title: Shoham, Matityahu

abstract: (Poliakewicz; 1893–1937), Hebrew poet and playwright. Matityahu Shoham was born to an affluent family in Warsaw. As a student, he read the classics of Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and German literature. In 1915, he married the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Warsaw, and for the next few years enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. In 1919, David Frishman published Shoham’s first poem in the prominent journal Ha-Tekufah, exposing him to literary circles.

text: Warsaw

text: David Frishman


title: Fahn, Re’uven

abstract: (1878–1939), Hebrew scholar and writer. Born in eastern Galicia, Re’uven Fahn received a maskilic as well as a traditional education, which motivated him to embark on a lifelong quest to combine nationalism with a religious spirit. He married at 19 and moved to the town of Halicz, in the Stanislau district, where he lived until World War I. There his acquaintance with the Karaite community prompted him to research and compile facts, stories, and details about their folklore.

text: Galicia

text: Karaite

text: Zionist

text: Lwów

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Gershom Bader

text: Mizraḥi

text: haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Ivano-Frankivs’k

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

glossary: Magid Karaites haskalah


title: Lenski, Ḥayim

abstract: (1905–1942?), Hebrew poet and translator. Ḥayim Lenski’s parents divorced when he was an infant, and though he had been born in Slonim, he was raised by his paternal grandfather in a nearby village. During his youth he was an avid reader of Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and German literature. Lenski wrote his first poem—rhyming verses about the fall of the tsar—at age 12. At 16, he moved to Vilna and studied at a teachers’ seminary. There, he and a friend published Leket (Anthology; 1922?), which included his first collection of poems.

text: Hebrew poet

text: Vilna

text: Leningrad

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Moscow

text: Soviet Union

text: Osip Mandel’shtam

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky


title: Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi

abstract: (Pol., Kamieniec Podolski; Rus., Kamenets Podol’skii), city on the Smotrich River (a tributary of the Dniester) and district center of the Khmel’nyts’kyi region of Ukraine. In the 1430s the town passed from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Poland; from 1569 to 1792 it was the center of the Podolia province of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, though in 1672–1699 it was the center of the Kamenets province of the Ottoman Empire. From 1793 it was the center of the Podolian region of the Russian Empire, and from 1920 of the Soviet Union.

imgDesc: View of the castle complex and part of the town, Kamenets Podol’skii, ca. 1920s. Photograph by Kodesh. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Russian Empire

text: Soviet Union

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising

text: Jakub Frank

text: guilds

text: Avraham Gottlober

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: yeshiva

text: Zionist movement

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: pogroms

text: Civil War

text: ORT

text: OPE

text: Kultur-lige

text: Holocaust

text: Birobidzhan

text: Crimea

text: ghettos

text: Hungary

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Poland

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

glossary:
Talmud
Talmud Torah
numerus clausus
yeshiva
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Torah


title: Krinskii, Vladimir Fedorovich

abstract: (1890–1971), architect, teacher, and a leader of the Rationalist group in Soviet avant-garde architecture. Born into a teacher’s family in Ryazan, Vladimir Krinskii was able to complete his secondary education in Saint Petersburg, thanks to the intercession of a prominent patron, and study at the Art School of the Imperial Society for Support of the Arts. He then enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating from its architecture department in 1917.

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow


title: Gorfinkel, Leyb

abstract: (1896–1976), advocate, journalist, and political figure. After graduating from the Russian secondary school in Kovno, Leyb Gorfinkel (also known as Leib Garfunkel) studied jurisprudence at Petrograd University. Later he moved to Gomel and became a member of the Russian Tse‘ire Tsiyon (Youths of Zion) Central Committee. From the end of 1918 he lived in Kovno and was one of the initiators of the Union of Ha-Po‘el ha-Tsa‘ir (The Young Worker) and Tse‘ire Tsiyon in Lithuania.

text: Kovno

text: Gomel

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Ba-Derekh


title: Munkácsi, Bernát

abstract: (1860–1937), Hungarian linguist, ethnographer, and pedagogue. Born in Oradea (Rom., Nagyvárad; Ger., Grosswardein), then located in Hungary, Bernát Munkácsi was the son of Me’ir Avraham Munk, a Hebrew writer. Munkácsi began his education in a traditional heder but later was sent to the local gymnasium. He started his university training in medicine but switched his concentration to Hungarian and German language and literature.

text: Oradea

text: Hungary

text: Me’ir Avraham Munk

text: heder

text: Ármin Vámbéry

text: Pest

glossary: heder Neolog


title: Szereszewski Family

abstract: Bankers and entrepreneurs in Lithuania and Warsaw. The family’s most prominent members were Moses David Szereszewski (also spelled Szereszowski; 1844–1915), a banker and businessman in Warsaw; and his son Rafał (1869–1948), who was a banker, businessman, and senator of the Republic of Poland.

text: Lithuania

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: bank

text: credit

text: Natanson

text: Grodno

text: Russian Empire

text: ORT

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Majer Bałaban


title: Berman, Adolf Abraham

abstract: (1906–1978), psychologist; left-wing Zionist activist, and a leader of the Warsaw ghetto underground. Adolf Berman (who used the code names Adam, Borowski, and Ludwik) studied psychology and philosophy at Warsaw University, receiving his doctorate in 1931. As one of the pioneers of professional counseling in Poland, he headed the Warsaw organization of Jewish counseling clinics, affiliated with Centrala Opieki nad Sierotami (Federation of Associations for the Care of Orphans; CENTOS). He also taught in high schools and published articles on social and educational psychology. While a student, Berman joined the Jewish socialist group Yugnt (Youth). In 1925, he became a member of the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon and was involved in publication of the party’s Polish- and Yiddish-language press organs.

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: Poland

text: Yugnt

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: ghettos

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Central Committee of Jews in Poland

text: Beriḥah

text: Holocaust

text: Jakub Berman


title: Bârlad

abstract: City in the central Moldavian region of Romania on the banks of the Bârlad River. Jewish settlement in Bârlad (Bîrlad) is documented from the end of the seventeenth century, and the oldest tombstone in the Jewish cemetery is dated 1728. A Jewish staroste (head of the Jewish guild) was mentioned as early as 1738. Jews in Bârlad were employed in local commerce, grain dealing, and crafts.

text: Moldavian

text: Romania

text: crafts

text: emigration

text: Buhuşi

text: Romanian literature

text: Felix Aderca

glossary: maskil halakhah publicist


title: Steinman, Eli‘ezer

abstract: (1892–1970), writer and essayist. Eli‘ezer Steinman was born in Uvoduvka, in the Podolian region of Russia (now Ukraine). He studied at a yeshiva in Kishinev and at age 15 received rabbinic ordination. Steinman began writing in Hebrew and Yiddish, and in 1909 published his first Hebrew story in the journal Reshafim, edited by David Frishman. That same year he moved to Odessa and joined the circle of Hebrew writers in that city. In 1912 he went to Warsaw, published stories and essays in Ha-Tsefirah, and translated works by Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Dostoevsky.

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: yeshiva

text: Kishinev

text: David Frishman

text: Odessa

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Stybel

text: pogroms

text: Kolot

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Hebrew literature

text: Hasidism

text: mysticism


title: Celan, Paul

abstract: (Paul Antschel; 1920–1970), poet. Considered one of the most important post–World War II European poets, Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz, in Bucovina, the easternmost province of the former Habsburg monarchy, which had been incorporated into Romania in 1918. Though he learned and spoke Romanian at school, German remained Celan’s primary cultural language and Vienna his cultural lodestar.

text: Czernowitz

text: Bucovina

text: Romania

text: Holocaust

text: Bucharest


title: Birnboym, Avrom Ber

abstract: (1865–1922), cantor, composer, and pedagogue. Avrom Ber Birnboym was born in the city of Pułtusk, north of Warsaw. He reportedly learned music from his Hasidic father, and also studied violin in Łódź with Ḥayim Janowski, the founder of the Hazomir Choral Society. Birnboym’s first position was as a cantor and kosher butcher in Hethar, Hungary, where he studied music theory and German. He then took a cantorial position in Prosnitz (Prostějov), Moravia. Birnboym eventually became the chief cantor for the Choir Synagogue in the Polish community of Częstochowa.

text: cantor

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Hungary

text: Prostějov

text: cantors

text: Sabbath


title: Kantor, Yehudah Leib

abstract: (1849–1915), editor and author; acclaimed for developing the feuilleton as a genre in the Jewish press. Yehudah Leib Kantor was born in Vilna, where his father Yosef served as a cantor in the main synagogue. A promising student at his yeshiva, Kantor soon grew interested in the Haskalah. In 1869, he entered the government-sponsored rabbinical seminary in Vilna and, in the same year, launched his literary career with an article in the Hebrew periodical Ha-Karmel, criticizing the state of education and other aspects of Jewish life.

text: Vilna

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: seminary

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Russia

text: Zhitomir

text: Ha-Melits

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Saint Petersburg

text: pogroms

text: Ha-Yom

text: Liepāja

text: Riga

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah


title: Eisenstadt, Hirsch

abstract: (1885–1963), Estonian community activist and philanthropist. Born in Pinsk, Belorussia, Hirsch (Grigori) Eisenstadt studied economics at the Kiev Institute of Commerce between 1908 and 1913. After graduation, he joined his parents in Riga, Latvia, working for an oil company. In 1914, he was transferred to Tallinn, Estonia, where he had a business career and was active in local Jewish life.

text: Pinsk

text: Kiev

text: Riga

text: Latvia

text: Tallinn

text: Estonia

text: Soviet Union


title: Koidanov Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: A branch of Lithuanian Hasidism founded by Shelomoh Ḥayim Perlov (1797–1862) after the death in 1832 of his uncle, Noaḥ Jaffe of Lakhovits. Koidanov has, for most of its history, been the smallest of the three Lithuanian Hasidic dynasties (the others being Slonim and Karlin-Stolin). Before the Holocaust, its centers of influence were in the regions of Koidanov and Minsk in Belorussia.

text: Hasidism

text: Slonim

text: Karlin-Stolin

text: Holocaust

text: Minsk

text: Belorussia

text: yeshiva

text: Poland

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Kabbalah
tsadik
yeshiva
Shulḥan ‘arukh
rebbe


title: Hirschler, Ignác

abstract: (1823–1891), ophthalmologist and president of the Jewish Community of Pest. Ignác Hirschler was born in Stomfa, where his father was a merchant. The family moved to Pest in the 1830s, and Hirschler studied at the prestigious Piarist secondary school, where he experienced antisemitism firsthand. In his autobiography, he wrote: “Sitting at the Jewish desk in the back of the classroom, I felt the poisoned sting of humiliation, which influences a person’s spirit and frame of mind more adversely than is generally believed.”

text: Hungary

text: General Congress of Jews

text: Transylvania

text: Seminary

text: Budapest


title: Mikra Kodesh

abstract: Established in Lemberg in the summer of 1883 as an organization for students, Mikra Kodesh (Holy Assembly) is sometimes considered the first Zionist association in Galicia, though it was not connected to the emergent Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion) movement in Russia. The organization was founded by Joseph Kobak, a Haskalah rabbi trained in Germany who was then serving as educator and unofficial rabbi at the Lemberg Temple, and Re’uven Bierer, who had just returned to his native Galicia after completing medical training at the University of Vienna, where he had cofounded Austria’s first Zionist fraternity, Kadimah.

