title: Sofer, Ḥayim ben Mordekhai Efrayim Fishel

abstract: (1821–1886), halakhist, Orthodox leader, and ideologue. Ḥayim Sofer’s grandfather, a native of Frankfurt am Main, settled in Pressburg (Bratislava; then in northwest Hungary, today in Slovakia) toward the end of the eighteenth century. Sofer’s father, Mordekhai Efrayim Fishel, was a religious functionary in the community and a close disciple and confidant (though not a relative) of Mosheh Sofer (known as Ḥatam Sofer, 1762–1839). Although initially Ḥayim Sofer’s father opposed rabbinic careers for his seven sons, the Sofers became one of the major rabbinical families in Hungary. Ḥayim (the sixth son) received his training at Ḥatam Sofer’s yeshiva and internalized the antimodernist approach of his mentor exemplified in the famous slogan, “that which is new is biblically forbidden.”

text: Orthodox

text: Bratislava

text: Hungary

text: Slovakia

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: yeshiva

text: Mukacheve

text: Budapest

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: Akiva Yosef Schlesinger

text: seminary

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Munkatsh Hasidic Dynasty

text: Ukraine

text: Jewish Congress

text: Sabbath

glossary: yeshiva responsa


title: Kóbor, Tamás

abstract: (1867–1942), writer and journalist. Tamás Kóbor was born in Pozsony (Pressburg; today Bratislava) as Adolf Bermann. His family moved to Budapest when he was three years old. The name Tamás Kóbor, which he adopted as a young artist, is a Hungarian version (translated by János Arany) of Tam o’ Shanter, Robert Burns’s famous character. Kóbor studied law and started his literary career at the journal A Hét, whose editor in chief was his brother-in-law, the poet József Kiss. Kóbor was a principal contributor to numerous other journals and newspapers, including Magyar Hírlap, Pesti Napló, Pesti Hírlap, and Az Újság. His most significant works were short stories and novels.

text: Bratislava

text: Budapest

text: József Kiss

text: Hungary

text: Holocaust


title: Chajes, Yitsḥak ben Avraham

abstract: (1538–ca. 1615), rabbi. The family of Yitsḥak ben Avraham Chajes probably had its origins in Provence. He was active as a rabbi in Prostějov (Prossnitz, Moravia) and in Prague, where in the 1580s he became chief rabbi and head of the yeshiva. According to David Gans (Tsemaḥ David; 1592), Chajes remained in Prague until 1584, later moving to Poland.

text: Prostějov

text: Moravia

text: Prague

text: yeshiva

text: David Gans

text: Poland

text: Passover

text: Poznań

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: yeshiva

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

glossary:
yeshiva
agadah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
pilpul


title: Ginzburg, Aleksandr Il’ich

abstract: (Sometimes spelled Gintsburg; 1907–1972), Soviet cinematographer and cinema director. Born into a traditional Jewish family, Aleksandr Ginzburg took up photography, and then cinematography, at an early age. After moving to Leningrad, he began at the age of 18 to film popular science movies. In 1927 he graduated from the Camera Department of the Leningrad Technical School of Cinematography, becoming a cameraman at the Sovkino (later, Lenfil’m) Movie Studio. In 1934 he received a bachelor’s degree from the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute.

text: cinema

text: photography

text: Leningrad

text: Moscow

text: Belarus


title: Fundoianu, Beniamin

abstract: (1898–1944), poet and philosopher. Born in Iaşi, Romania, Beniamin Fundoianu was the son of Isac Wechsler, a small tradesman from Herța (in Bucovina), and of Adela, sister of Jewish scholars Elias, Wilhelm, and Moses Schwarzfeld. The name of the Fundoaia estate, near Herța, inspired Beniamin to choose his literary pseudonym Fundoianu, which he eventually turned into Fondane in France.

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Herța

text: Bucovina

text: Schwarzfeld

text: Iacob Groper

text: Zionist

text: A. L. Zissu

text: Bucharest

text: Mântuirea

text: Mântuirea

text: Lev Shestov


title: Słonimski, Ḥayim Zelig

abstract: (1810–1904), author of scientific texts in Hebrew; inventor; principal of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; and founder and editor of the journal Ha-Tsefirah (The Dawn). As was the case with many nineteenth-century maskilim, Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski had to rely on inner strength, curiosity, and self-motivation to make the transition from a cultural environment steeped in tradition to one based on a more modern Jewish ethos. The education he received in Białystok, where he was born, qualified him for a career in the rabbinate, but out of a desire to expand his intellectual horizons, Słonimski taught himself European languages and read their literature.

imgDesc: Bookmark-shaped postcard with portrait of Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski. The card is decorated with traditional symbols of scholarship. Printed by Société Libanon, Warsaw, ca. 1900. (YIVO)

text: Zhitomir

text: Seminary

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Białystok

text: rabbinate

text: Haskalah

text: Warsaw

text: Abraham Stern

text: Poland

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: censor

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Zionist


title: Lelov Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Line of important second-tier rabbinic leaders originating in Central Poland. Its folksy progenitor, David Biderman of Lelov (Pol., Lelów; 1746–1814), was a highly effective recruiter of scions of prestigious rabbinic families. David himself came from a humble background and was famous for his compassion for transgressors and his love for children and animals. A disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk (Leżajsk) and then of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the “Seer of Lublin”), he remained the latter’s devotee even after obtaining his own following.

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: Poland

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Leżajsk

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Lublin

text: Pshiskhe

text: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

text: Vurke

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Opatów

text: Land of Israel

text: Russia

text: Karlin Hasidism


title: Litvakov, Moyshe

abstract: (1875/80–1939), Yiddish literary theoretician and critic. Moyshe Litvakov was born in the Ukrainian town of Cherkassy into the family of a melamed. He received a traditional Jewish education until the age of 17, gained an external gymnasium certificate, and attended the Sorbonne between 1902 and 1905. Litvakov returned to Russia after rejecting Ahad Ha-Am’s form of Zionism for Labor Zionism and becoming a founder of the territorialist Zionist Socialist Workers Party (SSWP). In 1907 he edited its organs Der nayer veg (The New Way), Dos vort (The Word), and Undzer veg (Our Way) in Vilna.

text: Russia

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Zionism

text: Vilna

text: Ben-Adir

text: Kiev

text: Fareynikte

text: Kultur-lige

text: communism

text: Moscow

text: Der emes

text: Khayim Gildin

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Der Nister

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Mendele

text: Shmuel Godiner

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Belorussia

text: Ukraine

text: Yashe Bronshteyn

text: Minsk

text: theater


title: Chagall, Marc

abstract: (1887–1985), artist. Marc Chagall was one of the most prominent European artists of the modern age. To this day, the frequent exhibitions of his work in many countries continue to draw large crowds. His art is polyphonic, combining the formal concerns of several modernist trends with cultural representations and an interest in the fantastic and the grotesque. Chagall combined a variety of sources, including aspects of Jewish, Russian, and French culture and images from Christian art, in his own whimsical art, based on his reinvented biography.

imgDesc: Remembrance. Marc Chagall, 1914. Gouache, india ink, and pencil on notebook paper. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. (Gift of Solomon R. Guggenheim, 41.440. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York / © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris)

text: Vitsyebsk

text: Belarus

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Shneur Zalman

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: heder

text: Yehudah (Iurii) Pen

text: Léon Bakst

text: Maksim Vinaver

text: El Lissitzky

text: Moscow

text: Yiddish Chamber Theater

text: Russia

text: Mark Antokol’skii

text: Vilna

text: YIVO

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Warsaw

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Yiddish literature

text: Khalyastre

text: Perets Markish

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Avrom Sutzkever

glossary: Gift of Solomon R. Guggenheim, 41.453. © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris

glossary: Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Donation of Elaine Lustig Cohen, 158.2001.B. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Marc Chagall © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

glossary: © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris. Print courtesy of YIVO


title: Lestschinsky, Jakob

abstract: (1876–1966), historian and sociologist; specialist in Jewish demography and economic history. Born in Horodishche, near Kiev, Jakob Lestschinsky (Yankev Leshtshinski) received a traditional Jewish education. In 1898, his interests in secular studies led him to Odessa, where he tutored Hebrew while studying for an external matriculation. In 1901, he attended universities in Bern and later in Zurich.

imgDesc: Jakob Lestschinsky (second from right), historian Simon Dubnow (center), Meyer Abraham Halevy from Bucharest (left), and other delegates to the YIVO Conference pose at the grave of Tsemaḥ Szabad, a physician, leader of the Folkist party, and founder of YIVO, Vilna, 1935. (YIVO)

text: Kiev

text: Odessa

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Zionism

text: Warsaw

text: ORT

text: Fareynikte

text: YIVO

text: Prague

text: Riga

text: Poland

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: World War I

text: trade

text: Holocaust


title: Riddles

abstract: Riddles have been described (by the American folklorist Roger Abrahams) as a traditional form of licensed aggression, since the aim of the riddler is to confuse the listener by giving hints that point to the right answer only in hindsight. The answer to a puzzling and seemingly unanswerable question is arbitrary, surprising, and traditional. That is, with all possible answers, the questioner, in keeping with tradition, has the power to insist which choice is the right answer. The puzzle arises from the skillful use of speech-play, metaphor, and other techniques of obfuscation and misdirection. Yet the riddle can serve various functions: as entertainment, as a means of teaching values, and as a way of socializing the child into the poetics of Yiddish speech, including speech-play, metaphor, puns, and proverbs.

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

text: proverbs

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: parody

text: Vilna

text: folklore

text: folk songs

text: Shloyme Bastomski

glossary: heder yeshiva


title: Yiddish Criticism and Scholarship (Literary Criticism and Scholarship)

abstract: The slow development of Yiddish literary criticism in Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century mirrored the limited role that modern Yiddish literature played in Jewish cultural life at that time. A telling example: when Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh began his career as a Yiddish writer in 1864, he had already written two significant treatises on literary criticism and cultural issues, in Hebrew. He did not deem it necessary, however, to develop this genre in Yiddish in any substantial way because he considered Yiddish primarily suited to belles lettres. Until the 1880s, the beginnings of Yiddish literary criticism were modest and sporadic.

