerations were paramount in the premodern period when Jews were viewed as committers of deicide and as members of the “synagogue of Satan,” capable of any abomination. They were a threat to Christian souls (by propagating apostasy) and bodies (accused of poisoning wells or of ritual murder).

imgDesc: “Sonka of the Golden Hand,” a Jewish woman criminal, being put into irons, Sakhalin Island, Russia, 1915. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: trade

text: Shklov

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Oyzer Varshavski

text: shtetl

text: informers

text: Gintsburg

text: tavernkeeping

text: Pale of Settlement

text: kahal

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Isaac Babel

text: Odessa

text: Russian Civil War

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: antisemitic

text: Bund

text: Beilis Affair

glossary:
Talmud
Pale of Settlement
kahal

subconcepts:
Violations of the Criminal Code
Violations of Restrictive Legislation
Revolutionary Activity and Terrorism


title: Yitsḥak ben Mosheh of Vienna

abstract: (ca. 1180–ca. 1250), legal scholar. Usually referred to as Yitsḥak Or Zaru‘a from the title of his main work, Yitsḥak ben Mosheh was born in Bohemia. He studied in Prague with Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov ha-Lavan, the latter’s son Ya‘akov ben Yitsḥak, and Avraham ben ‘Azri’el (the “Old Man of Bohemia”).

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov ha-Lavan

text: Ashkenazic

glossary: Diaspora responsa


title: Medal’e, Shemaryahu Yosef Leib Iankelevich

abstract: (1873–1938), rabbi in Russia and the Soviet Union. Born in Kretinga, Lithuania, Shemaryahu Yosef Leib Medal’e received his rabbinic ordination from the Slobodka yeshiva. His marriage into a Hasidic family brought him close to Lubavitch. In 1898, he was appointed rabbi of the provincial capital of Tula, outside the Pale of Settlement, and had to learn Russian to communicate with his congregation. He became rabbi of Korelichi (Belarus) in 1901. In 1907, he was chosen as rabbi of the provincial capital Vitebsk, the city where he officiated for many years and with which he is generally identified.

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Lithuania

text: Slobodka yeshiva

text: Lubavitch

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Belarus

text: Vitebsk

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Evsektsiia

text: heder

text: Moscow

text: Rostov

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
heder
Torah


title: Pinsker, Simḥah and Lev

abstract: Secular Jewish figures active in nineteenth-century Russia. Simḥah Pinsker (1801–1864) was an educator and translator of Karaite documents; his son Lev (often Yehudah Leib or Leon; 1821–1891) was a leader of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement.

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: Karaite

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Tarnopol

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Avraam Firkovich

text: Poland

text: Moscow

text: Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews

text: pogroms

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Katowice

text: Zionist movement


title: Kőrösy, József

abstract: (1844–1906), statistician. József Kőrösy was born in Pest to a poor family, and was forced to interrupt his university studies as a consequence of his financial circumstances. He went to work for the Első Magyar Általános Biztosító Társaság (First Hungarian General Insurance Company), and was the economic columnist for the newspapers Pesti Napló (from 1868) and Reform (from 1870). He was appointed director of the Statistical Office of Budapest (Fővárosi Statisztikai Hivatal) in 1870. During the 30 years of his tenure in that position, he developed the agency into a renowned institution.

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: assimilation

text: Transylvania


title: Roth, Mosheh Aryeh

abstract: (1845–1906), rabbi and Zionist. A disciple of Rabbis Esriel Hildesheimer of Eisenstadt and Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer, Mosheh Aryeh Roth was born in Hanusfalva, Hungary, and married the daughter of his uncle, Mordechai Roth, the head of the Jewish community in Hunsdorf. After his marriage, Roth settled in Altendorf, near the Galician border.

text: Zionist

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Eisenstadt

text: Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer

text: Hungary

text: Orthodox

text: Jewish Congress

text: Pápa

text: Mosheh Shemu’el Glasner


title: Hausner, Bernard Dov

abstract: (1874–1938), Zionist leader, rabbi, and Polish consul in Palestine. Born in Czortków, Galicia, Bernard Hausner was involved in Zionist activity during his high school years. He was ordained by the rabbinical seminary in Vienna and received a doctorate in philosophy from the German University in Prague. When he returned to Galicia in 1903, he taught Jewish studies at the government high school in Lemberg (Lwów) and also participated in Zionist activities. As an administrator, he granted financial aid to needy students, and initiated programs to encourage the involvement of Galician Jewry in the fields of crafts, industry, and agriculture.