text: Lemberg

text: Zionist

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: Shomer Yisra’el

text: Maccabi

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Markus Braude

text: Agudas Akhim

text: Yosef Bloch

glossary:
Ḥoveve Tsiyon
Haskalah
get


title: Brodskii, Isaak Izrailevich

abstract: (1883 [1884 according to the Gregorian calendar]–1939), painter, graphic artist, art critic, and educator. Born in Sofievka (Taurida guberniia), Isaak Brodskii studied at the Odessa School of Art from 1896 to 1902. He then attended the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg until 1908, receiving a grant from this institute to travel in Western Europe between 1909 and 1911.

text: Odessa

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Moscow


title: Sandauer, Artur

abstract: (1913–1989), Polish writer, literary historian, and critic. A classical philologist educated in Lwów, Artur Sandauer taught at the Hebrew high school in Kraków between 1937 and 1939. He published in both Polish and Polish Jewish literary journals. After escaping from the Sambor ghetto, he spent the remainder of World War II on the Aryan side of the city. After the war, he served as editor of Odrodzenie (1948–1949) and spent several years in Paris. Awarded a doctorate in 1948, Sandauer became a lecturer (1963) and subsequently a professor (1974) at the University of Warsaw.

text: Lwów

text: Kraków

text: Warsaw

text: Polish literature

text: Bolesław Leśmian

text: Bruno Schulz

text: assimilation

text: Holocaust

text: Julian Tuwim


title: Herrmann, Hugo

abstract: (1887–1940), journalist and Zionist activist. Although known primarily for his political activism, Hugo Herrmann was also an outstanding analyst of German and Italian literature. He was born in Mährisch-Trübau (Moravská Trěbově) and raised in an assimilated German-speaking home. He studied German and Romance philology at universities in Prague and Vienna, and during his student days became interested in Zionism.

text: Prague

text: Zionism

text: Bar Kochba Association

text: Selbstwehr

text: Purim

text: Bohemia and Moravia


title: Nadson, Semen Iakovlevich

abstract: (1862–1887), Russia’s most popular poet in the three decades preceding the 1917 Revolutions. Nadson was the first Russian poet of Jewish origin to achieve national fame and to reach a large, popular audience. Following the collapse of the revolutionary movement in the 1870s, his writing captivated younger readers during the reign of Alexander III. Oscillating between the poetry of pure art and social reflection (the former exemplified by Afanasii Fet and Aleksei Apukhtin), Nadson bridged the styles that marked the civic poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov and early Russian Symbolism. Emotionally evocative, his verses showcase a disillusioned poet’s quest for a liberal ideal of humanity. His first collection, Stikhotvoreniia (Poems; 1885), was reprinted 29 times before 1917 and sold more than 200,000 copies.

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ukraine

text: pogroms


title: Lissitzky, El

abstract: (1890–1941), abstract artist and theorist, graphic designer, architect, typographer, photographer, and propagandist. El (Lazar [Eleazar] Markovich) Lissitzky was born in Pochinok, near Smolensk, Russia, and died in Moscow. He chose his name in imitation of El Greco and to affirm his new artistic identity. His artistic career can be divided into three overlapping periods: (1) Jewish, from 1915 to 1923; (2) Suprematist, from 1919 to the early 1920s; and (3) Stalinist, in the 1930s. The following overview emphasizes his first period, when he participated intensively in the Jewish art renaissance in Russia and played a significant role in its development (Soviet and Western critics typically discount the importance of his early work).

imgDesc: Dlia golosa (For the Voice) by Vladimir Mayakovsky (USSR, 1923). Illustrations by El Lissitzky. Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, 281.2001.1–25. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art; licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY / © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Vitebsk

text: Yehudah Pen

text: Marc Chagall

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yisakhar Rybak

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Moscow

text: Passover

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: tombstones

text: Leyb Kvitko

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

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

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


title: Rafes, Moyshe

abstract: (Moisei Grigor’evich; 1883–1942), public and political figure active in the Bund and Evsektsiia. Born in Vilna into a family of wine merchants, Moyshe Rafes first attended heder, then a Russian primary school, and passed his examinations as an external pupil at a five-year high school. Rafes joined the Bund while still a youth and devoted himself to party work. He was first arrested in 1903 and spent half a year in prison in Vilna before being released on bail. Later he was suspected of being implicated in the plans for Hirsh Lekert’s attempt on the life of Vilna Governor-General Victor Von Wahl, although Rafes denied this involvement.

text: Bund

text: Evsektsiia

text: Vilna

text: heder

text: Hirsh Lekert

text: Gomel

text: Lemberg

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

text: Saint Petersburg

text: February 1917 Revolution

text: Kiev

text: Russia

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Fareynikte

text: Komfarband

text: Evsektsiia

text: Moscow

glossary: heder publicist


title: Krein, Aleksandr Abramovich

abstract: (1883–1951), composer and cellist. Aleksandr Krein was born in the Russian city of Nizhnii Novgorod into a family of musicians. His father, Avraham (1838–1921), was a klezmer violinist and amateur folk-song collector. Seven of his ten children became professional musicians, notably David (1869–1926), the concertmaster of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater orchestra, and Grigorii (1879–1955), also a composer. After a childhood spent performing in his father’s klezmer band, Krein entered the Moscow Conservatory at age 13 as a cello student. He went on to study music theory and composition with composers Sergei Taneyev and Boleslav Yavorsky.

imgDesc: Op. 12, Esquisses Hebraiques by Aleksandr Krein, 1928. Aleksandr Krein, Op. 12, Esquisses Hebraiques pour 2 Violons, Alto, Violoncelle et Clarinette in B; Partition (Moscow, 1928). RG 112, Music Collection, F88. (YIVO)

text: Moscow

text: Society for Jewish Folk Music

text: theater

text: Habimah

text: Kiev

text: Minsk

text: State Yiddish theaters

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Holocaust


title: Niger, Shmuel

abstract: (1883–1955), literary critic. Shmuel Niger was born in Dukor, Belorussia, to Zev Volf and Brokhe Tsharni. His father, a fervent Lubavitcher Hasid, died in 1889, leaving Shmuel’s mother a widow with five sons (he being the fourth) and a daughter. Two of Niger’s younger male siblings achieved renown. Borekh “Vladek” Tsharni (1886–1938) became a leading socialist agitator and theoretician in Eastern Europe and the United States. Daniel Tsharni (1888–1959) was a celebrated Yiddish poet.

imgDesc: Shmuel Niger (second from right, hand-numbered “3”), his brother, the writer Daniel Tsharni (second from left, “2”), scholar Jakob Lestschinsky (left, “1”), and others, on a trip to the Alps, ca. 1920s. Photograph by M. Aschwarden. (YIVO)

text: Belorussia

text: Lubavitcher Hasid

text: Daniel Tsharni

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Zionism

text: Kiev

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Vilna

text: Sholem Asch

text: Yiddish literature

text: Haskalah

text: Sholem Asch

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: Perets Hirshbeyn

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Der Nister

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Di yudishe velt

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: A.Vayter

text: YIVO

text: literary criticism

text: Hebrew literature

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidism

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Maks Erik

text: Meir Wiener

text: Sholem Asch

text: Litvak

text: shtetl

text: Holocaust

text: Tsene-rene

text: tkhines

glossary: Haskalah Diaspora agadah halakhah


title: Music (Hasidism)

abstract: Joy and its expression through song and dance have been important values of the Hasidic movement since its beginnings in the second half of the eighteenth century. The idealization of music reflected an innovation in Jewish culture, in contrast to the general attitude of the Ashkenazic rabbinical establishment. Hasidic spiritual leaders since that time devoted increasing attention to music and dance in their writings.

imgDesc: Hasidic nigun. "Ovinu malkeynu" (Avinu malkenu). Words: Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Amram Gaon. Music: Shneur Zalman of Liady. Performed by the Lubavitcher Chorus. Unissued take from recording sessions for Chabad Melodies: Songs of the Lubavitcher Chassidim, Collectors Guild lp CGL 615, New York, 1960. (YIVO)

text: dance

text: music

text: Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh

text: Sabbath

text: Lubavitch

text: Bratslav

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: folk songs

text: Hungary

text: weddings

text: badkhn

text: Karlin

text: Ger

text: Vizhnits

text: Modzits

text: Belz

text: Slonim

text: Rivne

text: Walachia

text: liturgy

text: Misnagdim

text: cantors

text: Karlin Hasidim

text: Ruzhin Hasidism

text: Vizhnits

text: Zhidachov

text: Russia

text: Yo’el Engel

text: Jewish Ethnological Expedition

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moisei Beregovskii

glossary: tsadik Magid rebbe Talmud Torah Misnagdim


title: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

abstract: A scholarly institution attached to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and specializing in Jewish studies, the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (Rus., Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul’tury; IEPK) was founded in 1929 as a reorganization of the academy’s Chair (Department) of Jewish Culture. The initiative for the creation of the chair had come from high party circles and was supported by UkrNauka, the government department that supervised the work of scholarly institutions in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s.

imgDesc: Presidium of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture, Kiev, 1934. Pictured are (first row, right to left): Osher Margulis (head of the Historical Section), M. Kadishevich (head of the Birobidzhan section), Kalman Marmor (a visiting scholar from America), historian Yoysef Liberberg, Gershon Gorokhov (director of the Institute from November 1934), Shimon Dobin (staff member of the Philological Institute); (second row) bibliographer Israel Mitlman, Iona Khinchin (archivist and dean of the Jewish Division of the Kiev Teachers College), philologist Elye Spivak, ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovskii (head of the Folklore Section), literary historian Maks Erik (Zalman Merkin), Yashe Reznik (head of the Literature and Criticism Section), and Mikhl Levitan (head of the Philological Section). (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Minsk

text: USSR

text: Yoysef Liberberg

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: archives

text: S. An-ski

text: ewish Historical and Archaeographic Commission

text: Evsektsiia

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: Minsk

text: L’viv

text: Odessa

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: YIVO

text: Elye Spivak

text: Moyshe Shapiro

text: folklore

text: Nosn Zabara

text: cosmopolitanism


title: Czech Literature

abstract: The oldest examples of Czech Jewish writing are glosses in medieval Hebrew manuscripts; Jewish scholars in Prague explained unusual or difficult Hebrew terms using Hebrew transcriptions of “the language of Canaan,” which was, Roman Jakobson has argued, a variant of Old Czech. These glosses are most extensive in the work of two Prague scholars, Avraham ben ‘Azri’el of Bohemia (also known as Abraham Chladek), who wrote his commentary ‘Arugat ha-bosem (Bed of Spices) in the late 1230s, and his student Yitsḥak ben Mosheh, whose Or Zaru‘a (Light Sown) dates from the mid-thirteenth century. The glosses cannot really be said to constitute a literary work, but they are evidence that Jews in medieval Prague were thoroughly familiar with spoken Czech.