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

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Shomer

text: prose

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Voskhod

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Zionist

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Sholem Asch

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Max Weinreich

text: YIVO

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Perets Markish

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Soviet Union

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Maks Erik

text: Haskalah

text: Max Weinreich

text: Yiddish literature

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Yisroel Tsinberg

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Vilna

text: Haskalah

text: Aron Gurshteyn

text: Yitskhok Nusinov

text: Elye Spivak

text: Meir Wiener

text: humor

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Holocaust

text: Leyb Naydus

text: Zelig Kalmanovitch

text: censorship

text: ghettos

text: Moscow

text: Sovetish heymland


title: Erlich, Henryk

abstract: (1882–1942), Bundist leader and major Jewish politician in interwar Poland. Henryk (Hersh Wolf) Erlich was born in Lublin; his father was a lapsed Hasid who had become a follower of the Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion) movement. Erlich received a traditional Jewish education as well as secular instruction. A significant turning point in Erlich’s political career came when he befriended Bronisław Grosser, a Bundist activist and prominent young theorist in the movement.

imgDesc: Bundist leaders at a Poland-wide gathering, Warsaw, 1928; (left to right) Yisroel Lichtenstein, Yitskhok Rafes, Henryk Erlich, Yekusiel Portnoy, and Bella Shapiro. At left is a portrait of Bundist leader Vladimir Medem, who died in 1923; at upper right, a portrait of Bundist leader Bronisław Grosser (1883–1912). The Yiddish banner reads: “Bund in Poland. Proletarians from all lands unite!” Photograph by Ch. Bojm. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Lublin

text: Bronisław Grosser

text: Warsaw

text: Bund

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Wiktor Alter

text: Vladimir Medem

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Soviet Union

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Ettinger, Shloyme

abstract: (1803–1856), Yiddish poet and dramatist. Shloyme Ettinger was born in Warsaw into a distinguished rabbinical family. His father died young, and Ettinger was raised by his uncle Mendel Ettinger, a rabbi who knew German and who was uncommonly flexible about enabling his nephew to explore features of the Enlightenment.

text: Warsaw

text: Zamość

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Lemberg

text: Poland

text: Haskalah

text: Purim

text: Zhitomir

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: theater

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Meyer Viner

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: poetry


title: Yidishe Shprakh, Di

abstract: Yiddish linguistic journal published in Kiev from 1927 to 1930. A bimonthly journal, Di yidishe shprakh (The Yiddish Language) was published by the cooperative publishing house Kultur-lige and was the main philological publication of the Kiev Yiddish academic center. Its editor was the veteran Yiddishist Nokhem Shtif, a founder of YIVO, who had returned to Kiev from Germany in 1926.

imgDesc: Letter from Nokem Shtif to Yoysef Opatoshu, 1929. From Nokem Shtif in Kiev to Yoysef Opatoshu in New York, 6 February 1929, expressing his delight that Opatoshu is a reader of Di yidishe shprakh, unlike other Yiddish writers who, he claims, scorn all attempts to improve the Yiddish language and have fallen under the sway of the Yiddish of the masses and the popular press. He complains of the Russification of Yiddish and Yiddish linguistics, maintaining that most Yiddish scholars are “Litvaks” and that Polish Yiddish is being neglected. He asks if Opatoshu will have a look at some folk expressions from the town of Siedlce that were recently published in the journal; could he contribute additions or corrections? Yiddish. Russian and Yiddish letterhead: Di yidishe shprakh, Kultur lige cooperative press, Kiev, Red Army 43. RG 436, Joseph Opatoshu Papers, F271. (YIVO)

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: YIVO

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Ayzik Zaretski

text: Elye Falkovitsh

text: Moscow

text: Aron Gurshteyn

text: Yoysef Liberberg

text: Max Weinreich


title: Filologishe Shriftn

abstract: Three-volume series published in Vilna by the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in 1926, 1928, and 1929. Filologishe shriftn (Studies in Philology) was coedited by Zalmen Reyzen and Max Weinreich. The publication continued the tradition established by the pioneer Yiddish academic collection Der pinkes: Yorbukh fun der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur un shprakh, far folklor, kritik un bibliografye (The Chronicle: Yearbook for the History of Yiddish Literature and Language, for Folklore, Criticism, and Bibliography; 1913), edited by Shmuel Niger, which had also been produced by the Kletskin Publishing House in Vilna.

text: Vilna

text: YIVO

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Max Weinreich

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Kletskin

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Zelig Kalmanovitch

text: Courland

text: Yisroel Tsinberg

text: Ayzik Zaretski

text: Kiev

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: YIVO


title: Yung-yidish

abstract: (1918–1921), artistic and literary avant-garde group in Łódź. The founding of Yung-yidish, the first Yiddish artistic avant-garde group in Poland, grew out of a meeting in 1918 between poet Moyshe Broderzon and a group of visual artists centered around Yitskhok Broyner, Yankl Adler, and Marek Szwarc. Eventually, the group included some 20-odd members including Yitsḥak Katzenelson, Yekhezkl-Moyshe Nayman, and Hershele, as well as younger people discovered by the group, such as the artist Henekh Bartshinski and the writers Elimelekh Shmulevitsh, Khayim Leyb Fuks, and Yisroel Shtern. In 1919, the group published a journal, also called Yung-yidish.

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

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Yankl Adler

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Yisroel Shtern

text: Moscow

text: El Lissitzky

text: Marc Chagall

text: Russian Empire

text: Odessa

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Kiev

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Henryk Berlewi

text: theater


title: Black Book

abstract: Account of Nazi atrocities against Jews in the Soviet Union. The first plenary session of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in May 1942 set up a subcommittee to collect material on Nazi crimes against the Jewish population of the occupied territories. Once the tide of the war turned in early 1943, the JAC indicated its intention to systematize the accumulation of this material and began receiving relevant testimonies.

imgDesc: Letter from Ilya Ehrenburg to Yerusalimsky, 1944. From Ilya Ehrenburg in the USSR to [Lazar?] Yerusalimski in (?), 22 September 1944, about Ehrenburg's project, The Black Book, a collection of eyewitness accounts, letters, and other materials documenting the Nazi atrocities against the Jewish population. He asks Yerusalimsky to please send him any information he might have, especially anything relating to anti-Nazi resistance and instances in which non-Jews expressed solidarity with or helped Jewish victims. Russian. Typed. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO. Published with permission.)

text: Soviet Union

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Solomon Lozovskii

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: censorship

text: Moscow

text: Holocaust

text: Vilnius


title: Molodowsky, Kadia

abstract: (1894–1975), Yiddish poet, writer, teacher of Yiddish and Hebrew, and editor. Kadia Molodowsky (in Yiddish, Kadye Molodovski) was one of the most prolific and public of the Yiddish poets, editors, and teachers in Warsaw and New York. Her life and works were characterized by paradoxes: she advocated both Yiddishism and Zionism; she believed that poetry should be engaged, yet not political, and should reflect both the poet’s individuality and her connection to the Jewish people as a whole; and she wrote powerfully about the struggles of women, yet argued against being categorized as a “woman poet” writing “women’s poetry.”

text: Warsaw

text: Zionism

text: poetry

text: shtetl

text: Grodno

text: Ukraine

text: Odessa

text: Kiev

text: Brest

text: TSYSHO

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Fraynd

text: Vilna

text: Boris Kletskin

text: sexuality

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Rokhl Korn

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Poland

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Bund

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Frayland-lige

abstract: Founded in London in 1935, the Frayland-lige far Yidisher Teritoryalistisher Kolonizatsye (Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization) united the three main organizations of the territorialist movement (based in Poland, Paris, and London) and other related local groups. Its objective was to procure a sizable tract of land for agricultural and industrial colonization in an underpopulated area of the world where East European Jews could settle. The fraylandistn, as its members were known, aimed to build a secure foundation for the continuity of their socioeconomic life and culture (including the Yiddish language). For them, compact, mass colonization was the only effective means to avoid the pressures of assimilation and dispersion associated with individual immigration—regardless of its scale.

imgDesc: Back cover of Frayland (Freeland), no. 3–4 (1934), Warsaw. English, Polish, and Yiddish text about the publication and an advertisement for Sotsyalistisher teritoryalizm (Socialist Territorialism), an anthology of memoirs about the Zionist Socialist Workers Party, Jewish Socialist Workers Party, and Fareynikte, Jewish territorialist parties active in Russia and Poland from the turn of the century to 1919. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: assimilation

text: Zionism

text: Yitskhok Nakhmen Steinberg

text: Ben-Adir

text: Fareynikte

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Białystok

text: Poland

text: Bund

text: Romania

text: Iaşi

text: Dorohoi


title: Bergelson, Dovid

abstract: (1884–1952), Yiddish novelist and dramatist. Born in Okhrimovo, Ukraine, to a wealthy family, Dovid Bergelson received a traditional Jewish education in heder and a general education through private tutors. His parents died while he was a teenager and he was raised under the supervision of his older brothers. He settled in Kiev in 1903, where he remained with some interruptions until 1921; and in that city he was both a witness and a central participant in its transformation into an important center of modern Yiddish culture.

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: Ukraine

text: heder

text: Kiev

text: Warsaw

text: A. Vayter

text: Shmuel Niger

text: prose

text: shtetl

text: Yiddish literature

text: Hebrew literature

text: Vilna

text: Kultur-lige

text: Russia

text: Evsektsiia

text: Poland

text: USSR

text: Moscow

text: Birobidzhan

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt


title: Ostropolyer, Hershele

abstract: (1770?–1810), folk figure. Although what we know about Hershele Ostropolyer is based mostly on oral tradition and folklore, he was also a real person. Hershele is thought to have come from Balta, Ukraine, and his name is based on the small town of Ostropolye (Ostropol) in Poland, where he served the community as a shoḥet (ritual slaughterer). According to legend, Hershele lost his job because of his constant joking that offended some leaders of the community. He then wandered through Ukraine, and was a familiar personality at inns and restaurants, which explains why such institutions figure so prominently in the stories about him. Eventually he found his calling—at the court of Barukh of Mezhbizh, the grandson of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Barukh was plagued by depression, and Hershele served as a court jester, frequently mocking the rabbi and his cronies and delighting the common folk.