text: Zionist

text: Galicia

text: seminary

text: Prague

text: Lemberg

text: crafts

text: industry

text: agriculture

text: Mizraḥi

text: Poland


title: Oradea

abstract: City in western Romania, known in Hungarian as Nagyvárad or Várad and in German as Grosswardein. Oradea was part of Hungary until World War I and again between 1940 and 1944; it was the seat of the historical Bihar (Bihor) county. Jews were not allowed to settle within Nagyvárad’s city limits during the eighteenth century but were encouraged to settle in the adjoining district of Váralja, an independent community until 1848–1849, where they enjoyed the right to trade and acquire plots for houses. From the 1720s on, Jews were exempt from paying property taxes.

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: trade

text: Budapest

text: assimilation

text: Jewish Congress

text: Orthodoxy

text: yeshiva

text: Ullmann

text: Zionism

text: Mizraḥi

text: ghettos

glossary:
Neolog
Status Quo
yeshiva


title: Hebrew Poetry (Poetry)

abstract: Hebrew poetry in Eastern Europe emerged in a direct line from works written at the end of the eighteenth century in German Haskalah centers where Hebrew literature had first taken form. Naftali Herts Wessely, the most prominent Haskalah poet in Germany, exerted a pronounced influence on the genre; his Shire tif’eret (Songs of Praise; first composed in 1789) was a large-scale poetical epic paraphrasing the life of Moses through the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and described the giving of the Torah.

imgDesc: Title page of Ga‘ash (Turbulence), by Mili Novak (Moscow, 1923). (The Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: Me’ir ha-Levi Letteris

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Lithuania

text: Vilna

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: prose

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Yitsḥak Kaminer

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Mordekhai Tsevi Mane

text: Konstantin Abba Shapiro

text: Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki

text: Meshulam Zalman Goldbaum

text: Land of Israel

text: love

text: Land of Israel

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Julian Tuwim

text: Poland

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Kishinev

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Ya‘akov Steinberg

text: Ya‘akov Lerner

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: parody

text: David Shimonovitz

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Avigdor Hame’iri

text: Yehudah Karni

text: Russia

text: Yokheved Bat-Miriam

text: shtetl

text: Ḥayim Lenski

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Warsaw

text: Matityahu Shoham

text: Berl Pomerantz

text: Holocaust

text: Malki’el Lusternik

glossary: Haskalah Torah halakhah agadah Diaspora


title: Feder, Richard

abstract: (1875–1970), Czech rabbi. Richard Feder was born in Václavice (near Benešov, south of Prague). He studied philosophy in Vienna and also attended the rabbinical seminary in that city; he then served as a rabbi in Kojetín, Louny, and Roudnice nad Labem. From 1917 until 1942, Feder held a rabbinic position in Kolín. Each of these communities was located in the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia; sermons were delivered in Czech before World War I.

imgDesc: Richard Feder at a memorial ceremony at the former Terezín concentration camp, Czechoslovakia, 1969. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Prague

text: Kolín

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Terezín

text: Silesia

text: Brno

text: Gustav Sicher

text: Českožidovské listy

text: Židovské zprávy

text: Holocaust


title: Marriage

abstract: The institution of marriage in East European Jewish society remained largely traditional until the early twentieth century but also reflected broader transformations in general society. In the absence of civil marriage in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later in tsarist Russia, marriage belonged to the competence of the rabbi, who supervised wedding ceremonies and adjudicated divorce according to Jewish law. In contrast, following the Polish Partitions, the Habsburg Empire maintained an ambiguous separation of church and state in matters of family law. While the new marriage edict (16 January 1783) mandated civil unions and a German exam for all married couples, it allowed clergy to regulate divorces based on their own confessional laws. In the case of Jews, the rabbinic court upheld the requirement of a formal get (writ of divorce) even in cases involving male converts to Christianity. Despite the extension of the Toleranzpatent to Galicia in 1789, the majority of Jews evaded civil marriages and maintained traditional religious ceremonies for many decades thereafter.

imgDesc: Matchmaker (right) with a customer in front of “Elyoshkevitsh’s Fancy Goods,” Kaunas, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Russia

text: wedding ceremonies

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: yikhes

text: Pale of Settlement

text: assimilation

text: Abraham Hirszowicz

text: sexuality

text: love

text: gender

text: Yeḥezkel Kotik

text: Misnagdim

text: Vilna

text: conversion

text: Warsaw

text: Soviet Union

glossary:
get
Haskalah
Torah
Pale of Settlement
rebbe
Misnagdim
‘agunah


title: Shklov

abstract: (Bel., Sklou; Pol., Szkłów), district city in the Mogilev region, Belarus. Jews first received a charter to settle in Shklov in 1668. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shklov became an important commercial center, where, in the words of a visiting diplomat in 1699, Jews were “the richest and most influential class of people in the city.” In 1746, the Shklov kahal briefly seceded from the regional council of Jewish communities (Va‘ad Medinat Rusyah), due to a dispute over its heavy tax burden. According to the Polish census of 1766, there were 1,367 Jews in Shklov, the same number as in Minsk.