imgDesc: Title page of the Kralice Bible, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Czech (Kralice: Unity of the Brethren, 1579–1593). (Moravské Zemské Muzeum, Czech Republic)

text: Prague

text: Roman Jakobson

text: Yitsḥak ben Mosheh

text: Siegfried Kapper

text: Oskar Donath

text: Eduard Lederer

text: Julius Zeyer

text: Vojtěch Rakous

text: Hilsner

text: Czechoslovakia

text: František Gellner

text: František Langer

text: Jiří Langer

text: Galicia

text: Ivan Olbracht

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Karel Poláček

text: Richard Weiner

text: Franz Kafka

text: Max Brod

text: Jiří Weil

text: Russian literature

text: Moscow

text: Egon Hostovský

text: Jiří Orten

text: Terezín

text: childhood

text: children’s literature

text: Slánský

text: communism

text: Holocaust

text: Holocaust

text: humor

text: Prague

text: Slánský trial

text: samizdat

text: Czech Republic

text: František Langer

text: Terezín

text: German literature

text: Karel Poláček


title: Bischitz, Johanna

abstract: (Née Hani Fischer; 1827–1898), philanthropic activist and head of a women’s association. Johanna Bischitz’s father was Moritz (Mór) Fischer (1799–1880), director and owner of the world-famous porcelain factory of Herend and a prominent Orthodox lay leader of Hungarian Jewry (he was the grandfather of Rabbi Stephen Wise). Little is known about her mother, Mária Salzer (1799–1886). Moritz Fischer was ennobled in 1867 and added the Hungarian name Farkasházi to his family name. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–1849, his daughter cared for wounded Hungarian soldiers, whom he had accommodated in his house. In October 1852, Johanna married the widower David Bischitz (1811–1897), a merchant and landowner from Sárbogárd (Fejér county), and moved to Pest. She became the stepmother of her husband’s three children and gave birth to another four.

imgDesc: Johanna Bischitz, Budapest, ca. 1880s. Bischitz was probably the first Jewish woman ever to receive the Golden Order of Merit with Crown (the medal to the left as seen in the photograph), a medal awarded to her in 1879 by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy for her charitable work with Pesti Izraelita Nőegylet (Pest Israelite Women’s Association). Photograph by Ellinger. (Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives)

text: Hungary

text: Katalin Gerő

text: Budapest


title: Katowice

abstract: A Prussian town until 1921, Katowice (Ger., Kattowitz) is now the capital city of the southern Polish province of Silesia. Although Jews were noted in the region as far back as 1733, the first Jews to settle in the village itself arrived in 1825.

imgDesc: View of the synagogue from across a meadow, Katowice, Poland. Postcard published by Verlag G. Siwinna, Katowice. (YIVO)

text: Silesia

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Ḥoveve Tsiyon

text: Poland

text: Zionists

text: Orthodox

text: Kielce


title: Reform, Religious

abstract: The movement for religious reform in modern Judaism began in Central Europe around the beginning of the nineteenth century as a response to the confrontation between traditional Jewish thought and practices and the values and demands of a modernizing state, society, and culture. The transformations involved both new conceptions of Judaism that were thought to be more in harmony with idealistic philosophy and liturgical reforms motivated by both aesthetic and ideological considerations. From German-speaking Europe, Jewish religious reform spread eastward to Hungary, Bohemia, Galicia, Russia, and Poland. Although differing from German Jewry, where modernized forms of Judaism had become dominant by the second half of the nineteenth century, East European Jewries were to varying degrees also affected and divided by the trend to adjust Judaism to new realities.

imgDesc: Reform synagogue and the mansion of Jakub and Anna Hertz, 2–4 Kościuszki Avenue, Łódź, ca. 1900. Photograph by Bronisław Wilkoszewski. (University Library, Łódź)

text: Hungary

text: Bohemia

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Arad

text: approbation

text: Sabbath

text: Purim

text: liturgy

text: Orthodox

text: Löw Schwab

text: Bratislava

text: Lugoj

text: weddings

text: seminary

text: Breslau

text: USSR

text: Prague

text: Sabbath rest

text: Peter Beer

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Holocaust

text: Haskalah

text: Königsberg

text: Galicia

text: Tarnopol

text: Brody

text: L’viv

text: Yosef Perl

text: rabbinate

text: Ya‘akov Orenstein

text: Abraham Kohn

text: Hasidism

text: Kraków

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: circumcision

text: Russia

text: Vilna

text: Zhitomir

text: Misnagdim

text: Zionist

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Odessa

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Riga

text: Max Lilienthal

text: Warsaw

text: land of Israel

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Ha-Melits

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Communist Russia

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: Prague

text: Budapest

text: Warsaw

text: Tallinn

text: Belarus

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Birobidzhan

text: Moscow

text: gender

glossary: Talmud Diaspora Haskalah Misnagdim maskil Torah Halakhah

subconcepts:
Hungary
Bohemia and Moravia
Galicia
Russia
The Twentieth Century


title: Rubinstein, Yitsḥak

abstract: (1880–1945), rabbi and Zionist leader. Born in Dotnuva, Lithuania, Yitsḥak Rubinstein studied at yeshivas in Kovno, Slutsk, and Volozhin as well as at the University of Moscow. He was appointed rabbi of Genicheck, Ukraine, in 1906, and in 1910 was chosen as the government-appointed rabbi of Vilna, with the support of the Orthodox community. During World War I, he remained in Vilna, representing the interests of Jews before the Russian and German authorities, and was one of the heads of the Merkaz le-‘Ezrah, a center for providing humanitarian aid.

text: Zionist

text: Lithuania

text: yeshivas

text: Kovno

text: Slutsk

text: Volozhin

text: Moscow

text: Ukraine

text: Vilna

text: Orthodox

text: Mizraḥi

text: Poland


title: Spektor, Yitsḥak Elḥanan

abstract: (1817–1896), rabbi, leader of traditional Jewry in Russia, halakhic authority, and supporter of the Ḥibat Tsiyon (Love of Zion) movement. Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor served as rabbi in various communities in the Russia Empire, the most important of which was Kovno in Lithuania (1864–1896). He was considered a moderate in his halakhic rulings, devoting much of his decision making to finding dispensations that would permit ‘agunot (literally, “chained” women—the wives of missing or disappeared husbands) to remarry. Many of his responsa were widely regarded as authoritative.

imgDesc: Exterior of the Rabbi Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor orphanage, Kaunas, Lithuania, 1927. Photograph by Gorshayn. (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Kovno

text: Lithuania

text: Musar

text: Yisra’el Salanter

text: Gintsburg family

text: Ya‘akov Poliakov

text: pogroms

text: Katowice

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

glossary: responsa Musar Kolel Torah


title: Singer, Israel Joshua

abstract: (1893–1944), Yiddish fiction writer. Born in Biłgoraj, Lublin province, Israel Joshua Singer was the second child in a family of Yiddish writers that included his elder sister, Esther Singer Kreitman, and his younger brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer spent much of his childhood in another small town, Leoncin, Warsaw province.

imgDesc: Erd-vey (Earth-woe), by Israel Joshua Singer (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1922). (YIVO)

text: Lublin

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Warsaw

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Khalyastre

text: Yiddish literature

text: Marc Chagall

text: Perets Markish

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Oyzer Varshavski

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Soviet Union

text: Yiddish theater

text: Zionist

text: assimilation

text: Łódź

text: Lwów

text: Holocaust

text: shtetl

text: pogroms


title: Gdańsk

abstract: (Ger., Danzig), port city, center of trade and industry on the Baltic. Gdańsk was a Hanseatic port in Royal Prussia and became the capital of Westpreussen (West Prussia) during the nineteenth century. From 1920 to 1939, it was known as the Danzig Free City (under the protection of the League of Nations), and since 1945, it has served as the capital of the Gdańsk Województwo in the Republic of Poland.

imgDesc: Members of the Heifetz and Glick families en route to the United States, Danzig (now Gdańsk, Pol.), 1921. (YIVO)

text: trade

text: industry

text: Poland

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: World War I

text: Warsaw

text: Terezín

text: Soviet Union

text: Kielce


title: Jewish Historical and Archaeographic Commission

abstract: (Rus., Evreiskaia Istoriko-Arkheograficheskaia Komissiia), Soviet research institute at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, specializing in the collection and study of archival materials dealing with Jewish topics. The Commission was founded in summer 1919 at the initiative of Jewish scholars, who submitted a memorandum to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences stating, “The Jews have a centuries-long history in Ukraine. The fate of the Jews has been closely linked to the fate of the Ukrainian people. The Jews have played a significant role in the economic and cultural life of Ukraine. Nevertheless, a systematic portrayal of the history of Jews in Ukraine has not yet been written. The lack of such a history has fostered many misunderstandings and mistaken impressions about Jewish activities in Ukraine and relations between the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples.”

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: pogroms

text: Russian Empire

text: Zionism

text: Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Evsektsiia


title: Danzig, Avraham ben Yeḥi’el Mikhl

abstract: (1748–1820), halakhic authority and author. Born in Gdańsk (Danzig), Avraham Danzig studied in Prague with, among others, Rabbi Yeḥezkel Landau. Danzig married and moved to Vilna, where he worked in business and refused to earn a rabbinic salary. He remained steadfast in this refusal even after he was appointed dayan (rabbinic judge) in Vilna in 1794; only after his business failed, in 1812, did he agree to receive remuneration. It was during this period that he wrote most of his books.

text: Gdańsk

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Vilna

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Lithuania

text: Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Land of Israel

text: Sabbath

text: Passover

text: Misnagdim

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Torah
Mishnah
Gaon
ethical will
Misnagdim


title: Kahal

abstract: An executive board that was chosen to run an autonomous Jewish community. A kahal served as a Jewish community council, or as a decision-making committee of a kehilah. Throughout the history of the Jewish Diaspora, even before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Jewish community was organized as a self-governing community, running its internal affairs according to its own laws, later codified as halakhah and continuously amended and supplemented by time-bound statutes and legislation known as takanot. This autonomy was not idiosyncratic or specific to Jews, but conformed to the basic organization of the premodern state, whether in ancient Rome, medieval Christendom, or Islam. This structure was also present in early modern Europe, in which society as a whole was divided into corporations and estates, including the nobility, the clergy, the peasantry, the townspeople, and the Jews. Each estate had its own specific code of laws, its own courts, and its own tax obligation and collection systems (or relief from such obligations).

imgDesc: Ludwik Natanson (center), chairman of the kehilah, with other board members, Warsaw, 1894. (YIVO)

text: Sephardic

text: Poznań

text: Kraków

text: shtadlonim

text: cantors

text: Lithuania

text: councils

text: trade

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Hasidism

text: rabbinate

text: Galicia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: military service

text: Iakov Brafman

text: Revolution of 1905

text: Bolshevik Revolution

glossary:
kahal
kehilah
Diaspora
halakhah
Council of Four Lands
tsadik
rebbe
Congress Poland
Pale of Settlement


title: Shapiro, Malkah

abstract: (1894–1971), Hasidic writer and memoirist. Born Reyzl Malke Hapstein in Kozienice (Kozhenits), Poland, Malkah Shapiro was the daughter of Yeraḥmi’el Mosheh Hapstein (1860–1909), a descendant of the Magid of Kozhenits (ca. 1737–1814), one of the founders of Polish Hasidism. Her mother was Brakha Tsipora Gitl Twersky (1861–1930), a descendant of Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobil (1730?–1797). In 1908, Shapiro married her first cousin Avraham Elimelekh Shapiro of Grodzisk.

imgDesc: Malkah Shapiro, Poland, ca. 1910. (Nehemia Polen)

text: Poland

text: Magid of Kozhenits

text: Hasidism

text: Chernobil

text: Land of Israel

text: memoir

text: piety

text: Holocaust

glossary: Magid Rebbe Kabbalah Torah Talmud


title: Tyshler, Aleksandr Grigor’evich

abstract: (1898–1980), painter, set designer, graphic artist, and sculptor. Born into a carpenter’s family in Melitopol’, Aleksandr Tyshler grew up among craft workers and from the time of his childhood assisted house painters. His early impressions were reflected later in his series of paintings Sosedi moego detstva (Neighbors of My Childhood, 1930–1968).