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Hasidism

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Isaac Babel


title: Zeitlin Family

abstract: (Yid., Tseytlin), prominent writers and intellectuals in prewar Poland. The father, Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942), was a thinker, journalist, and editor. His son Arn (Aharon; 1899–1973) was a prolific poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist, and editor in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Elkhonen (Elḥanan; 1902–1942), Hillel’s younger son, was a Yiddish poet, critic, journalist, and social activist.

imgDesc: Staff of Der moment, Warsaw, 1920s. (Back row, left to right) Mordkhe Spektor, A. Almi, Yoysef Tunkel, Moyshe Bunem Yustman, Tsevi Pryłucki, D. Druk,  Sh. Janowski, Yisroel Khayim Zagorodski (front), Bentsion Chilinowicz, Yisroel Khayim Zagorodski, and Hillel Zeitlin. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Belorussia

text: Lubavitch

text: Haskalah

text: Homel

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Warsaw

text: Haynt

text: Der moment

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Lev Shestov

text: Zionism

text: Ha-Dor

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Hasidism

text: An-ski

text: piety

text: mysticism

text: poetry

text: Yiddish literature

text: Globus

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Holocaust

text: Folkspartey

text: Literarishe bleter

text: memoir

text: Yiddish theater

text: Lwów

glossary: Haskalah Zohar Kabbalah


title: Shtern, Yisroel

abstract: (1894–1942), poet and journalist. Born in Ostrołęka, Białystok district, Yisroel Shtern grew up in an economically deprived family. His father, a melamed, died young, leaving his mother—who sold homemade baked goods—and grandfather to support the family. Shtern studied in a heder and continued his religious education in the prestigious yeshivas of Slobodka and Łomża. At the outbreak of World War I, Shtern was living in Vienna, where he was imprisoned as a Russian national. During this period, he became acquainted with contemporary European literature and philosophy.

imgDesc: “Minkhe,” by Yisroel Shtern, n.d. Poem by Yisroel Shtern, “Minkhe” (Minḥah [the afternoon prayer service]), n.d. "There chats with the window an old man twilight / The sky is perforated—the sun has scorched him. . . ." Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F88.10.1. (YIVO)

text: Białystok

text: heder

text: Slobodka

text: Łomża

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Musar movement

text: Bratslav Hasidim

text: Folkist

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Khalyastre

text: Haynt

text: Bund

text: Yiddish literature

text: Soviet Union

text: Rokhl Oyerbakh

glossary: melamed heder Musar


title: Przytyk Pogrom

abstract: Przytyk, a small town several kilometers from Radom, was the scene of a riot on 9 March 1936 in which two Jews and a non-Jewish Pole were killed, several dozen Jewish apartments and shops were destroyed, and more than 20 people were severely beaten. At that time, 90 percent of Przytyk’s 3,000 inhabitants were Jews and the town served as a market for neighboring hamlets.

imgDesc:
Yiddish song written in response to a pogrom. "Es
  brent," or "S'brent" (It's Burning). Words and music: Mordecai
  Gebirtig (Mordkhe Gebirtig). Performer unidentified. From the Ben Stonehill
  collection, Hotel Marseilles, New York, 1948. (YIVO)

text: Radom

text: Kielce

text: Poland


title: Hollaenderski, Leon

abstract: (1808/12?–1878), bookseller, printer, and journalist. Little is known about Leon (Leib ben David) Hollaenderski’s family background, childhood, and adolescence. As a printer and bookseller of Polish literature in the border region of Suwałki near Lithuania, Hollaenderski was vulnerable to police persecution and decided in 1843 to move to France.

text: Suwałki

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Kraków

text: chess


title: Anielewicz, Mordekhai

abstract: (1920?–1943), Zionist youth leader and commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ŻOB) in the Warsaw ghetto. Born in Wyszków, Poland, Mordekhai Anielewicz was initially a member of the Revisionist youth movement Betar but shifted allegiance to the left-wing Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, where his powerful personality, rhetorical skills, and sports prowess marked him as a leader.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Revisionist

text: Betar

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: armed resistance

text: youth movements

text: Yitsḥak Zuckerman


title: Paper Cuts

abstract: The making of paper cuts by Jews in Eastern Europe, which differed in style from those made by Jews elsewhere, flourished particularly in the nineteenth century and began to fade as an art in the 1920s. These developments coincided in time and place with paper cuts created by rural Poles and Ukrainians. Researchers nevertheless insist on the distinctiveness of Jewish paper cuts because they were closely related to religious practices, and maintain that the influence of their neighbors, both in techniques and artistic motifs, was limited.

imgDesc: Kimpetbriv. Artist unknown, Galicia. Watercolor, paper. (Slovak National Museum Museum of Jewish Culture)

text: Purim

text: calendars

text: Passover

text: Yeshiva

glossary: Torah Yeshiva


title: Geese

abstract: Every part of the goose was used by East European Jews, for whom rendered goose fat was a staple and feathers an essential component of bedding. In some regions, Jewish women were responsible for most aspects of the raising, fattening, and selling of geese; women also rendered and sold fat and traded in goose feathers.

imgDesc: Boys with geese at the Jewish Children’s Home, Kaunas, ca. 1925. (YIVO)

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Kraków

text: Passover

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Courland

text: weddings

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Opatów

text: Belarus

text: Lithuania

text: Belarus

text: Hungary

text: Russia

glossary:
Rashi
Shulḥan ‘arukh
get


title: Postcards and Greeting Cards

abstract: On 1 October 1869, the Austrian post office produced the first official governmental Correspodenz-Karte (postal card), based on an idea developed by Emanuel Hermann, a Viennese Jewish economics professor. The first picture postcards appeared in the 1870s in several European countries. Germany, with its advanced print technology, became the center for illustrated cards of Jewish interest in the 1880s. The new form of communication spread to Poland and the United States. As early as 1888, a writer for the Warsaw monthly Izraelita criticized the German Jewish practice of sending ornate and ostentatious postcards for Rosh Hashanah, and was disappointed with the sums of money spent on buying and mailing them. Despite such views, the illustrated postcard became a great success, and by the first decades of the twentieth century the variety, richness, and quantity of them that were produced in Poland exceeded that of Germany.

imgDesc: Rosh Hashana greeting postcard depicting women buying chickens to be used in the shlogn kapores ritual, in which one’s sins are symbolically transferred to chickens shortly before the start of Yom Kippur. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Izraelita

text: money

text: Haynt

text: Kraków

text: shtetl

text: Zionist

text: pogroms

text: Sabbath


title: Mieses, Fabius

abstract: (1824–1898), poet, translator, and essayist. Fabius Mieses was born in Brody, Galicia, where his father exposed him to the ideas of the Hebrew Haskalah. As a youth, Mieses studied philosophy with David Lokatsher, a former student of Naḥman Krochmal. In 1840, Mieses went to the home of his father’s uncle Yitsḥak Mieses (a philosopher and researcher of Kabbalah) in Kraków; subsequently, Fabius married his relative’s daughter.

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Kraków

text: Breslau

text: seminary

text: Hasidism

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Melits

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

glossary: Haskalah Kabbalah


title: Rumkowski, Khayim Mordkhe

abstract: (1877–1944), Jewish leader in Łódź, Poland, during World War II. The German occupiers appointed Khayim Rumkowski Judenälteste (or Älteste der Juden; Eldest of the Jews) with total authority and responsibility over Łódź’s Jewish population. All contacts between Germans and the Jews were to be through him and him alone. The occupiers thus diverted Jewish rage from themselves onto the Jewish leader.

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

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Zionist

text: General Zionists

text: ghetto

text: killing centers


title: Szyk, Artur

abstract: (1894–1951), artist. Artur Szyk was born in Łódź, at that time a Polish, Jewish, and German city under Russian rule. He studied art in Paris and Kraków, and during World War I and its aftermath took part in the armed struggle for Polish independence. During the interwar years he divided his time between Poland and Western Europe. In 1940 he settled in the United States, where he died 11 years later.

imgDesc: The Statute of Kalisz. Artur Szyk. Detail of Polish and French title page, 1927. Ink and paint on paper. The Jewish Museum, New York. (Gift of Andrew A. Lynn, JM 63-67. Jewish Museum/Art Resource, NY. Reproduced with the cooperation of Alexandra Szyk Braice and The Arthur Szyk Society, www.szyk.org)

text: Łódź

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Kalisz

text: Revisionist Zionism

text: Yosef Trumpeldor


title: Al’tman, Natan Isaevich

abstract: (1889–1970), artist. From 1914 to 1924, Natan Al’tman was the chief rival of Marc Chagall in the Russian Jewish art renaissance. Born in Vinnitsa (Vinnytsya, Ukr.), he attended art school in Odessa from 1903 to 1907 and moved to Paris in 1910, where he studied the works of old masters as well as cubism. His first famous work, Evreiskie pokhorony (Jewish Funeral), appeared in 1911.

text: Marc Chagall

text: Odessa

text: Saint Petersburg

text: tombstones

text: Moscow

text: Habimah

text: theater

text: stage design

text: The Dybbuk

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Aleksandr Granovskii

text: Kultur-lige

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Weinzieher, Salomon

abstract: (1869–1943), physician, community activist, and politician. Salomon Weinzieher was born in Białystok to an assimilationist Jewish family. After graduating from high school in Piotrków Trybunalski, he studied medicine at the University of Warsaw but was expelled after a year because of his affiliations with radical socialist organizations. Subsequently he was accepted, through personal connections, to the University of Kiev where he joined a Polish students’ group. After graduating from medical school, he remained active in the underground movement associated with the Polish Socialist Party. He was not a Zionist; indeed, as a Polish nationalist he regarded Zionism as a reactionary movement that alienated Jews from their civic duties in Poland.

text: Białystok

text: Piotrków

text: Warsaw

text: Kiev

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: Będzin

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Kraków

text: Holocaust


title: Kultur-lige

abstract: (Culture League), general name of a number of cultural and social organizations formed in the 1920s and 1930s in Eastern Europe as well as in certain countries of Western Europe and the Americas. The Kultur-lige was founded in Kiev during the period of the Central Rada (the Ukrainian Council that declared an independent state in January 1918), early in 1918. Its aim was to promote the development of all spheres of contemporary Yiddish culture, including education, literature, theater, art, and music.

imgDesc: Samet (Velvet), by Lipe Resnick. Illustration by Iosif Chaikov. (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1922). (Gross Family Collection)

text: Kiev

text: literature

text: theater

text: art

text: music

text: Zionists

text: Folkists

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Ukraine

text: OZE

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Perets Markish

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Zelig Kalmanovitch

text: A. Litvak

text: Khayim Shloyme Kazdan

text: Jakob Lestschinsky

text: El Lissitzky

text: Yisakhar Ber Rybak

text: Petrograd

text: Crimea

text: Minsk

text: Ester Frumkin

text: Grodno

text: Vilna

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: Białystok

text: Moscow

text: Rostov-on-Don

text: Evsektsiia

text: Vitsyebsk

text: Homel’

text: Pogroms

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: Kiev

text: USSR

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Fareynikte

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Folkist

text: Bund

text: Łódź

text: Literarishe bleter

text: TSYSHO

text: Romania

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Kishinev

text: Chernivtsi

text: Bucharest

text: Max Hermann Maxy

text: Latvia

text: Riga

text: Lithuania

text: theater

text: Yiddish literature

text: Michał Weichert

text: Yung-teater

text: Yiddish theater

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


title: Pilichowski, Leopold

abstract: (1869–1933), painter. Born in Piła near Sieradz, Poland, Leopold Pilichowski received his early Jewish education in his native village and then studied art in Łódź. There he spent time in the company of the painter Szmul Hirszenberg (to whom he was related) and the Hebrew writer David Frishman. Pilichowski continued his studies at the Art Academy in Munich and later at the Academy Julian in Paris. In France he painted portraits, Parisian street scenes, and nocturnes, and in 1891 exhibited a painting entitled Pierwsze jesienne liście (First Leaves of Autumn).