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

text: Belarus

text: kahal

text: Minsk

text: Russia

text: yeshiva

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Hasidism

text: Note Notkin

text: Haskalah

text: Land of Israel

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Zalman Shneour

glossary: kahal yeshiva Haskalah


title: Landau, Adolph

abstract: (1842–1902), publicist, editor, and publisher. Adolph Landau, first known as Aharon Landau, was born in Rassein, Kovno province, to a maskilic merchant’s family. He received a traditional Jewish education and studied at the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary (1855–1862). In 1860, he began publishing short articles about contemporary Jewish life; he wrote for various newspapers, including the Russian Jewish journals Razsvet and Sion.

text: Vilna

text: Razsvet

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Odessa

text: shtadlonim

text: Voskhod

text: pogroms

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionism


title: Mladá Boleslav

abstract: Town in Bohemia, 60 kilometers north of Prague. The presence of Jews in Mladá Boleslav (Ger., Jungbunzlau; known to Jews as Bumsla) was documented by the second half of the fifteenth century. Until the nineteenth century, Jews comprised roughly 10 percent of all inhabitants. The Jewish quarter there—together with those of Prague and Kolín—was among the most important in all of Bohemia.

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Kolín

text: Purim

text: archives

text: Lublin

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: El‘azar Fleckeles

text: Terezín

text: Ya


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

abstract: In the course of the nineteenth century, the geographical center of Hebrew and Yiddish printing shifted decisively to Eastern Europe. Demographic and cultural changes in European Jewry dovetailed with changing patterns of consumption and modes of reading. In addition, economic and technological transformations in the print industry helped to shape a new Jewish print culture. In this new environment, the premodern staples of the Jewish print corpus were joined and to some extent supplanted by Jewish versions of the media and genres common to the modern pan-European sphere.

imgDesc: Logo reading “Hotsa’at Avraham Yosef Shtibel.” From cover of Shire Anakre’on (Poems of Anacreon), by Sha’ul Tchernichowsky (Warsaw, 1920). (YIVO)

text: calendars

text: Tsene-rene

text: Shklov

text: Shapira family

text: Ukraine

text: Ostróg

text: Berdichev

text: Bak

text: Lwów

text: Zhovkva

text: Warsaw

text: Lithuania

text: Romm family

text: Vilna

text: Russian Empire

text: Poland

text: Fayvesh

text: Hasidism

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Tsene-rene

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov

text: Prague

text: Tarnopol

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: censorship

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Zhitomir

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Poznań

text: Samuel Orgelbrand

text: historiography

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Karaites

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Bucovina

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: Czernowitz

text: Hungary

text: Munkács

text: Orthodoxy

text: Pressburg

text: OPE

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Shomer

text: Kol mevaser

text: Voskhod

text: Izraelita

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ha-Asif

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Kiev

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Tushiyah

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Moriah

text: Boris Kletskin

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Kraków

text: Orthodoxy

text: newspaper

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Der fraynd

text: Haynt

text: Moment

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Yiddish literature

text: Moscow

text: Stybel

text: Kultur-lige

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: El Lissitzky

text: Piotrków

text: Literarishe tribune

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Radom

text: Będzin

text: Stanisławów

text: Soviet Union

text: Minsk

text: Der emes

glossary:
responsa
Kabbalah
musar
Talmud
Zohar
Haskalah
rebbe
Rashi
Congress Poland
Pale of Settlement
maskil
Karaites
Gaon
Magid


title: Sachs, Feliks

abstract: (1869–1935), Polish socialist, Yiddish writer and editor, and physician. Feliks Sachs was born in Warsaw to a lower middle-class Jewish family. A native Yiddish speaker, he completed gymnasium in 1888 and subsequently entered the faculty of medicine at Warsaw University, earning his degree in 1895. At the university, Sachs attended illegal meetings of radical students and became a convinced Marxist. In 1898, he joined the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and in 1899 sat on the executive committee of the party’s Warsaw division. Sachs coedited the party’s central organ, Robotnik, with Józef Piłsudski in 1899–1900.