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

text: painter

text: set designer

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Moscow

text: Riga

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

text: USSR

text: Belarus

text: State Yiddish Theater

text: Kharkov

text: Moscow

text: theater

text: MosGOSET

text: Solomon Mikhoels


title: Dimanshtein, Semen Markovich

abstract: (1886–1938), Soviet government and Communist Party figure. Semen Dimanshtein, first known as Shimon Dimanshtein, was born into the family of a craftsman in Sebezh and studied at the Slobodka and Lubavitch yeshivas. He received two rabbinical ordinations, one of which was from the renowned rabbi Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski. However, by 1904 Dimanshtein had joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party in Vilna and worked at translating the party platform into Hebrew and Yiddish. He soon joined the Bolsheviks and participated in their struggle with the Bund.

text: Soviet

text: Communist Party

text: Slobodka

text: Lubavitch

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Riga

text: Minsk

text: February 1917 Revolution

text: Russia

text: Petrograd

text: Der emes

text: Evsektsiia

text: Moscow

text: Ukraine

text: Birobidzhan

text: Lev Mekhlis

text: Tribuna


title: Schwimmer, Rózsika

abstract: (1877–1948), feminist, journalist, and politician. Rózsika (Róza) Schwimmer was born in Budapest into a middle-class Jewish family; her father was a produce merchant. Schwimmer studied at an evening commerce school in Temesvár (Timişoara, Romania) in 1893–1894. Following the bankruptcy of her father’s business, her family moved back to Budapest. There, she first worked as a governess and then as a bookkeeper and a correspondent clerk. She also wrote for various journals such as the Pester Lloyd. From 1904, she supported herself as a journalist and lecturer. From 1911 until 1913, Schwimmer was married to a journalist whose surname was Bédy.

imgDesc: Rózsika Schwimmer. (Carrie Chapman Catt Collection, Bryn Mawr College)

text: Budapest

text: Timişoara

text: Romania

text: Hungary


title: Ben Chananja

abstract: Hungarian German-language periodical published initially in 1844 and then between 1858 and 1867, edited by Leopold Löw. When Löw published what was to be the first Jewish periodical in Hungary, Ben Chananja: Blätter für israelitisch-ungarische Angelegenheiten in 1844, his choice of German was praised by contemporaries as realistic, given that few Hungarian Jews at the time were fluent in Magyar. The quarterly was discontinued after the pilot issue.

text: Leopold Löw

text: Hungary

glossary: Talmud Kabbalah halakhah


title: Tallinn

abstract: (Ger., Reval; Rus., Revel, later Tallin), historical capital of the Province of Estonia. Christianized in 1219 by Danish crusaders and then a member of the Hanseatic League, Tallinn was under Swedish rule from 1561 to 1710 and Russian from 1710 to 1918. Beginning in 1918, Tallin was the capital of the Republic of Estonia, including during the years of Soviet annexation (1940–1941, 1944–1991) and Nazi occupation (1941–1944). Its population in 2005 was 402,000, and it still serves as the industrial, logistical, and administrative center of Estonia.

imgDesc: “Jews in Tallinn! . . . Don’t forget that by voting now you are deciding the fate of Jewish cultural autonomy in Estonia.” Yiddish poster. Printed by B. Beilinson, Tallinn, n.d. The poster urges Jews who are “against party politics and factionalism” to vote for candidates affiliated with the Economics Group. (YIVO)

text: Estonia

text: Russian Empire

text: cantonists

text: Courland

text: Lithuania

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Betar

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Maccabi

text: Holocaust

text: USSR


title: Hrodna

abstract: City now in Belarus; also known in Polish and Russian as Grodno and in Yiddish as Horodno or Grodne. Grodno’s Jewish community, one of the oldest in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, existed as early as the fourteenth century. Its privilege, allegedly obtained in 1389 from Grand Duke Vytautas, was, however, a forgery dating from the early sixteenth century. The first Jews settled mainly in the western part of the town, near the Old Castle; ultimately their quarter expanded eastward and they also settled in districts owned by noblemen, outside municipal jurisdiction. By 1560, an estimated 1,000 Jews lived in Grodno, and by 1765 this population had expanded to 2,418.

imgDesc: View of the Koloza neighborhood, whose woods were a popular place for Sabbath walks, Grodno (Hrodna), ca. 1915. Photograph by A. Fialko. (YIVO)

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: Mordekhai Yafeh

text: Te’omim

text: Poland

text: Zionist movement

text: Bund

text: Misnagdim

text: Yeshiva

text: Shim‘on Shkop

text: Soviet Union

text: ghettos

text: Białystok

glossary: Misnagdim Yeshiva


title: Lewko

abstract: (fl. late 14th century), financier. Lewko was the most important financial backer to serve Polish kings during the second half of the fourteenth century. Coming from Kraków, he was the son of Yarden and Kaszyca; was married to Swonka (Zwonka); and was the father of Avraham, Kena‘an, Yisra’el, Yarden, and Golda. A member of a council convened by Casimir the Great in 1368 to discuss the organization of salt mines, Lewko became the co-lessee of such mines in Bochnia and Wieliczka and also helped administer the royal mint in Kraków.

text: Kraków

text: Hungary

text: Gniezno


title: Love

abstract: The concept of romantic love was seen as foreign in East European Jewish culture, a society that relied on arranged marriages and carefully separated the sexes in its religious and educational institutions. The critique of this attitude toward romantic love was fundamental to the project of modernizing traditional Jewish life. In Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s introduction to his fictionalized autobiography, Of Bygone Days, the writer lamented that his childhood and youth had failed to provide him with the ingredients of good literature:

imgDesc: “Come hear the first lecture in Dr. Globus’s series on love and marriage from a social and medical perspective.” Polish and Yiddish poster. Printed in Vilna, 1929. The poster notes that the lecture will be accompanied by magic lantern slides. (YIVO)

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: childhood

text: yeshiva

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidic movement

text: Devorah Baron

text: rebetsin

text: S. An-ski

text: The Dybbuk

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: psychoanalysis

text: Sholem Aleichem

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah Torah


title: Stybel

abstract: Hebrew publishing house founded in Moscow in 1917 by the patron and literary enthusiast Avraham Yosef Stybel (1885–1946) and journalist Bentsiyon Katz. Literary critic David Frishman, whose aestheticist and westernizing Hebraism influenced Stybel, was editor in chief.

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: Moscow

text: Avraham Yosef Stybel

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: David Frishman

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: David Shimoni (Shimonovitz)

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Warsaw

text: Yeruḥam Fishel Lachower

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Poland

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Matityahu Shoham

text: Hebrew literature

glossary: Diaspora Yishuv


title: Satmar Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Ultraconservative, anti-Zionist Hasidic sect founded in 1928 by Yo’el Teitelbaum (Reb Yoelish; 1887–1979) in the town of Szatmár (Hun., more properly Szatmárnémeti; now Rom., Satu Mare), the youngest son of the Hasidic rebbe of Sighet (Rom., more fully, Sighet Marmației; Hun., Máramarossziget or Sziget), Ḥananyah Yom Tov Lipa Teitelbaum (1836–1904), author of the biblical commentary Kedushat Yom Tov (1905). Ḥananyah had succeeded his father, Yekuti’el Yehudah Teitelbaum (1808–1883), who served as rabbi of Sighet from 1858 and is best known for his biblical homilies, Yitav lev (5 vols.; 1875). Yekuti’el Yehudah, who allied himself with the Sandz dynasty and struggled to establish Sighet as his own dynastic base in the face of opposition from followers of Vizhnits Hasidism, was the grandson of one of the most prominent figures in the history of Hungarian Hasidism, Mosheh Teitelbaum (1759–1841). A disciple of Ya`akov Yitsḥak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin, Mosheh was the rabbi of Uyhel (Sátoraljaújhely), and the author of the seminal, multivolume Hasidic biblical commentary Yismaḥ Mosheh (5 vols.; 1848–1861).

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: Hasidic

text: Satu Mare

text: Sighet Marmației

text: Vizhnits Hasidism

text: Ya`akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Sátoraljaújhely

text: Holocaust

text: Rezső (Rudolph) Kasztner

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Zionism

text: Munkatsher rebbe

text: Slovakia

text: Orthodox

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Land of Israel

glossary: rebbe Talmud


title: Thieberger, Friedrich

abstract: (1888–1958), writer, translator, and teacher. Friedrich Thieberger was born in Golčův Jeníkov (Goltsch-Jenikau), Bohemia, to a rabbinical family. He studied philosophy and philology in Prague, where he also taught modern languages and philosophy in German secondary schools. He was dismissed from his job in 1939 and moved to Palestine. There, he worked first as writer and later as a librarian at the B’nai B’rith Lodge in Jerusalem, the city in which he died.

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

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Zionist

text: Bar Kochba Association

text: Selbstwehr

text: Franz Kafka

text: Felix Weltsch

text: Golem legend

text: Yehudah Leib (Löw) ben Betsal’el


title: Herrmann, Leo

abstract: (1888–1951), journalist and Zionist activist. Leo Herrmann was born in Landškroun (Landskron), Bohemia. After studying law in Prague, he joined the Bar Kochba Association, the organization of Prague Zionists, in 1906, and served as its chairman between 1908 and 1909. That year, he invited Martin Buber to Prague to deliver his famous “Three Speeches on Judaism,” a presentation that had a decisive influence on Zionism in that city. Herrmann was editor of the Prague Zionist weekly Selbstwehr (Self-Defense) from 1910 to 1913; under his editorship it became a respected political and literary journal. He also contributed to the Jüdische Volksstimme (Jewish People’s Voice) in Brünn (Brno) and the Jüdische Zeitung (Jewish News) in Vienna.