imgDesc: Tułacze (The Tired Ones). Leopold Pilichowski, before 1903. Postcard reproduction of a popular painting by the artist, published by Kunstverlag Phönix, Berlin. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: Szmul Hirszenberg

text: David Frishman

text: Warsaw

text: Zionist

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik


title: General Zionists

abstract: Party affiliated with the World Zionist Organization. When the World Zionist Organization was first established in 1897, it acted as one unified political body, based on the Basel Program that had been adopted at the First Zionist Congress that year. According to this program, the Zionist movement would be divided only into regional, not political, blocs; a mere few years later, however, the movement split into political parties, each one basing itself on an ideology other than that articulated in Basel. Consequently, the bulk of the movement was represented by international parties, including Po‘ale Tsiyon, Mizraḥi, the Radical Zionists, and the Revisionist Zionists.

imgDesc: Members of Ha-No‘ar ha-Tsiyoni, a youth movement affiliated with the General Zionist movement, harvesting a crop at a hakhsharah (Zionist training farm), Pinsk, ca. 1930s. (The Institute for Labour Research in Memory of Pinchas Lavon, Tel Aviv)

text: Zionist movement

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Mizraḥi

text: Revisionist Zionists

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: Leon Reich

text: Kraków

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Ignacy (Yitsḥak) Schwarzbart

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Leon Lewite

text: Chaim Weizmann

text: Romania

text: Poland

text: Transylvania

text: Bucovina

text: Bessarabia

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: youth movements

text: Akiva


title: Gebirtig, Mordkhe

abstract: (1877–1942), Yiddish poet and songwriter. Mordkhe Gebirtig (Bertig) was a native of Kraków. Details given in various sources regarding the personal history of this poet in the first 20 years of his life—such as the year of his birth, his alleged studying at a heder until the age of 10, his alleged employment as a carpenter’s apprentice, and the claim that he subsequently made a living working as a carpenter—were refuted by the latest researcher of his work, Natan Gross; thus, information about his early life is practically unavailable.

imgDesc:
Yiddish
  song about a boy waiting for his girlfriend. "Reisele"
  (Reyzele). Words and music: Mordecai Gebirtig (Mordkhe Gebirtig). Performed
  by Menasha Oppenheim with Harry Lubin, piano. Asch H-6004 mx. SC 84, New
  York, ca. 1940s. (YIVO)

text: poet

text: songwriter

text: Kraków

text: heder

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Jewish Social Democratic Party

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Holocaust


title: Varshavski, Oyzer

abstract: (1898–1944), Yiddish writer, painter, and art critic. Born in Sochaczew, Poland, Oyzer Varshavski received a traditional Jewish education and settled in Warsaw with his family at the age of 14. He was encouraged to write during World War I by Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg, whose publishing house later produced Varshavski’s first novel, Shmuglars (Smugglers; 1920). The book was well received by critics and readers and went through several editions and reprints in Warsaw, Vilna, and Kiev before 1930. In the 1920s, he published stories in various—usually modernist—journals in Poland, the United States, and Western Europe.

imgDesc: Yiddish writers Oyzer Varshavski (left), Perets Markish (standing), H. Leyvik (seated, right), and an unidentified man, Paris, ca. 1924. Photograph by J. Deutscher. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Vilna

text: Kiev

text: Khalyastre

text: Perets Markish

text: B. Kletskin

text: World War I

text: Shmuel Niger

text: shtetl


title: Vaysenberg, Itshe Meyer

abstract: (1881–1938), Yiddish prose writer. Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg (Isaac Meir Weissenberg), was born in Żelechów, Poland, into a working-class family. He attended heder and in his youth was a craftsman. In 1904, Vaysenberg published his first two short stories in Di yudishe bibliotek, edited by Y. L. Peretz. One of these stories, “Dor hoylekh vedor bo” (A Generation Comes and a Generation Goes), already heralded the place that Vaysenberg was about to occupy within Yiddish literature. He became a master of realistic descriptions of social tensions in the shtetl, even as he avoided open ideological commitment.

text: Yiddish prose

text: Poland

text: heder

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yiddish literature

text: shtetl

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Warsaw

text: Sholem Asch

text: humor

text: Shimen Horontshik

text: Yekhiel Lerer

text: Litvak

text: literary journals


title: Landkentenish

abstract: Founded in 1926, Landkentenish (Pol., Krajoznawstwo), the Jewish movement to promote touring the countryside, brought together two disparate ideological strands: the ideal of the French Physiocrats, who extolled agricultural labor as being most productive, and the new nationalism that laid exclusive claim to the land and its historic landmarks. Because Jewish membership in the Polish Touring Society was severely restricted, and because the Poles made no effort to preserve Jewish landmarks, Jewish historians, ethnographers, novelists, poets, and other engagé intellectuals formed their own society and issued their own publications: Land un lebn (1927–1928), edited by Yitskhok Lejpuner, as well as the bilingual Landkentenish / Krajoznawstwo (1933–1935) and Landkentenish: Yedies fun Yi. G. F. L. / Krajoznawstwo: Wiadomosci Z. T. K. (1936–1938), both edited by Emanuel Ringelblum.

imgDesc: Jewish youngsters, members of the Bund, on an organized trip to the ruins of a castle, Kazimierz nad Wisłą, Poland, 1930s. Photograph by Lokieryk. (YIVO)

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Lithuania

text: memory

text: Mikhoel Burshtin

text: shtetls

text: Zionist movement

text: synagogue architecture

text: Rokhl Korn

text: Mikhoel Burshtin

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Rokhl Oyerbakh

text: Perets Opotshinski

text: Warsaw


title: Cinema

abstract: Perhaps because the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century coincides with the migration of Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the cities of Eastern Europe, newly urbanized Jews were prominent in the development of Eastern European cinema—if only intermittently as Jewish artists addressing Jewish themes or a Jewish public.

imgDesc: Solomon Mikhoels (center) and other actors in Yidishe glikn (Jewish Luck), directed by Aleksandr Granovskii, USSR, 1925. (YIVO)

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Pale of Settlement

text: shtetl

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: Sholem Asch

text: Riga

text: Odessa

text: Czechoslovakia

text: József Kiss

text: Sándor Bródy

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: operetta

text: Hungary

text: Yiddish literature

text: Kaminska

text: Aleksandr Granovskii

text: GOSET

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Isaac Babel

text: Habimah

text: theater

text: Hirsh Lekert

text: Grigorii Kozintsev

text: Mikhail Romm

text: Leonid Trauberg

text: Dziga Vertov

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist League

text: Birobidzhan

text: Perets Markish

text: Aleksander Ford

text: Medem Sanatorium

text: Dzigan and Shumacher

text: The Dybbuk

text: humor

text: Holocaust

text: Terezín

text: anticosmopolitan campaign

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: shtetl

text: Bruno Schulz

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Communism

text: Holocaust

text: Ivan Olbracht

text: Grigorii Bogrov

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Asch

text: Béla Balázs

text: Łódź

text: Viktor Shklovskii

text: Habimah

text: Hirsh Lekert

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Prague

subconcepts:
Early Cinema
World War I and After
Yiddish Talkies
Post–World War II Period
After Communism
APPENDIX: JEWISH FILM PERSONALITIES


title: Babad Family

abstract: Leading wealthy rabbinic family in Galicia. Beginning in the seventeenth century, many members of the Babad family served in rabbinic posts in Poland and Lithuania; others were quite wealthy and held a variety of leadership positions in their communities. The founder of the line was Yitsḥak Krakover (1650–1705), rabbi of the city of Brody from about the year 1690. His children were called by the name Babad, an acronym for Bene Av Bet Din (Children of the Head of the Rabbinic Court); in state records they are referred to by the name Rabinowitz. Some of Krakover’s sons were merchants; two of them, Mordekhai (d. 1752) and Ya‘akov Yokel (d. 1748), were communal leaders in Brody in the first half of the eighteenth century, as were a number of their descendants.

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Brody

text: Tarnopol

text: Lublin

text: Yosef Perl

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Yosef Babad

glossary: responsa maskil Torah


title: Der Nister

abstract: (“The Hidden One”; pseud. of Pinkhes Kahanovitsh; 1884–1950), Yiddish writer. Der Nister was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, where he received a traditional Jewish education. In his adolescence he began reading Russian literature and studied secular subjects. His elder brother Aharon, who became a Bratslaver Hasid, had a significant influence on him; his younger brother, Motl (Max), became a sculptor and well-known art dealer in Paris.

imgDesc: Hekher fun der erd (Higher Than the Earth), by Der Nister (Warsaw: Progress, 1910). Illustration by Depner. (Joe Fishstein Yiddish Poetry Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library)

text: Berdichev

text: Ukraine

text: Bratslaver Hasid

text: Hebrew poetry

text: Russia

text: Yiddish prose

text: Yiddish literature

text: Kiev

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Kultur-lige

text: Yiddish children’s literature

text: Marc Chagall

text: Moscow

text: Kharkov

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Holocaust

text: Birobidzhan

text: Chone Shmeruk


title: Czyński, Jan

abstract: (1801–1867), publicist, politician, writer, and philosopher. Born in Warsaw into a Christian family of Frankist descent, Jan Czyński became the first recognizably Jewish writer—his family’s origins were well known—to enter the ranks of Polish literature. A veteran of the November uprising of 1830, he joined the exodus of Polish patriots to France after its defeat. There he engaged in politics to champion “universal emancipation.” History, according to this “Polish fourrierist,” was a movement toward the emancipation of all disadvantaged groups.

text: Warsaw

text: Frankist

text: Polish literature

text: Poland


title: Calendars

abstract: Jewish calendars (Heb., luḥot; Yid., kalendarn) use rabbinic chronology for determining the year “to the Creation of the World,” and have presented the months and Jewish holidays in remarkably stable form over the centuries. At least through the eighteenth century, knowledgeable Jews learned how to calculate the Jewish calendar, and luḥot were among the earliest printed Jewish works, both broadsides and pocket calendars. Calendars usually contained brief chronographs, time lines that counted the important events from creation, through the biblical period, until contemporary times. Some Jewish calendars served as full almanacs by including astronomical, medical, weather, market, and other information.