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Russia


title: Vitsyebsk

abstract: City in Belarus. The first reference to Jews in Vitsyebsk (more commonly known to Jews as Vitebsk) dates from the mid-sixteenth century. In 1627 a synagogue was built and in 1634, Jews received permission to engage in commerce, have their own cemetery and synagogue, and buy houses and land in the town. In the organizational structure of the council (Va‘ad) of Jews in Lithuania, the Vitebsk community was under the jurisdiction of the community of Brest. Starting in 1706 Vitebsk Jews began recording community activities in their own pinkas. In 1765 sources record 667 Jews and, in 1772, when Vitebsk was incorporated into the Russian Empire, 1,227. In the eighteenth century Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel (of Vitebsk) and Shneur Zalman of Liady lived in the city. Late in the century Vitebsk became a main center of Lubavitch Hasidism, although Misnagdim continued to live there alongside the Hasidism. Among its well-known religious leaders were Rabbis Yitsḥak Aizik Bogorad and Yekuti’el Zalman Landa. In the nineteenth century the Jewish population increased from 2,973 (40% of the total population) in 1808 to 33,455 (51%) in 1897.

imgDesc: View of the Great Synagogue, or Uzgor’e Synagogue, a stronghold of the Misnagdim (opponents of Hasidism) and a meeting place for Zionists, on Suvorer Street in the business district, Vitsyebsk, 1910. A Yiddish inscription on the back of the photograph notes, “This is where the memorial for Herzl’s death took place.” (YIVO)

text: Belarus

text: council

text: Lithuania

text: Brest

text: Menaḥem Mendel

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: Misnagdim

text: Hasidism

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Moscow

text: Bund

text: heder

text: Marc Chagall

text: El Lissitzky

text: Solomon Iudovin

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Bund

text: Fareynikte

text: Zionists

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs

text: Evsektsiia

text: Soviet Russia

text: theater

text: Lubavitch

text: yeshiva

glossary: Misnagdim heder yeshiva


title: Life Cycle

abstract: The notion of life cycle may appear to reflect a natural human category, but is conditioned by social and cultural circumstances. Cultural elaboration of the special characteristics of “childhood” is associated with early modernity, and the idea of “adolescence” is connected with the Industrial Revolution, expansion of the middle class, extended education of young people, and their dependence on the family. Demographers claim that declining rates of infant mortality are followed by a reduction in birth rates and new images of family formation.

imgDesc: Bar mitzvah portrait of Yossel Fischer, Poland, early twentieth century. On the backdrop hangs a portrait of London Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore (1784–1885). (Gift of Mrs. Joseph Lempel, 1989.69. Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York)

text: childhood

text: rabbinic literature

text: circumcision

text: marriage

text: death

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: gender

text: dance

text: heder

text: birth

text: amulets

text: circumcision

text: Orthodoxy

text: Hungary

text: names

text: Heder

text: Passover

text: Sabbath

text: Lemberg

text: tkhines

text: weddings

text: yeshiva

text: Prague

text: yeshiva

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
heder
Torah
melamed
yeshiva


title: Folklore, Ethnography, and Anthropology

abstract: Jewish folklore and ethnography emerged as a field of study during the nineteenth century. As early as 1823, Leopold Zunz, a founder of the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums, outlined what a future “statistics” of the Jews should include: religion, education, occupations, language, government, pastimes, old buildings, tombstones, and “die Tradition,” which included legend, fable, and anecdote. By 1918, in a posthumously published essay, British folklorist Joseph Jacobs explicitly identified Zunz’s statistical outline as the ideal protocol for a Jewish Volkskunde (folkloristics).