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Bar Kochba Association

text: Zionists

text: Selbstwehr

text: Jüdische Volksstimme

text: Brno

text: Hugo Herrmann

text: Nathan Birnbaum


title: Khaldei, Evgenii Anan’evich

abstract: (1917–1997), Soviet photojournalist. Among a small number of photographers whose images have become iconic representations of key moments in Soviet history, Khaldei remains less well-known than his works. His photograph of Russian soldiers raising the Soviet flag above a burning Reichstag has been reproduced countless times, though for many years his name was not attached to it. His photographs of the Nuremberg Trials, of Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam, and of the progress of the war from Murmansk to the south of Russia and throughout Eastern Europe were widely reproduced. Khaldei’s photographs are remarkable for their aching beauty (a cityscape of Nuremberg, destroyed; a lone reindeer against a night sky filled with warplanes) and their appreciation of human endurance. While Khaldei also photographed Jews in Budapest during World War II, Soviet censorship prevented their exhibition until recently.

imgDesc: Victory Flag over Reichstag, Berlin. Evgenii Anan’evich Khaldei, Berlin, 1945. Gelatin silver print. 17–1/4 x 23–5/8. (Gift of the Union of Journalists of the USSR, through the Embassy of the USSR, 1991.24.5, in the Collection of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

text: Soviet

text: photographers

text: Russia

text: Budapest

text: censorship

text: Ukraine

text: Moscow

text: “anticosmopolitism” campaign


title: Brańsk

abstract: A small town in eastern Poland, south of Białystok. Brańsk was a royal town that was granted city rights under Magdeburg law in the fifteenth century. The privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis barred Jews from settling there, but in 1560 two Jews obtained permission from King Sigismund August to lease mills in the district. The town council granted them permission to reside in Brańsk on a temporary basis. Until the late eighteenth century, the number of Jews never reached more than a dozen. Many, however, lived on local estates belonging to the aristocracy and gentry who leased inns and mills to them. Larger Jewish settlements thus arose in the vicinity of Brańsk in private towns such as Tykocin, Orla, Boćki, Siemiatycze, and Ciechanowiec.

text: Poland

text: Białystok

text: Tykocin

text: Russia

text: trade

text: crafts

text: ghettos

glossary:
de non tolerandis Judaeis
kehilah


title: Eisenbach, Artur

abstract: (1906–1992), Polish Jewish historian. Artur Eisenbach was one of the last representatives of a distinguished group of scholars who, in the years before World War I and in independent Poland between 1918 and 1939, laid the foundation for an investigation of the Polish Jewish past.

imgDesc: Letter from Artur Eisenbach to Yoysef Opatoshu, 1947. From Artur Eisenbach in Łódź to Yoysef Opatoshu in New York, 20 January 1947, asking for his help in identifying certain documents found in the Oyneg Shabes Archive. It is believed that the material was written by the late Zelig Kalmanovitch in Vilna in 1941, when he was still alive and in touch with Emanuel Ringelblum. In the material, there is a reference to a private letter from Opatoshu, in which he castigates Jews for having allowed historical treasures to be lost before World War I. Eisenbach wants Opatoshu to confirm that he sent such a letter to Kalmanovitch. Yiddish. RG 436, Joseph Opatoshu Papers, F9. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Marceli Handelsman

text: TOZ

text: Raphael Mahler

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Soviet Union

text: Buczacz

text: Poland

text: Central Committee of Polish Jews

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Holocaust


title: Gordon, Aharon David

abstract: (1856–1922), Zionist thinker. Aharon David Gordon was born in Troyanov, a village in Podolia. His father had left Vilna to manage the country estate of Baron Evzel’ Gintsburg. Gordon’s early life in wooded, natural surroundings seems to have informed his later emphasis on the need to bond with nature. Following his marriage at age 19, Gordon lived with his wife’s family in Obodovka, where he seems to have come into contact with Hasidism.

imgDesc: District heads of the Hit’aḥadut party in Poland, Łódź, 1946. On the wall are portraits of (left to right) Zionist leaders Chaim Arlozoroff, Aharon David Gordon, and Berl Katznelson. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Zionist

text: Vilna

text: Gintsburg

text: Hasidism

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: youth movements

text: Gordonia


title: Mihăileni

abstract: Town in northern Moldavia. Mihăileni was established in 1792, subsequent to the opening of a customs station between Austria and Moldavia. The town was originally named Vlădeni, but eventually the Moldavian prince Mihail Sturdza (r. 1834–1849) changed it into Mihăileni and, aiming to turn it into an important trading center, encouraged the settlement of Jews from Galicia, exempting them from taxes.

text: Moldavia

text: Galicia

text: crafts

text: Iacob Groper

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Dorohoi

text: Transnistria

glossary: mikveh responsa maskil


title: Bet ha-Midrash

abstract: (commonly bet midrash; Yid., besmedresh; lit., “study house”), a voluntary, public institute for Torah learning, functioning for generations within Jewish communities alongside the synagogue and, from certain halakhic standpoints, even surpassing it in preference and importance. Functioning mainly as a place of study, the bet midrash (universally referred to by East European Jews in its Yiddish form, besmedresh) has also served as an alternative place of worship due to the many hours students spend there. In fact, students in Eastern Europe often took meals there and slept on the premises—so that, unlike the synagogue, the bet midrash required a mezuzah. Yet as a community of learners whose daily routine is dictated by the requirements of study, the bet midrash has been an institution that is in essence the reverse of the synagogue, challenging it and offering a certain alternative to the fixed models of communal life.

imgDesc: Jewish communal buildings near the railroad tracks, including (from right) the kloyz, synagogue, “old” bet midrash, “new” bet midrash, and Talmud Torah, Iwie, Poland (now Iwye, Bel.), ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Sabbatianism

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Medzhibizh

text: yeshiva

text: kahal

text: Poznań

text: Sabbath

text: kloyz

glossary: Torah yeshiva kahal


title: Society for Jewish Folk Music

abstract: In its brief existence (1908–ca. 1919) the Society for Jewish Folk Music (Rus., Obshchestvo Evreiskoi Narodnoi Muzyki; Yid., Gezelshaft far Yidisher Folks-Muzik) launched an influential movement among young Russian Jewish composers to create a modern national style of Jewish concert music. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, as part of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia’s growing interest in Jewish nationalism and Yiddish folk culture, musician and music critic Yo’el Engel and historian-folklorists Peysekh Marek and Sha’ul Ginsburg promoted the study of Jewish folk music from the Pale of Settlement through fieldwork, public lectures, and publications. These initial efforts, combined with the encouragement of Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, soon inspired a group of young Jewish musicians at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to organize the Society for Jewish Folk Music in 1908.

imgDesc: Program for a concert by the Society for Jewish Folk Music in the hall of the public library, Kharkov, Russia (now Khar’kiv, Ukr.), 1913. (YIVO)

text: Yo’el Engel

text: Sha’ul Ginsburg

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Aleksandr Krein

text: folk songs

text: Russian Empire

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: Odessa

text: Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Expedition

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Kultur-lige


title: Bielsko

abstract: Section of the urban area of Bielsko-Biała, Silesia, in southern Poland. Bielsko (Ger., Bielitz) was a Bohemian town until about 990, then Polish until 1327, when it was once more under Bohemian rule. Beginning in 1526 it was ruled by the Habsburgs; after World War I (in 1920) it became part of Poland, then fell under Nazi rule from 1939 to 1945, after which it became Polish again. Until 1951 it was an independent town, with municipal rights dating to before 1312. The first mention of Jews in Bielsko comes from 1653; and two complaints about Jewish tax collectors were recorded in 1677. Subsequent legislation hindered Jewish settlement.

text: Silesia

text: Poland

text: Poland

text: trade

text: Toleranzpatent

text: charity

text: Zionist

text: Biała

text: ghettos


title: Gordon, Mikhl

abstract: (1823–1890), Hebrew-Yiddish maskil and popular songwriter. Born in Vilna, Mikhl Gordon was a second-generation maskil. His great uncle, Yisra’el Gordon, was the government rabbi of Vilna, and Mikhl’s father, Aharon David, published a Hebrew work that imitated the style of Mosheh Ḥayim Luzzato. At the age of 16, Mikhl married Neḥamah Gordon, the sister of writer Yehudah Leib Gordon, and lived comfortably under his father-in-law’s roof for the next seven years.

imgDesc: Ayzik Meyer Dik (center) and other maskilim; (clockwise from top) Mikhl Gordon, Yehudah Leib Gordon, Tsevi ha-Kohen Rabinovich, and Eli‘ezer Zweifel. (YIVO)

text: songwriter

text: Vilna

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Mikhah Yosef

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Ha-Boker or

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Haskalah

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: satire

text: Love

text: Hasidism

text: pogroms

text: Kiev

glossary: maskil Haskalah


title: Bergson, Temerl

abstract: (surname also Sonnenberg or Berekson; d. 1830), patron of Polish Hasidism and benefactor of Warsaw Jewry. Little is known about Temerl’s background and early years, although her father, Avraham of Opoczno, is described as “learned and extremely wealthy.” She was briefly married and widowed at a young age to a merchant from Warsaw with whom she had a son. In 1787 she married Berek Sonnenberg, the son of the Warsaw plutocrat Shmul Zbytkower (Berek adopted the surname Sonnenberg under Prussian rule); they had five children. Upon her second husband’s death in 1822, Temerl oversaw his business enterprises, including a salt company and a bank. She won permission to own property outside the ghetto and was only the third Polish Jew to receive such land ownership rights.

text: Hasidism

text: Warsaw

text: Shmul Zbytkower

text: Poland

text: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

text: Gdańsk

text: shtadlan

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: charity


title: Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations in Russia

abstract: (Kongress Evreiskikh Religioznykh Obshchin i Organizatsii v Rossii; KEROOR), post-Soviet association of Jewish groups in Russia. Before 1990 in the Soviet Union, Jews were allowed neither to create a chief rabbinate nor to form a central organ uniting the Jewish religious communities. Under perestroika, however, at a conference of community representatives held in January 1990, the All-Union Council of USSR Jewish Religious Communities (Vsesoiuznyi Sovet Evreiskikh Religioznikh Obshchin SSSR; VSERO) was created. Vladimir Fedorovskii, chair of the Moscow community, was elected chair of its executive committee, and Adol’f Shaevich, chief rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, was chosen as the chief rabbi of VSERO and the USSR. The newly created central organ was intended to facilitate the coordination of activities of emerging as well as of older religious communities.

text: Russia

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Lubavitch Hasidic movement

text: Russian Jewish Congress

glossary: Ḥabad halakhah Torah


title: Buber, Salomon

abstract: (1827–1906), scholar of rabbinic literature and public activist in Lwów. Salomon (Shelomoh) Buber’s family provided him with a traditional education. His father’s rich and varied library of Talmudic and rabbinic texts enabled Buber to avail himself of homiletic sources that would become the mainstay of his scholarly activity. As a young man, Buber also immersed himself in the writings of the forerunners of the scientific study of Judaism and was influenced greatly by Naḥman Krochmal, Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, and Leopold Zunz. Married at age 20, he made his living from business, which afforded him a comfortable lifestyle.

text: rabbinic literature

text: Lwów

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: rabbinate

text: pogroms


title: Badkhonim

abstract: Like many traditional societies, Jewish communities had their singers, popular writers, and entertainers. Such figures, known as badkhonim (sg., badkhn), appeared at domestic celebrations, primarily weddings or holidays such as Hanukkah and Purim.