imgDesc: 'Omer calendar, Bohemia, 1824. It was not uncommon for Jews to have 'omer calendars with movable numbers on them to help them fulfill the commandment  to count the 49 days from Passover until Shavu'ot. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: gzeyres takh vetat

text: Vilna

text: Grodno

text: Yosef Perl

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

glossary:
gzeyres takh vetat
Diaspora
maskil


title: Archives

abstract: Hundreds of state and local archives throughout Eastern Europe hold millions of documents that reflect the experience of Jews over many centuries. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and other East European Communist regimes, government archives became more accessible. Although it is true that numerous documents were lost during World War II, the documents that still exist are enormously rich and valuable. Particularly with the case of the former Soviet Union, the data remain largely unexplored by researchers interested in Jewish history.

imgDesc: Page from the passport application of Rabbi Leizer Brandwein (b. 1868), a resident of Stanisławów, Poland (now Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukr.), 1922. An example of the archival materials about the Jews of Ivano-Frankivs’k collected by Rabbi Moishe Leib Kolesnik in Ukraine. (Courtesy Moishe Leib Kolesnik)

text: Odessa

text: Kiev

text: Kishinev

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Ukraine

text: Ivano-Frankivs’k

text: Harkavy

text: An-ski Ethnographic Expedition

text: Ostrog

text: Prague

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Wrocław

text: Holocaust

text: Hungary

text: Czech lands

text: YIVO

text: Bund

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Belarus

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

subconcepts: Libraries and Other Repositories in Eastern Europe

subconcepts: Libraries and Other Repositories outside of Eastern Europe


title: Baumhorn, Lipót

abstract: (1860–1932), architect and designer of synagogues. Lipót (Leopold) Baumhorn was born in Kisbér (near Győr, Hungary), and graduated from the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1883. Working in the office of the architect Ödön Lechner in Budapest between 1884 and 1894, Baumhorn adopted Lechner’s characteristic combination of plain plastered surfaces and red or yellow wavy brick string courses, string pilasters, gables, and battlements. Baumhorn, however, broke with Lechner’s folkloric style and followed more standard architectural conventions, using patterns that were welcomed by a range of Jewish communities from the more traditional to the ostentatious. Baumhorn opened his own office in 1894, where he worked with his son-in-law György Somogyi. Baumhorn built 25 synagogues and restored numerous others in Austria-Hungary from the 1880s until his death.

imgDesc: Neolog synagogue designed by Lipót Baumhorn, built in 1924–1926, Lučenec, Slovakia, ca. 2000. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber. (Courtesy of the photographer)

text: synagogues

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Braşov

text: Immánuel Löw

text: Timişoara


title: Moriah

abstract: Hebrew publishing house, founded in 1901–1902 in Odessa. Moriah was established by the poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Hebrew-Zionist activist Y. H. Ravnitski, writer Simḥah Alter Gutmann (known as S. Ben-Zion), and others in Ahad Ha-Am’s circle. Under Bialik and Ravnitski, Moriah became the premiere Hebrew publishing house in the period before World War I; a brief revival in 1917–1918 ended amid economic crisis and Bolshevik suppression.

imgDesc: Postcard from Yehoshu‘a Ravnitski to Dovid Pinski, 1909. From Yehoshu‘a Ravnitski in Odessa to Dovid Pinski in Berlin, 14 April 1909, asking him to contribute a piece to an anthology commemorating Zelig Yehudah Steinberg, which Pinski is to write in Yiddish but which will be translated into Hebrew. Yiddish. Russian, German, and Hebrew letterhead: Verlag Moriah, Odessa, Post office box 916. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Odessa

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Y. H. Ravnitski

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Ben-Ami

text: Mendele

text: Alter Druyanow

text: folklore, ethnography

text: memoirs

glossary: agadah Halakhah Talmud


title: Kushnirov, Arn

abstract: (1890–1949), Yiddish writer. Arn Kushnirov was born in Boyarka (known as Boyberik in Sholem Aleichem’s works), near Kiev, and worked in Kiev as a sales assistant in a grocer’s shop. Starting his writing career in 1909, Kushnirov and his friends Osher Shvartsman and Nokhem Oyslender planned to publish a poetry collection, but the project failed. After serving in the Russian army during World War I, Kushnirov joined the Red Army in 1920. That same year he met with success in publishing. In 1921, he edited Yugnt (Youth), which included the work of young Ukrainian Yiddish poets.

imgDesc: Jewish writers on the occasion of a visit by Yiddish writer H. Leyvik (front row, center), Moscow, 1925. Among those in the portrait are Izi Kharik and Zelik Akselrod (back row, first and third from left), Yehezkl Dobrushin, Borekh Glazman (also visiting from New York), Shmuel-Nisn Godiner, and Arn Kushnirov (front row, first, second, fourth, and fifth from left). Photo by B. Kapustinskii. (YIVO)

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Kiev

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Yugnt

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: cinema

text: Moscow

text: Der shtrom

text: Moyshe Khashchevatski

text: Der emes

text: Avrom Vevyorke

text: Yashe Bronshteyn

text: Minsk

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Hirsh Lekert

text: Theater

text: Eduard Bagritskii

text: Birobidzhan

text: Shklov

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt

text: Shmuel Gordon


title: Miskolc

abstract: Seat of Borsod county, Hungary. Founded by a steady stream of immigrants from Moravia from the 1720s on, the Jewish community of Miskolc grew slowly during the eighteenth century. Until the 1820s, its only functioning communal institutions were the burial society, founded in 1767, and a seven-man executive committee appointed in 1769 to collect the Toleration Tax on behalf of the royal crown. The community had no rabbi until the 1770s, and, until 1784, only a single school, which had been founded in 1734. A Josephinian Normalschule, established in 1784 and highly praised by Ferenc Kazinczy, superintendant of schools for the Habsburg government and a leading figure in the Magyar national revival, functioned for just three years.

imgDesc: Paloczy Street Synagogue, Miskolc, ca. 1900. Postcard printed in Hungary. (YIVO)

text: Hungary

text: Moravia

text: Normalschule

text: tavernkeeping

text: credit

text: Reform

text: weddings

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: Orthodoxy

text: Hasidic

text: Galicia

text: Jewish Congress

text: Zionist

text: Lajos Hatvany

text: antisemitism

glossary:
Talmud
Torah
Neolog
Status Quo
maskil
numerus clausus


title: Cluj

abstract: City in Romania, traditionally considered to be the capital of Transylvania. The Jewish presence in Cluj (Ger., Klausenburg; Hun., Kolozsvár; current official name, Cluj-Napoca) was first noted in a document dating from 1481 that referred to a conflict between Jews from Cluj and the powerful Haller family of Buda. One century later, in 1578, a Jewish presence at the Cluj fair was considered alarming by the authorities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jews were allowed to settle in just one town of Transylvania (Alba Iulia); hence, only during the age of Emperor Joseph’s II reforms (1780–1790) were there again indications of Jews in Cluj.

imgDesc: Po‘ale Tsedek, Baritsu Street, Cluj, 2000. The synagogue was established in the early twentieth century by a group that included many craftsmen, including carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers. Photograph by David Gordon. (© David Gordon)

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Alba Iulia

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: Mosheh Glasner

text: Zionist

text: Jewish Congress

text: Hungary

text: Tarbut

text: industry

text: crafts

text: trade

text: banking

text: ghettos

glossary:
Status Quo
Neolog
Yeshiva


title: Kalischer, Tsevi Hirsh

abstract: (1795–1874), rabbi and the most prominent “harbinger of Zionism.” Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer was born in Leszno (Lissa) in western Poland. He was a disciple of Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum of Lissa and of Akiva Eger, two of the leading halakhic authorities of his generation. Kalischer served his entire adult life as the unpaid rabbi of Thorn (Toruń), supported by his wife, who had a small shop.

imgDesc: Image from a postcard produced by the Mizraḥi Zionist organization to commemorate Rabbi Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer. Illustration by H. Goldberg. Printed by Omanut, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Zionism

text: Leszno

text: Poland

text: Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum

text: Akiva Eger

text: Orthodoxy

text: Reform

text: Land of Israel

text: Königsberg

text: Land of Israel

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Russia

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Yosef Natonek

text: Ha-Magid

glossary: Diaspora Magid


title: About this Article (Language)

abstract: To explore the principal languages of the Jews in Eastern Europe, this entry includes four articles. The first two treat Hebrew and Yiddish, respectively, from a linguistic perspective, including their historical development, dialects, and status. Planning and Standardization of Yiddish describes the attempts to elevate the status of Yiddish and to standardize its spelling, and the political context of these efforts. Finally, Multilingualism surveys this phenomenon among East European Jews, combining sociolinguistic data with an evaluation of its cultural consequences. For further discussion of Yiddish-language standardization, see Czernowitz Conference. For Hebrew and Yiddish as literary languages, see Hebrew Literature and Yiddish Literature.

imgDesc: Torah mantle. Sušice, Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic), early twentieth century. This mantle, donated to the synagogue by Dr. Heřman Barthů and his wife Kamil, represents an unusual example of Czech written in Hebrew characters. (Jewish Museum in Prague)

text: Czernowitz Conference

text: Hebrew Literature

text: Yiddish Literature


title: Kolomyia

abstract: (or Kolomyya; Pol., Kołomyja; Ger., Kolomea), city on the Prut River in Ukraine. Jews first settled in Kołomyja, then part of Poland, at about the turn of the sixteenth century. Although many were murdered and the community was destroyed during the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres of 1648–1649, the Jewish population quickly reestablished itself and numbered more than 1,000 residents by 1772, when Austria wrested the city from Polish control and made it part of the new province of Galicia.