imgDesc: Scene from Mekhires Yoysef (The Selling of Joseph), a Purim play presented at an ethnographic evening program at YIVO, Vilna, 1928. The Yiddish signs read (left) “Snake pit” and (center) “Dotan” [biblical site of the pit that Joseph was thrown into by his brothers]. Photograph by Moryc Grossman. (YIVO)

text: tombstones

text: proverbs

text: Globus

text: assimilation

text: Russia

text: cantors

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Kiev

text: Budapest

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

text: Sha’ul Ginsburg

text: folk songs

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Purim

text: Yiddish theater

text: dance

text: clothing

text: Society for Jewish Folk Music

text: Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport

text: Belorussia

text: satire

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Shklov

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Hasidism

text: autobiographies

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: Pauline Wengeroff

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Y. L. Cahan

text: Purim

text: Warsaw

text: Yankev Shatzky

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Shmuel Lehman

text: Regina Lilientalowa

text: wedding customs

text: childhood

text: holidays

text: YIVO

text: Max Weinreich

text: yeshiva

text: Soviet Union

text: Shmuel Zaynvl Pipe

text: Shloyme Bastomski

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Kharkov

text: Moscow

text: Jewish Historic-Ethnographic (or Archaeographic) Society

text: Moyshe (Moisei) Beregovskii

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: shtetl

text: Lithuania

text: Zionism

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Alter Druyanow

text: Odessa

text: Pale of Settlement

text: ghettos

text: Shmerke Kaczerginski

text: Holocaust

text: Łódź

text: Uman

glossary:
Diaspora
yeshiva
Talmud
Pale of Settlement


title: Hantke, Bernard Ludwik

abstract: (1826–1900), industrialist. Born in Warsaw to a family that had moved from the Poznań district in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, Bernard Hantke was raised in a Polonized home that had discarded Jewish traditions; he was educated in institutions attended by very few Jews. His grandfather had been a grain merchant in the Poznań district, and Hantke’s father, Adolph, owned a haberdashery store in Warsaw and was a moderately successful fabric merchant. Hantke’s sister’s conversion to Christianity led some biographers to assume that he too had converted, yet there is no documentary evidence to support this contention. Unlike most of the other Jewish entrepreneurs in contemporary Poland, Hantke made his initial fortune in farming and only later reinvested the money in industry—a path far more common for the non-Jewish industrialists of Congress Poland districts. He began his career as a farmer on an estate in Drybus, but soon returned to Warsaw to be a partner in a plant that manufactured agricultural machines and implements. In 1867 he founded a factory to produce chains, nails, and agricultural implements, and in 1879 he acquired the only factory in Warsaw that made rolled steel.

text: Warsaw

text: Poznań

text: conversion

text: industry

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Kielce


title: Iudovin, Solomon Borisovich

abstract: (1892–1954), artist. Solomon Iudovin (or in Yiddish, Yudovin) was born in the village of Beshenkovichi near Vitebsk, into a family of artisans. His first art teacher, beginning in 1906, was Yehudah Pen. In 1910 Iudovin moved to Saint Petersburg, where he studied initially at the School of the Society for Encouragement of Art, and then in 1911–1913 with Mstislav Dobujinsky, one of Chagall’s first teachers. He matured as an artist during the Russian Revolution, and spent the years 1918–1923 in Vitebsk, at that time an important center for the Russian avant-garde.

imgDesc: Okraina Vitebska (Outskirts of Vitebsk; 1927), from Graviury na dereve (Woodcuts), by I. Ioffe and E. Gollervakh (Leningrad, 1928). (YIVO)

text: Vitebsk

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Marc Chagall

text: El Lissitzky

text: An-ski ethnographic expedition

text: Ukraine

text: communism


title: Communist Party of the Soviet Union

abstract: Jews played a prominent role in the Communist Party from its inception: it came into being as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) in 1903, becoming the Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks; RCP[b]) in 1918, the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks; AUCP[b]) in 1925, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1952.

imgDesc: “For the Leninist General Line for the Party and the Comintern. Not One Step Away from Lenin’s Teachings!” Yiddish poster. Printed in Moscow, 1930s. (Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ludwig Jesselson, 1998.624. Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York)

text: Soviet Union

text: Bund

text: Iurii Kamenev

text: Maksim Litvinov

text: Karl Radek

text: Iakov Sverdlov

text: Leon Trotsky

text: Grigorii Zinov’ev

text: Lazar’ Kaganovich

text: Ian Gamarnik

text: Iurii Steklov

text: Genrikh Iagoda

text: Iona Iakir

text: Bund

text: Komfarband

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Evsektsiia

text: Belorussia

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Mikhail Mikhailov

text: Maksim Litvinov

text: Solomon Lozovskii

text: Ivan Maiskii

text: Iakov Smushkevich

text: Polina Zhemchuzhina

text: Lazar’ Kaganovich

text: Lev Mekhlis

text: Mark Mitin

text: Moldavia


title: Arad

abstract: Town in western Romania, in the Arad Plain on the Mureş River. From 1552 to 1687, Arad was claimed by the Turkish pashalik of Timişoara, and between 1687 and 1918 it was part of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Habsburg Empire and then of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first documented indication of a Jewish presence in Arad dates from 1717 when the commander of the town’s citadel, Baron Ştefan Cosa, agreed to allow two Jewish families to settle there. In 1743, there were 6 Jewish families; in 1754 there were 24; in 1767, 17 families with 71 people; and in 1784–1785, 30 families with 152 people.