imgDesc: Tanz der Marschelik, Spassmacher (Dance of the Marshelik, Jester). Illustration by an artist identified only as “M.D.,” 1902. Postcard published by A.F.T. Drawing depicting a badkhn (marshelik) at a Hasidic wedding. (YIVO)

text: entertainers

text: weddings

text: Purim

text: dance

text: humor

text: Hershele Ostropolyer

text: Barukh ben Yeḥi’el of Mezhbizh

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Elyokem Tsunzer

text: Sabbath

text: Yiddish literature

text: tkhines

text: entertainers

text: entertainers

text: Haskalah

text: poetry

glossary: rebbe responsa Haskalah


title: Utesov, Leonid Osipovich

abstract: (Lazar’ Iosifovich Vaisbein; 1895–1982), Soviet actor and singer. While attending commercial school, Utesov acted and played violin. Before completing his studies he joined the circus, performing in cabaret theaters in Kremenchug, Kherson, and Odessa. In 1921 Utesov moved to Moscow, where he appeared at the Theater of Revolutionary Satire, the Hermitage Theater, and the Theater of Musical Comedy. In 1922 he began performing in Leningrad at the Palace Theater, the Free Theater, and the Theater of Satire. He was most at home in cabaret theater, popular musical reviews, sketches, and melodramas. He frequently played in shows with Jewish themes, taking the roles of Ioshka the Musician in Osip Dymov’s Pevets svoei pechali (Singer of Grief) and Mendel’ in Mendel’ Marants, based on David Fridman’s novel; he also performed dramatic readings of Isaac Babel’s stories. In 1925, Utesov debuted in the cinema, playing the lead roles in Boris Svetlov’s films Kar’era Spir’ki Shpandyria (The Career of Spir’ka Shpandyr’) and Chuzhie (Strangers).

imgDesc: Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee attending a memorial service for victims of the Holocaust at the Choral Synagogue, Moscow, 1945. (Front row, first to third from right) writer Itsik Fefer (with glasses), actor Benjamin Zuskin, and musician and actor Leonid Utesov. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

text: theaters

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: Leningrad

text: Osip Dymov

text: Isaac Babel

text: cinema

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: USSR

text: Odessa


title: Newspapers and Periodicals

abstract: Jewish newspapers and periodicals have been published in the main three Jewish languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino) and have also appeared in the primary languages of countries in which Jews have lived. The first Jewish newspaper, Gazeta de Amsterdam, was published in Ladino in Amsterdam (1674–1699). A short-lived Yiddish newspaper, Kurant, soon followed (1686–1687); however, other early efforts at news reporting in Yiddish did not succeed. In 1784, German supporters of the Haskalah movement created the Hebrew-language, largely literary Ha-Me’asef (The Harvester).

imgDesc: Customers at a newsstand that displays the Jewish newspapers Haynt (Today), Vort (Word), Folks-tsaytung (People’s Newspaper), Moment, Shpilki (Barbs), Nasz Przegląd (Our Review), and Letste nayes (Latest News), Łódź, 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Galicia

text: Bohemia

text: Tarnopol

text: Prague

text: Warsaw

text: Dostrzegacz nadwiślański

text: Lwów

text: Odessa

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Kol mevaser

text: Ha-Melits

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yankev Shatzky

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Russia

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Der yud

text: Kraków

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Der fraynd

text: Sha’ul Ginzburg

text: Gershom Bader

text: Poland

text: Zionism

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Shmuel Yankev Yatskan

text: Haynt

text: Tsevi Pryłucki

text: Der moment

text: Revisionist Zionism

text: Holocaust

text: Soviet Union

text: Der emes

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: Di royte velt

text: Eynikayt

text: Birobidzhan

text: Birobidzhaner shtern

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Arn Vergelis

text: Vilna

text: Orthodox

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Der yud

text: Dos yudishe togblat

text: Bund

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Folks-shtime

text: Hersh Smolar

text: Lithuania

text: Kaunas

text: Leyb Gorfinkel

text: Ruvn Rubinshteyn

text: Folkist

text: Riga

text: Latvia

text: Frimorgn

text: Ya‘akov Latzky-Bertholdi

text: Hungary

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Mukacheve

text: Romania

text: Hayoets

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Kishinev

text: Chernivtsi

text: communism

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

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidism

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: Brody

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Yosef Kohen-Tsedek

text: Ha-‘Ivri

text: Belz Hasidim

text: Kraków

text: Russia

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Ha-Melits

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Ha-Yom

text: Yehudah Leib Kantor

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Land of Israel

text: Bentsiyon Katz

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Der fraynd

text: Ba-Derekh

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Czech Republic

text: Slovakia

text: Prague

text: Českožidovské listy

text: Židovské zprávy

text: Selbstwehr

text: Felix Weltsch

text: Brno

text: Max Hickl

text: Hugo Gold

text: Bratislava

text: Leopold Löw

text: Ben Chananja

text: Budapest

text: Múlt és Jövő

text: József Patai

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle

text: Seminary

text: Új Élet

text: Jutrzenka

text: Daniel Neufeld

text: Izraelita

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Kraków

text: Chwila

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Bucharest

text: Egalitatea

text: Curierul Israelit

text: Wilhelm Filderman

text: Renaşterea noastră

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

text: Mozes Rosen

text: Censorship

text: Razsvet

text: Odessa

text: Osip Rabinovich

text: Il’ia Orshanskii

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Ha-Melits

text: Kol mevaser

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Adolph Landau

text: Voskhod

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Maksim Vinaver

text: Moscow

text: Tribuna

text: Leningradskii evreiskii al’manakh

text: samizdat

text: yeshiva

text: Aharon Shemu’el Lieberman

text: Bund

text: Jewish Social Democratic Party

text: Iaşi

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

glossary:
Haskalah
Talmud
Magid
Congress Poland
Diaspora
publicist
yeshiva

subconcepts: Jewish Print Media in Other National Languages


title: Shakhnah, Shalom

abstract: (ca. 1495–1558), rosh yeshivah and rabbi in Lublin; chief rabbi of Poland. Shalom Shakhnah ben Yosef was born into one of the richest Jewish families of Poland. His father Yosef (Yoska) and grandfather Shakhnah were successful farmers of customs duties in Poland. After Yosef’s property was plundered, he moved from Lwów to Lublin in about 1504 and opened a moneylending business. After Yosef’s death in 1507, Shakhnah maintained the business, but subsequently turned to Torah study and a rabbinical career. Although he studied in Poznań and may also have spent some time in Ashkenazic yeshivas in northern Italy, his main teacher was Ya‘akov Pollak of Kraków. Shakhnah, who eventually directed a yeshiva in Lublin, was considered to be Pollak’s heir and successor and was a central figure among rashe yeshivot (heads of yeshivas) of Poland in the generation following his teacher, beginning in about 1522.

text: Lublin

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: Poznań

text: Ya‘akov Pollak

text: Kraków

text: yeshiva

text: councils

text: Yehudah Leib

text: Prague

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Helicz press

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: rabbinic literature

text: Ashkenaz

glossary:
yeshiva
Council of Four Lands
Torah
pilpul
Talmud
halakhah


title: Economic Life

abstract: The economic opportunities open to Jews of Eastern Europe over their history were limited by non-Jewish society—largely through legislation. Thus, in order to understand Jewish economic life, it is important to have a clear picture of the laws and regulations imposed by non-Jewish society. These were never monolithic and were often extremely complex. Consequently, economic success for Jews was often a result of the ability to maneuver between different—and sometimes contradictory—regulations in order to achieve their goals.

imgDesc: Négociants et marchands Israélites (Jewish Traders and Merchants). Denis Auguste Marie Raffet. Print depicting Jewish merchants in Odessa, from Voyage dans la Russie by Anatole Demidoff (Paris: Ernest Bourdin, 1840). (Gross Family Collection)

text: Bohemia

text: Kalisz

text: credit

text: Hungary

text: Poland

text: trade

text: agriculture

text: crafts

text: Edicts of Toleration

text: Soviet Union

text: guilds

text: Hungary

text: Sabbath Rest

text: Pale of Settlement

text: ghettos

text: Gender

text: Hasidism

text: Orthodoxy

text: Haskalah

text: Zionists

text: Bund

text: shtetl

text: Holocaust

text: Lewko

text: Kraków

text: Josko

text: Fortunatus

text: Fiszel family

text: leases

text: money

text: Lwów

text: Becal

text: councils

text: Epstein

text: Bergson

text: Kronenberg

text: Gintsburg

text: Poliakov

text: banking

text: Hipolit Wawelberg

text: Jan Bloch

text: Zsigmond Kornfeld

text: Nandor de Madarassy

text: Brodskii

text: Romania

text: Czech lands

text: Galicia

text: tavernkeeping

text: Galicia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Crimea

text: Ukraine

text: Birobidzhan

text: Land of Israel

text: crafts

text: guilds

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: Prague

text: Moldavia

text: industry

text: Slovakia

text: Trade

text: Budapest

text: Odessa

text: Manfréd Weiss

text: Natanson

text: Brodskii

text: cantors

text: kahal

text: shtadlan

text: Minorities Treaties

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

text: Łódź

glossary:
numerus clausus
Pale of Settlement
halakhah
Haskalah
Diaspora
Council of Four Lands
Congress Poland
kahal
Talmud
Torah
melamed
yeshiva

subconcepts:
Banking and Finance
Production
Supply and Distribution
Other Occupations
The Holocaust and After


title: Soroca

abstract: Town, district center, and port on the Dniester River, now in the Republic of Moldova. The first reference to a settlement in Soroca (Rus., Soroki; Yid., Soroke) dates from 1499. The town was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in Bessarabia, mentioned by the Swedish preacher Conrad Jacob Hildebrandt in 1653. The oldest Jewish tombstones are from the sixteenth century and the first notations in the local pinkas (communal record book) are from 1770. The main synagogue was built in 1775. In 1772, a dozen Jewish families (out of a total of 170 households) lived in Soroca.

imgDesc: Members of the Jewish community in the Great Synagogue, Soroca, ca. 1920. The chair hanging from the chandelier was deposited there by the waters of a flood that engulfed the town. (YIVO)

text: Moldova

text: Bessarabia

text: tombstones

text: Russia

text: Zionist

text: Transnistria

text: Joint Distribution Committee

text: Shelomoh Hillels


title: Belarusian Literature

abstract: Translations of books of the Hebrew Bible (most frequently Psalms) and other religious texts into the Old Belarusian language and into a Belarusian version of Old Church Slavonic marked the beginnings of Jewish participation in Belarusian literature. Several of the extant manuscripts of those texts date from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century (Vilna Codices 52 and 262, containing the Five Scrolls, Daniel, Job, Proverbs, and Psalms) and are considered to be the projects of local Jewish translators who worked directly from Hebrew on behalf of fellow Jews or Judaizers, or were commissioned by a Christian amateur.

imgDesc: Fun Amerike (Of America), by Ayzik Platner. (Minsk: Melukhe farlag fun Vaysrusland, 1934). (YIVO)

text: Judaizers

text: Lublin

text: Lithuania

text: Yiddish literature

text: Polish

text: Russian literature

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Yashe Bronshteyn

text: Holocaust

text: Belarus

text: Minsk

text: shtetl

text: heder

text: yeshiva

glossary: Aktion heder yeshiva


title: Artels

abstract: Voluntary cooperative associations of craftsmen or peasants in the Soviet Union. Established on the basis of charters, artels obtained raw materials, produced finished or (less commonly) unfinished products, and sold them. Artels began to extend significantly after the October Revolution and reached their zenith in the late 1920s and 1930s. Both artisanal and agricultural cooperatives worked from the same economic principles, raising basic capital through membership fees and realizing profit through communal labor.