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres

text: Galicia

text: trade

text: industry

text: Hasidism

text: heders

text: Hillel Lichtenstein

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: Yosef Shemu’el Bloch

text: Zionist movement

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Bohemia

text: Hungary

text: Soviet Union


title: Löwisohn, Salomon

abstract: (1789–1821), Hebrew poet, linguist, and historian. Salomon Löwisohn was born in Mór, Hungary, a small community led by his relatives, the prominent Rosenthal and Saphir families, who played key roles in the Hungarian Haskalah. As a child, he received a traditional education. When he was 12, he studied German and arithmetic at a Capuchin monastery. By the time he celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1802, Löwisohn was well versed in the Bible and began writing poems in Hebrew.

text: Hungary

text: Haskalah

text: Moritz Gottlieb Saphir

text: Prague

text: yeshiva

text: Jeitteles

glossary: Haskalah maskil yeshiva Mishnah


title: Friedman, Tsevi Hirsh

abstract: (1808–1874), rabbi and Hasidic leader in Hungary. Born in Sátoraljaújhely, Tsevi Hirsh Friedman grew up in the house of Mosheh Teitelbaum and ultimately became his foremost disciple. Friedman continued his Talmudic studies at the yeshiva of Tsevi Hirsh Heller (Ḥarif) in Bonyhád. He was also close to Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz.

text: Hungary

text: Sátoraljaújhely

text: yeshiva

text: Sandz

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Ropshits

text: Apt

text: Opatów

text: Ruzhin

text: Sadagora

text: Belz

text: Komarno

text: Zhidachov

text: Dzikov

text: Hasidism

text: Orthodox

text: Yirmiyahu Löw

text: Sátoraljaújhely

text: Jewish Congress

text: pilgrimage

glossary: yeshiva rebbe


title: Satu Mare

abstract: (Hun., Szatmárnémeti; Yid., Satmar; also Satmer), a small town in northwestern Romania. Satu Mare was part of Hungary until World War I and again between 1940 and 1944. Jews first appeared there toward the early eighteenth century: they distilled brandy and leased taverns on crown estates. In 1715, however, when Satu Mare became a royal town, their influx came to a halt and Jews who had arrived earlier were expelled. Allowed to come into town just for fairs, Jews did not begin to resettle until the 1820s. Jewish arrivals accelerated in the 1850s: by 1869 the Jewish population had grown to 1,357; by 1890 to 3,427; and by 1910 to 7,194 (representing 7.4%, 16.5%, and 20.6% of the total population, respectively). By 1941, there were 12,960 Jews in Satu Mare—24.9 percent of the total number of residents.

imgDesc: Orthodox boys at a summer camp, Satu Mare, ca. 1930. (YIVO)

text: Romania

text: Hungary

text: Miskolc

text: Hasidim

text: Orthodox

text: yeshiva

text: Zionist

text: Mizraḥi

text: Aharon Roth

glossary:
Status Quo
Neolog
yeshiva
Rebbe


title: Schiper, Ignacy

abstract: (1884–1943), historian, political activist, and Sejm deputy. Energetic, creative, and imaginative, Ignacy Schiper (often spelled Schipper) was one of the leading Jewish historians of interwar Poland, a pioneer in Jewish economic history who based his work on extensive research in Polish and German archives. A prolific speaker and author who published primarily in Polish, Yiddish, and German, Schiper advocated a shift from traditional Jewish intellectual history to the secular socioeconomic and cultural history of the working Jewish masses.

imgDesc: Ignacy Schiper at the YIVO Institute during a scholarly conference, Vilna, 1939. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: Poland

text: Tarnów

text: heder

text: Kraków

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: General Zionists

text: Warsaw

text: Hasidism

text: YIVO

text: Warsaw

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: armed resistance


title: Shpanyer Arbet

abstract: The decorative work known as shpanyer arbet has been translated as both “spun work,” derived from the Yiddish word shpinen, and as “Spanish work.” The latter fancifully implies a connection between shpanyer arbet and the craft of lace making incorporating silver and gold threads practiced by Jews of Mallorca, Barcelona, and Toledo in fifteenth-century Spain. Shpanyer arbet is similar to nineteenth-century East European passementerie and bobbin lace, from which it is most likely derived.

imgDesc: Shpanyer arbet ‘atarah. Eastern Europe, late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Gift of Joseph Arnon, 1983.84. (Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York)

text: L’viv

text: Ukraine

text: Passover

text: Sabbath

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Berdichev

text: Brody

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Izidor Kaufmann

text: Moldavia

text: Belz Hasidim


title: Fichmann, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1881–1958), Hebrew poet, critic, and editor. Born in Beltsy (Bălți), Bessarabia, Ya‘akov Fichmann received a traditional and secular education, and was well versed in Hebrew maskilic writing as well as Yiddish, Russian, and German literature. The rural landscape of his childhood village remained an integral part of his imagination for the rest of his life.

text: Hebrew poet

text: Bălți

text: Bessarabia

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Odessa

text: Warsaw

text: children’s literature

text: Russia

text: Stybel

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky


title: Shteynbarg, Eliezer

abstract: (1880–1932), Yiddish writer and educator. Born in Lipkany, Bessarabia, Eliezer Shteynbarg (originally Shteynberg) received a traditional Jewish education but independently mastered German and Russian classics. Like his cousin Yehudah Steinberg (Shteynberg; a pioneer of modern Hebrew education), Eliezer directed a private, secular school, with Hebrew as the language of instruction. From 1919 on, he lived in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) where he ran, among other things, a Yiddish children’s theater.

imgDesc: Shoybn (Windowpanes), no. 2 (April 1936), Bucharest, special issue dedicated to the works of Eliezer Shteynbarg (pictured on the cover). (YIVO)

text: Bessarabia

text: Yehudah Steinberg

text: Chernivtsi

text: theater

text: Romania

text: purim-shpil

text: heder

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: angels

text: rabbinic literature

text: Shmuel Niger

text: humor

glossary: heder agadah Zohar Talmud Rashi Torah


title: Rabon, Yisroel

abstract: (1900–1941), Yiddish author. Yisroel Rabon (orig. Rubin) was born in Gowarchów but grew up in Balut, a working-class suburb of Łódź. He had little formal education but read voraciously, acquiring a broad literary knowledge at an early age and publishing his first poems in his teens. He spent most of the interwar years in Łódź as a professional writer. After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, he escaped to Vilna, and was shot in 1941 in Ponar.

imgDesc: Letter from Yisroel Rabon to Sholem Asch, 1938. From Yisroel Rabon in Warsaw to Sholem Asch in New York, 23 July 1938, belatedly thanking him for his donation of 100 dollars, which is helping to enable the continued existence of Os, "the only literary-art journal around which young Jewish writers in Poland are congregating." Yiddish. Polish and Yiddish letterhead: Os, Literary Monthly, Warsaw, Przejazd 1, m. 27; Łódź, Śródmiejska 30, m. 42. RG 602, Shalom Asch Papers, F85. (YIVO)

text: Łódź

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: literary journals

text: sexuality

text: Yiddish literature

text: Yiddish prose

text: shtetl


title: Ludo, Isac Iacovitz

abstract: (1894–1973), journalist and writer. Isac Iacovitz Ludo was born in Iaşi, Romania, where he published his first writings as a teenager in the literary review Absolutio. In 1919, he moved to Bucharest and joined Abraham Leib Zissu on the editorial board of the Jewish national newspaper Mântuirea (The Redemption). From 1923, Ludo served as editor of the magazine Ştiri din lumea evreiască (News from the Jewish World), focusing on issues agitating Romanian Jewish circles after World War I.

text: Iaşi

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Mântuirea

text: Adam

text: assimilationist

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: ghettos

text: humor

text: Yiddish literature

text: Romanian literature


title: Natanson Family

abstract: Polish family of bankers, philanthropists, industrialists and scholars.

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

text: Warsaw

text: industry

text: Poland

text: Kronenberg

text: Seminary

text: Samuel Dickstein

text: Vilna

text: Tartu

text: Kraków


title: Neuda, Abraham

abstract: (1812–1854), rabbi and religious reformer. Abraham Neuda was born in Loštice (Ger., Loschitz) in the Habsburg province of Moravia. The only son of Aron Moses Neuda, rabbi of Loštice, Abraham attended yeshiva in Mikulov (Nikolsburg), where he studied under Moravian chief rabbi Neḥemyah Trebitsch. While there, Neuda secretly pursued secular “German” subjects with his fellow students.

text: Moravia

text: yeshiva

text: Mikulov

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: Reform

text: Sabbath

text: Pápa

text: Hungary

text: Fanny Schmiedl


title: Spivak, Elye

abstract: (1890–1950), Yiddish linguist. Elye Spivak was born in Vasilkov, Ukraine. The product of a traditional Jewish education and a secular self-education, he worked as a teacher in various places, including the Kultur-lige Yiddish schools in his hometown and Glukhov. In the early 1920s, he taught Yiddish at the Kiev Yiddish Teachers’ College and at Yiddish vocational schools in Kiev and Kharkov. Spivak was appointed professor of Yiddish linguistics at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute in 1925. When the Kiev Chair (later, Institute) for Jewish Culture opened its Odessa branch, he took an active part in its activities, working under the guidance of Yankev Reznik (1890–1944), a veteran of Yiddish education.

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: Kultur-lige

text: Kiev

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow

text: Moyshe Shapiro


title: Letters and Letter Writing

abstract: Throughout East European Jewish history, the letter was an important vehicle of written communication about everyday concerns. Letters were written to serve many practical purposes: to communicate about Jewish law; to report on communal affairs; to engage in commerce; and to discuss personal matters, among others. Naturally, letters could be written with more than one purpose in mind. Singly and in constellations, they also served as a literary form.

imgDesc: Title page of Kiryat sefer, by Mordekhai Aharon Gintsberg (Vilna, 1855). This igron, or book of model Hebrew letters, is an example of a maskilic genre whose aim was the enrichment of Hebrew epistolary style. (YIVO)

text: gender

text: brivnshteler

text: Ashkenaz

text: love

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Lubavitcher

text: Yosef Perl

text: humor

text: Sholem Aleichem

glossary:
Torah
responsa
ethical will
rebbe


title: Telz, Yeshiva of

abstract: The yeshiva of the Lithuanian town of Telsiai—or Telz, as it was known among Jews—had its beginnings as an initiative of some local scholars around 1870, but it became an institution of major significance when Eli‘ezer Gordon was appointed rabbi of Telz in 1883 and took over the direction of the yeshiva. Gordon was a creative organizer who sought ways to adopt modern methods in the service of what he saw as tradition. He was one of the first to call for an Orthodox Jewish press and for modern political organization in traditionalist circles.

imgDesc: Students of the Telz yeshiva, 1938. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

text: yeshiva

text: Talmud study

text: bet midrash

text: Musar movement

text: Shim‘on Shkop

text: Lithuania

text: Holocaust

glossary: yeshiva Talmud Musar


title: Toys and Games

abstract: Only sparse information has been gleaned about toys and games enjoyed prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, in East European memoirs describing childhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the heder (elementary school), where young boys frequently spent long hours, dominates the texts. These depictions portray childhood in general and the heder in particular in the darkest of terms—exposing a brutal regime dominated by ignorant teachers who robbed boys of their childhoods. This image became somewhat more nuanced in literature from the turn of the twentieth century. Still, the extremely negative images substantially served the ideological program of the Haskalah that sought to broaden and modernize Jewish education and Jewish life in general, leading to a more positive attitude toward playing and imagination.