imgDesc: Members of the Habonim Zionist hakhsharah (training farm) at the entrance to the mortuary of the Jewish cemetery, Arad, Romania, 1940. When the fascist regime confiscated Jewish-owned properties, Habonim members took on the task of becoming grave diggers in order to be able to raise vegetables on unused land in the cemetery and to use the area as a hiding place for materials owned by the movement. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Romania

text: Timişoara

text: Hungary

text: Aharon Chorin

text: reform

text: economic life

text: crafts

text: trade

text: banking

text: leasing

text: Congress of Jews

text: Transylvania

text: economic life

text: industry

text: Izidor Kaufmann

text: Holocaust


title: Broda Family

abstract: Rabbinic family, originating in Bohemia, that settled in Galicia, Lithuania, and Hungary. The surname Broda (Braude, Broide, Braudo) indicates that the family’s origins were likely in the city of Brod, though the name could also be a Hebrew acronym for bene rabanim ve-dayane emet (the sons of rabbis and judges of truth).

text: Bohemia

text: Galicia

text: Lithuania

text: Hungary

text: Mladá Boleslav

text: Prague

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Avraham Broda

text: Musar movement

text: Grodno

text: Lwów

text: Orenstein

text: Brisk

text: Russia

text: Rzeszów

text: Markus Braude

text: Stanisławów

text: Zionist

text: Kraków

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Kovno

text: Musar movement

glossary: Musar responsa Mishnah Talmud kolel


title: Naimark, Mark Aronovich

abstract: (1909–1978), Soviet mathematician. Born in Odessa into the family of an artist, Mark Naimark graduated from the Odessa Physics and Chemistry Institute in 1933 and became a graduate student at Odessa University. He began his scientific work under the guidance of Mark Krein. After completing graduate studies in 1936, Naimark was awarded the degree of candidate in physics and mathematical sciences. He worked at Odessa University from 1933 to 1938, and from 1938 to 1950 at the USSR Academy of Sciences.

text: Soviet

text: Odessa

text: Mark Krein

text: Moscow


title: Weidmann, František

abstract: (1910–1944), communal leader. Born in Prague, as a student in secondary school, František Weidmann became a member of Kapper Academic Society, the Czech Jewish student organization. He served as chair of the association from 1930 to 1931 while studying law. In contrast to the leadership of Svaz Čechů-židů (the Union of Czech Jews), which was mostly nationalist and anti-Zionist, Weidmann furthered the cooperation of the Kapper association with Czech-speaking Zionists from the Theodor Herzl Association. Influenced by Jindřich Kohn, the leading philosopher of Czech Jewish integration, Weidmann believed that Jews needed to unite in their fight against antisemitism.

text: Prague

text: Zionists

text: Jindřich Kohn

text: antisemitism

text: Czech lands

text: Theresienstadt

text: Jindřich Kohn

text: Eduard Lederer


title: Folkists

abstract: Political party that sought Jewish national autonomy in the Diaspora. Following the 1905 Russian Revolution, a small circle of public intellectuals organized under the leadership of the historian Simon Dubnow and Yisroel Efroikin to form the Folkspartey (Folks Party) in Saint Petersburg in 1906. The party, whose leadership also included Meir Kreinin, S. An-ski, Ya‘akov Ze’ev Latzky-Bertholdi, Nokhem Shtif, and Joseph Tschernikov, advanced a platform based on Dubnow’s doctrine of Diaspora Nationalism (autonomism) as expounded in his Pisma o starom i novom evreistve (Letters on Old and New Judaism; 1907).

imgDesc: Vote for the Jewish Folkspartey." Yiddish poster. Artwork by Solomon Borisovich Iudovin. Printed by B. Sokolov, 1918. (YIVO)

text: 1905 Russian Revolution

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: S. An-ski

text: Ya‘akov Ze’ev Latzky-Bertholdi

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russian Empire

text: Bund

text: Zionists

text: Poland

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Samuel Hirschhorn

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Warsaw

text: Der Moment

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Łódź

text: Vilna

text: Tsemaḥ Szabad

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

glossary:
Diaspora
Pale of Settlement