imgDesc: Men inspecting foals at an artel supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Kherson, Ukraine, ca. 1924. The Russian sign identifies the building as the first equine artificial insemination project in the area and a Russian inscription on the photograph claims that the horses pictured were evaluated as “less than average.” (YIVO)

text: Soviet Union

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Sabbath

text: Ukraine

text: Hirsh Lekert

text: Evsektsiia

text: Aleksandr Chemeriskii

text: Ukraine


title: Barasch, Iuliu

abstract: (1815–1863), physician, philosopher, writer, and popularizer of science. Born in Brody, Galicia, Iuliu (Julius; Yehudah) Barasch received a traditional education and prepared for a rabbinical career. However, he came under the influence of the Hebrew writers Hirsh Mendel Pineles and Yitsḥak Erter and turned his attention to secular reading. He studied philosophy beginning in 1836 at the University of Leipzig. In 1839 he transferred to the University of Berlin and earned a degree in medicine in 1841.

imgDesc: Letter from Juliusz Barasch to his brother Eisig, 1839. From Juliusz (Iuliu) Barasch in Berlin to his brother Eisig Barasch in Stanisławów, Austrian Empire (now Ivano-Frankiv'sk, Ukr.), 30 June 1839. Barasch praises his brother's letter: they are soul-mates.  Reading it was like looking into an untarnished mirror of his own soul. He writes about his continuing study of medicine, "his chosen profession," which he is combining with a degree in philosophy. He has abandoned his rabbinical studies. He compares Leipzig—where he was one of only a handful of Jewish students in the university—and Berlin, where there are "a few thousand Jewish families and a quarter of the students are Jewish or of Jewish ancestry."  In Berlin, all sorts of Jews can be encountered, from the very Orthodox ("stricter than any Jew in Galicia" when it comes to observance of the Sabbath) to those who "take many liberties"  when it comes to Jewish practice. Barasch has made a pilgrimage to Moses Mendelssohn's grave, and has affixed transcription of the tombstone to the front page of the letter.  He found it a surprisingly modest grave for such a prominent man.  He has brought letters of recommendation from Leipzig with him, which have secured him a friendly reception by some of the local families and he has also met and gotten to know some prominent scholars, including Abraham Geiger and Leopold Zunz. Barash has run into  and become very friendly with their cousin, Herr Brillant, a successful businessman in Petersburg and Odessa who gave up everything to study medicine in Berlin. Judeo-German. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Brody

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: Moritz Steinschneider

text: Bucharest

text: Romania

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidim

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: Moldavia

text: Walachia

text: assimilation

text: religious reform


title: Gerő, Katalin

abstract: (1853–1944), director of the Girls’ Orphanage of the Pest Israelite Women’s Association and cofounder of the first Zionist girls’ association in Budapest. Katalin Gerő’s mother was Zsófia Benkő, whose family had been successful and respectable residents in the village of Hévízgyörk northeast of Budapest from the eighteenth century. Katalin’s father, László Gerő, was an intellectual and son of a Polish freedom fighter who had found shelter for his family in Hungary. The early death of Zsófia left László with six children and little experience in running the farm. As a result, he quickly became impoverished and abandoned his children.

text: Zionist

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Johanna Bischitz

text: József Kiss


title: Kapper, Siegfried

abstract: (1821–1879), Czech and German poet, writer, and translator. Siegfried (Salomon) Kapper studied philosophy at Prague University (1837–1839) and medicine in Vienna (1841–1846), earning his doctorate in medicine in 1847. He then worked briefly in Croatia, took an active part in the revolution in Vienna in 1848, and served as an elected representative in the Austrian parliament. When shots were fired into the assembly in March 1848, he provided medical care to the wounded. Kapper was also a division leader of the academic legion, whose musical anthem used the text of one of his poems. His collection of poems titled Befreite Lieder (Liberated Songs; 1848) was infused with revolutionary sentiment.

text: Prague

text: Poland

text: Moritz Hartmann

text: Mladá Boleslav

text: Prague


title: Beregovskii, Moisei Iakovlevich

abstract: (1892–1961), Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist. Born in Ukraine into the family of a melamed (itinerant teacher), Moisei Beregovskii was given a traditional Jewish heder education. In 1905 he went to Kiev, where he received an external degree for high school studies (1912), learned music theory, and took cello lessons; from 1915 to 1920, he studied at the Kiev Conservatory (cello with Friedrich von Müllert, composition theory with Boleslav Yavorski). From 1916 to 1922, Beregovskii taught music at various Jewish schools and conducted the chorus at the Kiev Society for Jewish Music.

imgDesc: Presidium of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture, Kiev, 1934. Pictured are (first row, right to left): Osher Margulis (head of the Historical Section), M. Kadishevich (head of the Birobidzhan section), Kalman Marmor (a visiting scholar from America), historian Yoysef Liberberg, Gershon Gorokhov (director of the Institute from November 1934), Shimon Dobin (staff member of the Philological Institute); (second row) bibliographer Israel Mitlman, Iona Khinchin (archivist and dean of the Jewish Division of the Kiev Teachers College), philologist Elye Spivak, ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovskii (head of the Folklore Section), literary historian Maks Erik (Zalman Merkin), Yashe Reznik (head of the Literature and Criticism Section), and Mikhl Levitan (head of the Philological Section). (YIVO)

text: folklorist

text: Ukraine

text: heder

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Moscow

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Kiev

text: Odessa

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Galicia

text: An-ski expedition

text: Engel

text: Chernivtsi

text: folk songs

text: purim-shpiln

glossary: melamed heder


title: Tsharni, Daniel

abstract: (1888–1959), Yiddish poet and journalist. The youngest brother of critic Shmuel Niger and political activist Borekh Vladek-Tsharni, Daniel Tsharni (last name also rendered Charney) was born in Dukor, Belorussia. His father died when Tsharni was 18 months old, and his mother, who inherited a small business, worked hard to support her six children. A delicate child, Tsharni received no formal education.

imgDesc: Shmuel Niger (second from right, hand-numbered “3”), his brother, the writer Daniel Tsharni (second from left, “2”), scholar Jakob Lestschinsky (left, “1”), and others, on a trip to the Alps, ca. 1920s. Photograph by M. Aschwarden. (YIVO)

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Belorussia

text: Minsk

text: Vilna

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Moscow

text: Petrograd

text: Folkspartey

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: El Lissitzky

text: Der emes

text: Der shtrom

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Crimea

text: Elias Tcherikower

text: Riga

text: Warsaw


title: Mântuirea

abstract: Daily newspaper published in Bucharest in two series: 1919–1922 and 1944–1948. The director and founder of Mântuirea (Redemption) was Abraham Leib Zissu, and its editor in chief was Abraham Feller. The publication was regarded as the most influential Romanian Jewish newspaper of the interwar period. It had a strong Zionist bent, implied by its subtitle, “Cotidian național evreiesc” (Jewish National Daily).

text: Bucharest

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Zionist

text: assimilation

text: Romania

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Lev Pinsker

text: Naḥum Sokolow


title: Agudas Yisroel

abstract: (Agudat Yisra’el; Aguda[h]; Union of Israel) is a political movement of Orthodox Jewry, founded at a conference in Kattowitz (Upper Silesia; today Katowice, Poland) in May 1912. Subsequently, branches of the movement were established in most countries of Western and Eastern Europe, as well as in the United States and pre-state Israel. It was in interwar Eastern Europe, though, that Agudas Yisroel reached the pinnacle of its political achievement and institutional development. Hasidic rebbes in Poland and yeshiva heads in Lithuania legitimized the movement religiously, and their followers formed the bulk of its constituency.

imgDesc: Members of a hakhsharah (training farm that prepared young Jews for settlement in Palestine) affiliated with Agudas Yisroel, Mosty Wielkie, Poland (now Velikiye Mosty, Ukr.), 1930s. The Hebrew sign reads: “Kibbutz Hakhsharah of Agudas Yisroel in Poland, named after Maharam of Lublin [Rabbi Me’ir ben Gedalyah], Mosty Wielkie.” (YIVO)

text: Orthodox

text: Silesia

text: Katowice

text: Poland

text: yeshiva

text: Lithuania

text: shtadlones

text: Daas Toyre

text: Zionism

text: Reform

text: rabbinate

text: Mizraḥi

text: Russia

text: Hungary

text: Ger Hasidic dynasty

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: General Zionists

text: Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski

text: Me’ir Shapira

text: yeshiva

text: Ya‘akov Trokenheim

text: Leib Mincberg

text: Aleksander Zysha Frydman

text: Latvia

text: Mordekhai Dubin

text: Bessarabia

text: Romania

text: Yehudah Leib Zirelson

text: Kishinev

text: Beys Yankev

text: Sarah Schenirer

text: youth movements

text: Land of Israel

text: yeshiva

text: ghettos

text: Tseirey Agudas Yisroel

text: Orthodoxy

glossary:
yeshiva
Torah
Congress Poland
rebbe
Ḥabad
Diaspora

subconcepts:
Foundation of the Movement
Organizational Structure


title: Goldstein, Angelo

abstract: (1889–1947), politician, lawyer, and Zionist leader. Angelo Goldstein was born into a rabbi’s family in Milevsko (Mühlhausen), Bohemia. He studied law in Prague and was an active member of the Zionist Bar Kochba Association. He was the cofounder of the Theodor Herzl Association in 1909 and chaired this first Czech Zionist student group in 1909–1910. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and was wounded. After the war, he opened a law office in Prague.

text: Zionist

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Bar Kochba Association

text: Židovská Strana

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Emil Margulies

text: Ludvík Singer

text: Slovakia

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Ḥayim Kugel

text: Silesia

text: Chaim Weizmann


title: Kenigsberg, Dovid

abstract: (1891–1942?), poet. Dovid Kenigsberg was born in the provincial town of Busk, in the Tarnopol district of eastern Galicia. He received a general education in secondary schools in Brody and Czernowitz, and learned ancient Greek and Latin. In 1911, he worked as a bookkeeper in Lwów. Scholars claim that he first wrote poetry (in German and Polish) when he was 15, but his first piece was printed in the collection Yugnt (Youth; 1909), edited by Yankev Zrubovl.

text: Tarnopol

text: Galicia

text: Brody

text: Czernowitz

text: Lwów

text: Warsaw


title: Ukrainian Literature

abstract: Jewish Ukrainian literary creativity was uncommon: East European Jews generally sought acculturation into powerful imperial societies that had great literary traditions, such as Russia or Germany. Nonetheless, some Jews chose to identify with the colonial society of Ukraine even though it was routinely represented not only as powerless, stateless, and oppressed, but also as uncivilized and backward. Most of the Jews who established themselves as Ukrainian writers or expressed sympathy for Ukrainian culture made a conscious anti-imperial choice; indeed, a decision by an East European Jew to integrate into Ukrainian culture was particularly striking because Jews for centuries viewed Ukrainians as perpetrators of anti-Jewish massacres, and Ukrainians perceived Jews as sycophantic servants of the Polish gentry, Russian landlords, or, later, the Bolsheviks.