imgDesc: Willow-bark horn. Mayer Kirshenblatt from Toronto, Canada, made this toy in the early 1980s to replicate a handmade toy he remembered from his childhood in interwar Opatów, Poland. Children made horns like this one in the springtime and called it a trompayte (trumpet) or shoyfer (shofar, the ram's horn blown in the synagogue during the High Holidays). (YIVO)

text: childhood

text: heder

text: Haskalah

text: Mordkhe Gebirtig

text: Minsk

text: Regina Lilientalowa

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Gender

text: shtetls

text: Lithuania

text: riddles

text: chess

text: Warsaw

text: Prague

text: Budapest

text: children’s literature

text: Passover

text: holidays

text: paper cuts

text: Dov Ber Birkenthal

text: Purim

text: Terezín

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Soviet Union

glossary: heder Haskalah get Talmud Torah


title: Sándor, Pál

abstract: (1860–1936), liberal politician and economist. Pál Sándor studied in Budapest at the Commercial Academy, the alma mater of many Hungarian Jewish youngsters at that time. He supplemented his education with studies in Dresden and a later trip to Antwerp. After continuing his father’s commercial enterprise in corn trading, he became a manager at a number of Budapest-based firms, serving most significantly as chief executive of the city’s communal electric street railway company (Budapesti Közúti Villamosvasút Rt.). He was a member of the Budapest Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the City Council, and the Stock Exchange Council, and was chairman of the Civil Club of the City of Budapest (Lipótvárosi Polgári Kör). As a participant in the national commercial congresses of the early 1900s, in 1906 Sándor founded the National Hungarian Commercial Union (Országos Magyar Kereskedelmi Egyesülés), which he then led for several decades. Within the Jewish community, he was notably the chairman of the Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület (National Hungarian Israelite Cultural Society).

text: Budapest

text: Mór Mezei

text: Mór Wahrmann


title: Borokhov, Ber

abstract: (also Borochov, Borochow, Boruchow; 1881–1917), pivotal thinker and scholar who in his short life of 36 years founded two distinct fields: Labor Zionism and Yiddish studies. He played the dual roles of theoretician and primary activist in both.

imgDesc: Students and teachers in a classroom of the first Jewish kindergarten, Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukr.); ca. 1920s. Affiliated with Po‘ale Tsiyon, this was one of many schools known as “Borokhov” schools, which taught both Zionism and Yiddish culture. A portrait of Borokhov hangs in the background. (YIVO)

text: Zionism

text: Yiddish

text: Ukraine

text: Dnipropetrovs’k

text: Land of Israel

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Russia

text: YIVO

text: Vilna


title: Babel, Isaac

abstract: (Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel’; 1894–1940), Soviet Jewish short-story writer and playwright. Isaac Babel was born in Odessa and brought up in the Russified middle-class family of a dealer in agricultural machinery. Odessa was then a thriving center of modern Jewish culture where writers such as Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik lectured and published. In 1916, Babel met Mendele Moykher-Sforim, the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature. Babel’s love of Yiddish is reflected in the subtext of his Russian prose, as well as in his adaptation of one of the popular folktales about Hershele Ostropolyer, “Shabos-Nakhamu” (1918). It was for love of Yiddish, not just want of money, that Babel wrote the screenplays of Sholem Aleichem’s Menakhem Mendl stories, Evreiskoe schast’e (Jewish Luck; 1925), and a novel, Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy (Wandering Stars; 1926), and edited two volumes of stories by Sholem Aleichem in Shimon Hecht’s Russian translation (1926). The Zionist and Hebrew influences of his childhood had to be concealed after the Bolshevik Revolution, but the response of the post-Kishinev generation to pogroms and to the decay of shtetl life are evident in Babel’s first published story, “Staryi Shloime” (Old Shloime; 1913), which describes an old man’s suicide after his sons abandon Judaism under socioeconomic pressure.

imgDesc: From Rasskazy (Stories), by Isaac Babel (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1932). Portrait of Isaac Babel by David Shterenberg. (Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: Odessa

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Yiddish literature

text: Hershele Ostropolyer

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Kishinev

text: pogroms

text: shtetl

text: Kiev

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow


title: Eynikayt

abstract: The official newspaper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, published from 1942 until the committee was liquidated in November 1948. Written in Yiddish, Eynikayt (Unity) produced its first issue on 7 June 1942. In its early stage, the paper resembled a bulletin and appeared just a few times a month. In September 1943 it became a weekly and from February 1945 until its last issue it was issued three times a week. The editor was the committee’s secretary, Shakhne Epstein, followed by G. Zhits, who took over the periodical when Epstein died in 1945. The major Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union served on its editorial board, including Dovid Bergelson, Shmuel Halkin, Leyb Kvitko, and Itsik Fefer. In particular, the poet Fefer contributed frequently; he tried to inspire readers to greater effort and encouraged those in Nazi-occupied territory to resist.

imgDesc: Letter from Rokhl Korn to Vilenski, 1942. From Rokhl Korn in Fergana, Uzbekistan, to Vilenski in [Kuibyshev, USSR?], 1 October 1942. She describes living conditions in Fergana as "not being much better than yours." They are living in a "distant corner of Central Asia, torn away from the center, lonely and fading away," and says that despite the fact that there are many Jews there, she has not seen a single Yiddish book. From time to time, she has access to the Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt. Korn suggests that Vilenski seek work as a typesetter at a newspaper in Kuibyshev. Yiddish. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: USSR

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Ilya Ehrenburg


title: Steinberg Brothers

abstract: Russian intellectual figures, active in literature and politics. Yitskhok Nakhmen Steinberg (1888–1957) was a political activist and public intellectual. His brother Aron (1891–1975) was a Russian and Yiddish writer and essayist. The Steinberg brothers were born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia) into an educated, religious, and wealthy merchant family. Their mother was a sister of the Yiddish critic Isidor Eliashev, also known as Bal-Makhshoves.

text: Daugavpils

text: Latvia

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Vilna

text: YIVO

text: Zionism

text: Simon Dubnow


title: Adler, Yankl

abstract: (1895–1949), artist. Yankl (Jakub) Adler was born in Tuszyn, near Łódź, and died in England. Apprenticed in engraving in Łódź in 1912, he moved to Düsseldorf in 1913 for further studies. There Adler came into contact with the Düsseldorf-based artists of Das Junge Rheinland (Young Germany; 1918). He subsequently moved back to Łódź, joining Moyshe Broderzon as cofounder of Yung-yidish, the first avant-garde Jewish cultural movement in independent Poland.

imgDesc: Moi rodzice (My Parents). Yankl Adler, Poland/Germany, 1920-1921. Oil and collage on board Muzem Sztuki, Łódź (2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź)

text: Łódź

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Yung-yidish

text: Poland

text: yeshiva

text: shtetl

text: Marc Chagall

text: Yisakhar Rybak


title: Zaretski, Ayzik

abstract: (1891–1956), Yiddish linguist, lexicologist, and educator. Born in Pinsk into the family of a Jewish schoolteacher and compiler of a Russian mathematics textbook, Ayzik Zaretski received a Talmudic education and graduated from a Russian secondary school. He then studied mathematics at Dorpat (mod. Tartu, Estonia) University from 1913 to 1917. Active in the student historical and literary society, he was enthusiastic about Yiddish philology and Esperanto.

text: Pinsk

text: Tartu

text: Estonia

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Avrom Vevyorke

text: Kharkov

text: YIVO

text: Filologishe shriftn

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Vilna


title: Shomer

abstract: (Pseudonym of Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch; 1849?–1905), Yiddish author and dramatist. Born in Nesvizh, Lithuania, to a wealthy family, Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch was traditionally educated. However, he also read secular literature, including Kalman Schulman’s Hebrew translation of Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris and Hebrew novels by Avraham Mapu. Teaching himself German from Moses Mendelssohn’s famous Bible translation, he also explored German and Russian literature. His pseudonym comes from the last letters of each of his three names.

text: Lithuania

text: Kalman Schulman

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Pinsk

text: Ha-Melits

text: Vilna

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Romania

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: theater

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Bessarabia

text: Pinsk

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: David Frishman

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Avrom Vevyorke


title: Bastomski, Shloyme

abstract: (1891–1941), Yiddish pedagogue, folklorist, writer; and editor; pioneer of Yiddish secular schooling. Born in Vilna to a poor family, Shloyme Bastomski was orphaned at an early age. After attending a Talmud Torah school, he graduated from the Vilna Teacher’s Institute in 1912. He then taught in nearby towns for two years before being hired to teach at the newly formed school of the Khevre Mefitse Haskole (Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia), the first nontraditional boys’ school in Vilna. Yiddish was the language of instruction, and Bastomski taught there through the 1930s.

imgDesc: Postcard from Shloyme Bastomski to Bessie Pomerantz, 1932. From Shloyme Bastomski in Vilna to Bessie Pomerantz in Chicago, 26 December 1932. Bastomski is sending her copies of the latest Grininke beymelekh, in which her poem “Pitsl” appears, and asks her to distribute copies of the publication to acquaintances. Yiddish. Polish and Yiddish letterhead: Grininke Bojmełech i Chawer, Wilno, Stefańska 24, m. 28. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Frayland

text: proverbs

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Riddles

text: proverbs

text: YIVO

text: folk songs

text: Lithuania

text: purim-shpil

text: Yiddish literature

glossary: Talmud Torah


title: Pen, Yehudah

abstract: (1854–1937), painter, graphic artist, teacher, and founder of the “Vitebsk school.” Yehudah (Yudel, Iurii; patronymic Moiseevich, Movshevich) Pen was born in the shtetl Novo-Aleksandrovsk, Kovno guberniia (now Zarasai, Lith.), to an impoverished family. He attended a local heder but did not show much interest in his studies. Instead he devoted most of his time to drawing, for which he showed great talent. According to Pen himself, his talent found its application in the sphere of traditional Jewish art. He drew ornamental letters and captions in books, decorated Purim gragers (noisemakers), and created mizraḥ (Eastern wall) plaques. He painted portraits of shtetl dwellers and various imaginary characters, an activity that brought him great satisfaction, but made his mother very angry. At her insistence Yehudah was sent to Dinaburg (Dvinsk; now Daugavpils, Latvia) at the end of 1867, to become an apprentice house painter.