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: L’viv

text: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky

text: Shimen Frug

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: L’viv

text: Kyiv

text: Khar’kiv

text: Ezra Fininberg

text: Moyshe Khashchevatski

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Uman

text: Kultur-lige

text: El Lissitzky

text: Yisakhar Rybak

text: Aleksandr Tyshler

text: USSR

text: prose

text: Der Nister

text: shtetl

text: Itsik Fefer

text: shtetl

text: Poland

text: Isaac Babel

text: censorship

text: Miklós Radnóti

text: Babi Yar

text: Paul Celan

text: Chernivtsi

text: assimilation

glossary: Talmud Torah


title: Alba Iulia

abstract: Town in the central western area of Romania, on the Mureş River. Alba Iulia (known in German as Karlsburg; Ladino as Carlisburg; Latin as Alba Carolina [or Apulum in ancient Roman times]; and Hungarian as Gyulafehérvár) served from 1542 to 1690 as the capital of the autonomous principality of Transylvania under Turkish suzerainty. It was then part of Hungary until it was annexed to Romania after World War I.

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary

text: World War I

text: trade

text: Yeḥezkel Paneth

text: Sephardic

text: Orthodoxy

text: Holocaust

glossary:
Status Quo
Neolog


title: Entertainers

abstract: While itinerant entertainers of all kinds were a part of European culture in general, and even though they are poorly documented, a bare outline of this phenomenon among East European Jews can be sketched. Among the earliest of such performers were magidim (preachers), who went from place to place delivering sermons illustrated with parables and stories. The shpilman, a traveling singer of poems and tales, often collaborated with musicians, and gradually gave way to phenomena such as the popular Broder Singers. Klezmorim—instrumental musicians—while based in one location, played for weddings in surrounding towns, as well as for the local aristocracy on their estates.

imgDesc: “King of Iron: Gustaw Breitbart.” Poster in Polish and Yiddish. Gustaw (Gershon) Breitbart was a brother of the more famous Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart. Artwork by H. Cyna. Printed by Drukarnia Piórko, Grajewo, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: weddings

text: Ger Hasidim

text: Warsaw

text: Romania

text: Przemyśl

text: Bucharest

text: Lwów

text: sport

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Zishe Breitbart

text: Shtern


title: Notkin, Nota Khaimovich

abstract: (d. 1804), merchant, shtadlan (lobbyist for Jewish interests), and Jewish political leader in late eighteenth-century Russia. In the late 1770s and 1780s, Notkin was a contractor for the court of Count Semen Gavriilovich Zorich in Shklov, and for Count Grigorii Potemkin, Russia’s “viceroy of the south.” During this period, Notkin traveled frequently to Prussia, and came into contact with the circle of the Berlin Haskalah. He was a subscriber to the journal Ha-Me’asef, and was apparently responsible for commissioning Naftali Herts Wessely to compose Hebrew poems, with German translation, in honor of the visit by Empress Catherine II to Shklov and Mogilev in 1780.

text: shtadlan

text: Russia

text: Shklov

text: Haskalah

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: agriculture

text: industry

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

glossary:
Haskalah
Pale of Settlement


title: Kahana, Yehudah

abstract: (ca. 1740–1819), rabbi and author. Born in Kalisz (in what was to become Galicia), Yehudah Kahana was the eldest of four sons of Yosef ha-Kohen, who traced his lineage to the seventeenth-century rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (hence, some members of the family were called Kahana-Heller). Kahana at first shunned the rabbinate, leasing a village inn near Kalisz. Unsuccessful as an innkeeper, he became a private tutor to advanced students of wealthy families in Lwów, where he befriended a fellow tutor, Yosef Te’omim, later the rabbi of Frankfurt an der Oder and the author of the Peri megadim.

text: Kalisz

text: Galicia

text: Yom Tov Lipmann Heller

text: rabbinate

text: Lwów

text: Yosef Te’omim

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Hungary

text: Munkács

text: Sighet

text: Sabbatian

text: Frankist

text: Mosheh Schreiber

text: Pressburg

text: Satmar

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
gaon


title: Dej

abstract: Salt-mining town in northwestern Romania, on the Someş River 60 km northeast of Cluj. The first documented reference to Dej (Ger, Desch; Hun., Dés) dates to 1061. After legislation in 1693–1700 had prohibited Jews from settling in mining towns, authorities in Dej decided in 1722 to forbid Jewish residence. No Jews lived there until 1834; and just three were mentioned in 1838.

imgDesc: Children at a day camp, including one traditionally dressed Orthodox boy (center) who has peyes and wears a yarmulke, Dej, Romania, 1930. (YIVO)

text: Romania

text: Cluj

text: Transylvania

text: Yeḥezkel Paneth

text: yeshiva

text: Jewish Congress

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Orthodox

text: Zionist movemen

text: ghettos

glossary: yeshiva Talmud Torah


title: Broderzon, Moyshe

abstract: (1890–1956), Yiddish poet and playwright. The son of a well-to-do businessman, Moscow-born Moyshe Broderzon and his family were among the Jews expelled from that city in 1891. His father moved to Łódź but Broderzon’s mother and the children went to Nesivizh (Pol., Nieśwież), her native town in Belorussia. In 1900, the family was reunited in Łódź. Broderzon studied accounting at a business school there and worked in that field for several years after 1907. He also wrote poems in Russian, though these pieces were not printed. In 1908, he began to write in Yiddish and published humorous skits in the Lodzer tageblat, under the pseudonym Broder Zinger.

imgDesc: Shney-tants (Snow Dance), by Moyshe Broderzon (Łódź: Yung-yidish, 1921). Illustrated by the author. (YIVO)

text: Łódź

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Moscow

text: Yisakhar Rybak

text: El Lissitzky

text: Yiddish literature

text: Daniel Tsharni

text: poetry

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Yankl Adler

text: Yung-yidish

text: Perets Markish

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Israel Joshua Singer

text: Khalyastre

text: Poland

text: theater

text: Dzigan

text: Shumacher

text: Yoysef Tunkel

text: Białystok

text: GOSET

text: Y. L. Peretz


title: Tsunzer, Elyokem

abstract: (1836–1913), Yiddish folk poet and songwriter. Known as Lyokemke Badkhn (Elyokem the Wedding Entertainer) and the “people’s bard,” Elyokem Tsunzer was born in Vilna (then Russia)—in 1841 rather than 1836, according to his own account—and died in New York, where he is buried in Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn. Tsunzer received a heder education but was raised when ideas of the Haskalah were reaching Eastern Europe; consequently, his years spanned modernization of Jewish life in Russia, eventual emancipation of Jews, secularization, Jewish participation in modern political movements, and the creation of specifically Jewish movements such as Zionism and Yiddishism.

text: Vilna

text: Russia

text: heder

text: Haskalah

text: Zionism

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Haskalah

text: agriculture

text: Yiddish poetry

glossary: heder Haskalah Talmud


title: Będzin

abstract: Royal town in southern Poland, since 1945 in the province of Silesia. Będzin (Yid., Bendin) traces Jewish settlement back to the thirteenth century. In 1583, King Stefan Batory granted a charter to Jews of Będzin, giving them the right to own prayer houses and a cemetery, to sell and buy municipal real estate, to carry out unlimited trade, to slaughter animals and sell meat, and to manufacture and distribute alcoholic beverages. The privilege was confirmed by subsequent rulers.

text: Poland

text: Silesia

text: trade

text: kahal

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: armed resistance


title: Selbstwehr

abstract: Zionist weekly published in Prague from 1 March 1907 to 8 October 1938. Selbstwehr’s title, which literally means “self-defense,” was interpreted in the newspaper’s programmatic statement also to mean “self-help.” Communal administration was to be made democratic, and Jews were to be encouraged to stop hiding their Jewishness. In addition, Selbstwehr campaigned to have Jews recognized as one of the nationalities of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zionist work was reported in great detail, as was news of the Jewish world and of local Jewish cultural activities. In its first years, Selbstwehr gave special emphasis to sports, which were to help in creating a new type of Jew.

text: Zionist

text: Prague

text: sports

text: Max Brod

text: Czechoslovak Republi

text: Židovská Strana

text: Felix Weltsch


title: Konin

abstract: City in central Poland about two-thirds of the way on the east–west route from Warsaw to Poznań. The Jews of Konin probably arrived from Poznań and Kalisz (about 50 km due south of Konin) and are first mentioned in a Polish court record of 1397. The community gained full autonomy from Kalisz in 1810. It is likely that a Jewish burial ground existed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, though the town’s “old” cemetery was first used in the eighteenth century. The Jewish population had reached 180 in the fifteenth century, but destruction by the Swedes (in 1656 and 1707) and plague (especially during the cholera epidemics of 1628–1631 and 1662) kept the numbers of inhabitants lower. It was estimated that 168 Jews lived in Konin in 1764–1765 (making up 24% of the town’s population); by 1827, the numbers had grown to 872 (24.4%) and in 1897 to 2,482 (31.7%). In 1939, it was approximately 3,000 (23%).

imgDesc: Coach on Long Street, Konin, ca. 1912. The sign on the coach reads in Russian and Polish, “From Konin to Kutno.” Postcard published by J. Buchner, Konin. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Poznań

text: Kalisz

text: Haskalah

text: Leopold Infeld

text: ORT

text: Zionist

text: sport

text: Radom

text: Lublin

text: Lwów


title: Aizman, David Iakovlevich

abstract: (1869–1922), Russian fiction writer and playwright. Born in Nikolaev, in the Russian Empire (now Mikolayiv, Ukraine), David Aizman led an itinerant life most of his adult years. In an autobiographical note he wrote, “To the present day I have no certain place of residence. . . . I suffer a great deal from the absence of a residence permit. . . . I am a writer. I pass myself for a shop assistant” (Odessa, 15 January 1914).

text: Russian Empire

text: Ukraine

text: Odessa

text: Shimon Markish


title: Slutsk

abstract: Town in Belarus. The first evidence of Jewish life in Slutsk (Pol., Słuck) dates from 1583, when the town formed part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; its Jewish community was granted a formal privilege in 1601. By 1623, Jews owned 16 houses. Though affected by wars in the mid-seventeenth century, both the town and the Jewish community developed rapidly. In the Lithuanian Jewish Council, Slutsk, originally a satellite of Brisk (Brest Litovsk), became one of the five leading communities in 1691.

text: Belarus

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Council

text: Brest

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Shmuel Ickowicz

text: Misnagdim

text: Yosef Dov Ber Soloveichik

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Soviet Jewish schools

text: Soviet Union

glossary: Torah Misnagdim yeshiva Haskalah


title: Frydman, Aleksander Zysha

abstract: (1897–1943), activist, publicist, and official of Agudas Yisroel in Poland. Born in Sochaczew to a Hasidic family, Frydman received a traditional education. In 1914, his family fled to Warsaw. It was there that the young Frydman came under the influence of Emanuel Carlebach, a representative of Frankfurt Orthodoxy who was instrumental in the founding of the Polish branch of Agudas Yisroel in 1916.

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Orthodoxy

text: Tseirey Agudas Yisroel

text: heder

text: Joint Distribution Committee

text: Adam Czerniaków

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Yitsḥak [Ignacy] Schiper

text: armed resistance

glossary: publicist heder Talmud Torah kehilah