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

text: shtetl

text: heder

text: Purim

text: Daugavpils

text: Latvia

text: Hasidic

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Riga

text: Vitebsk

text: Sabbath

text: Marc Chagall

text: El Lissitzky

text: Soviet

text: Minsk


title: Ben-Adir

abstract: (pseudonym of Avrom Rozin; 1878–1942), socialist leader. A leading figure first in the Jewish Socialist Workers Party (known as SERP, the party’s initials in Russian, or the Sejmists in Yiddish usage), later in the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party (Fareynikte), and ultimately in the territorialist grouping known as the Freeland League (Frayland-lige), Rozin was born in Krucha (Mohilev province; now in Belarus), in the Russian Empire, and received a traditional education. He affiliated with illegal socialist circles in Minsk in the mid-1890s and studied in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.

text: Fareynikte

text: Frayland-lige

text: Belarus

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Zionism

text: Bund

text: Soviet Union

text: Evsektsiia


title: Schulz, Bruno

abstract: (1892–1942), prose writer, literary critic, and artist. Born in Drohobycz, Galicia, to an assimilated, impoverished merchant family, Bruno Schulz studied architecture at the Lwów Polytechnic (1910–1914). During World War I, his family took refuge in Vienna, where Bruno briefly resumed his studies. In 1924, he began teaching handicrafts and drawing in a Drohobycz school. Schulz made his debut as an artist in the 1920s and as a prose writer in the 1930s.

imgDesc: Portraits of students and staff of the King Jagiełło school, including writer Bruno Schulz (to the left of the photograph of the school building), Drogobych, 1930. (YIVO)

text: Drohobycz

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Franz Kafka

text: Dvora Vogel

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków


title: Rybak, Yisakhar Ber

abstract: (1897–1935), painter, graphic artist, and sculptor; active in the Jewish art renaissance in Russia. Yisakhar Ber Rybak was born in Elisavetgrad, Ukraine. He attended art school beginning in 1907 and then studied at the Art Academy of Kiev from 1911 to 1916. In the summers of 1915 and 1916, he accompanied El Lissitzky on expeditions for the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society, copying tombstones in Orsha and culling folk-inspired prints, ceremonial silver objects, and synagogue wood carvings in Podolia and Volhynia.

imgDesc: Illustration by Yisakhar Ber Rybak from Foyglen (Birds), by Leyb Kvitko (Berlin: Shveln, 193?). (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: El Lissitzky

text: tombstones

text: ceremonial silver objects

text: synagogue wood carvings

text: Kultur-lige

text: theater design

text: Moscow

text: children’s books

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: shtetl

text: Soviet Union

text: Kharkov


title: Hofshteyn, Dovid

abstract: (1889–1952), Yiddish poet. Born in Korostyshev, not far from Kiev, Dovid Hofshteyn was educated at a heder and by private teachers in Russian and Hebrew. His father, a forester, was a maskil; his mother came from the Pedotser-Kholodenko family of klezmer celebrities; and his sister, Shifra Kholodenko (1909–1974), was a noted Soviet Yiddish poet. Hofshteyn began writing poems at age nine, initially mostly in Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian, and his cultural experience in these languages influenced his Yiddish poetry.

imgDesc: From Geklibene lider (Collected Poems), by Dovid Hofshteyn (Kharkov and Odessa: Kinder farlag, 1936). Illustration for the poem “Alte felder” (Old Fields) by M. Fradkin. (Joe Fishstein Yiddish Poetry Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal)

text: Kiev

text: heder

text: Yiddish poetry

text: Kultur-lige

text: Perets Markish

text: Yiddish literature

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: Marc Chagall

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Moscow

text: Yitskhok Nusinov

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Der shtrom

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: poetry

glossary: © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris. Print courtesy of YIVO


title: Oyerbakh, Rokhl

abstract: (also commonly Rachel Auerbach; 1903–1976), writer and essayist in Yiddish and Polish. Rokhl Oyerbakh was born in Lanowitz (mod Ukr., Lanovitsy), a small village in Podolia. Although the family later moved to Lwów, her rural childhood left her with a lifelong love of Yiddish and a deep interest in Jewish folklore. Auerbach studied psychology and philosophy at Lwów University and also collaborated in Tsushtayer, a journal founded by Melech Ravitch to foster Yiddish culture in Galicia, a region where most of the Jewish intelligentsia spoke Polish.

imgDesc: Jewish writers and scholars, Poland, ca. 1930s. (Left to right) Emanuel Ringelblum, Itsik Manger, Rokhl Oyerbakh; Yankev Shatzky, Ber Horovits, Raphael Mahler, and M. Weinberg. (YIVO)

text: Lwów

text: folklore

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Itsik Manger

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: ghetto

text: Jewish Historical Institute

text: Holocaust


title: Fininberg, Ezra

abstract: (1899–1946), Yiddish poet and writer. Born in Uman, Ezra Fininberg “published” his first poems in a handwritten journal that he produced in the mid-1910s in his hometown with Leyb Kvitko and Moyshe Khashchevatski. Initially Fininberg supported the Zionist Socialist (Territorialist) Party, but joined the Communists in 1919. From 1920 he lived in Kiev, working at the editorial office of the daily Komunistishe fon (Communist Banner). Fininberg belonged to a group of young Yiddish literary talents called Vidervuks (New Growth), whose mentor was Dovid Hofshteyn. Fininberg married Eva Khenkin, whose sister, Mira Khenkin, was Nokhem Oyslender’s wife and a Yiddish writer in her own right.

text: Uman

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Moyshe Khashchevatski

text: Kiev

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Nokhem Oyslender

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Der Nister

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Moscow


title: Yikhes

abstract: In Eastern Europe, the concept of yikhes evolved from a narrow biological meaning of lineage or genealogy to a prestigious trait that could be acquired through marriage based on scholarly merit, wealth, or political status (i.e., holders of rabbinical or communal offices).

text: marriage

text: Ashkenaz

text: Efrayim of Luntshits

text: pogroms

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Opatów

text: magic

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: Grodno

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Pale of Settlement

text: love

text: Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines

text: yeshiva

glossary:
Torah
rebbe
Gaon
Pale of Settlement
Talmud
yeshiva


title: Liberberg, Yoysef

abstract: (1898–1937), Soviet historian, journalist, and functionary. Born in Starokonstantinov, Ukraine, into the family of a clerk, Yoysef Liberberg was educated in Kiev—first at a Russian gymnasium, which gave him a full scholarship, and then at the faculty of history and philosophy at Saint Vladimir University. At the age of 15 he began working at the Kiev Jewish library and became interested in Jewish history. He also joined the local Labor Zionist organization.

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Berdichev

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Maks Erik

text: Meir Wiener

text: Simon Dubnow

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

text: Leningrad

text: Moscow

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: Dnepropetrovsk

text: YIVO

text: Birobidzhan


title: Falkovitsh, Elye

abstract: (1898–1979), Yiddish linguist. Elye Falkovitsh was born in Gomel, where he spent the first 19 years of his life. At age 15, he began giving private lessons as a tutor and soon joined the local Tse‘ire Tsiyon organization. He then worked as headmaster of a Jewish school in Sarapul in 1917 and 1918, and directed a children’s club in Kiev in 1918 and 1919. Subsequently, in 1920 and 1921 he served in the Red Army as a cultural worker, stationed in the Moscow region.

text: Gomel

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Ayzik Zaretski

text: Malke Lifshits Frumkin

text: Minsk

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sholem Asch

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Sovetish heymland


title: Naydus, Leyb

abstract: (1890–1918), Yiddish poet. Leyb Naydus was born in Grodno (Hrodna) to a wealthy, somewhat maskilic family. Most of his childhood was spent on a spacious estate near his birthplace, where he had private tutors for Jewish and general studies. He later attended Russian schools, but never graduated. He wrote in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish from an early age and published poems in the provincial Russian press. A collection of his youthful Russian poems remained unpublished.

imgDesc: Lider (Poems), by Leyb Naydus (Warsaw: Kinderfraynd, 1938). Yiddish poems published in a series of literary works for young readers. (YIVO)

text: Hrodna

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: poetry

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: shtetl


title: Renaşterea Noastră

abstract: Weekly publication issued in Bucharest by its editor, Samu (Samuel I.) Stern. The first issue was published on 14 September 1924, under the title Renaşterea (Renaissance); its goal was to promote the ideology of a literary club bearing the same name. The title was changed to Renaşterea Noastră (Our Revival) on 10 October 1925. The subtitle, “Organ național evreesc” (Jewish National Organ), defined its political orientation.

text: Bucharest

text: Samu (Samuel I.) Stern

text: Mântuirea

text: Zionist

text: Romania

text: Land of Israel

text: Abraham Leib Zissu

text: Ury Benador

text: Alexander Şafran

text: Theodor Loewenstein (Lavi)

text: Felix Aderca

text: Y. L. Peretz


title: Khalyastre

abstract: The major Yiddish cultural avant-garde movement in Poland between 1919 and 1924. Di Khalyastre (The Gang) brought together mainly poets, novelists, and artists who consciously participated in European expressionism as modern secular Jews but were also determined to construct a new lay culture in Yiddish. Its expressionist stylistics and themes distinguished it both from contemporary Soviet Yiddish culture and the New York Inzikhistn (“Inwardists”), yet placed it close to Central European aesthetics and cultural concerns. While shared aesthetic innovations distinguished the Khalyastre, ideological conflicts within the group eventually led to its dissolution.

imgDesc: Khalyastre (The Gang), vol. 2, 1924. The cover is illustrated by Marc Chagall and features a figure (right) holding up a flag that reads, in Yiddish: “Paris.” YIVO. (© 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

text: Poland

text: journals

text: poetry

text: Warsaw

text: Perets Markish

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Yung-yidish

text: Łódź

text: Michał Weichert

text: Alter-Sholem Kacyzne

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Yankl Adler

text: pogroms

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: S. An-ski

text: Henryk Berlewi

text: Soviet Union


title: Gnessin, Uri Nisan

abstract: (1879–1913), Hebrew and Yiddish writer and translator. Born in Starodub, Ukraine, Uri Gnessin belonged to a generation of Hebrew writers who disagreed with the criticism of traditional Judaism by Haskalah writers. When Gnessin was nine years old, his family moved to Pochep, where his father served as the town’s rabbi (both Gnessin’s father and grandfather were Hasidic rabbis). Gnessin was a brilliant student, teaching himself Russian, French, German, and Latin as well as philosophy, history, and other nonreligious disciplines. At the Pochep yeshiva, he formed a friendship with Yosef Ḥayim Brenner, and together they edited a journal in which Gnessin published his first poems and feuilletons. At the age of 14, he was already writing reports from Pochep for the Hebrew daily Ha-Melits.

text: Ukraine

text: Haskalah

text: yeshiva

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Ha-Melits

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Tushiyah

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Ha-Dor

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Yiddish theater

text: Kiev

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Leah Goldberg

glossary: Haskalah yeshiva rebbe Diaspora