title: Goldberg, Leah

abstract: (1911–1970), poet, novelist, playwright, and literary scholar. Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), then an important center of the Haskalah movement and Hebrew culture, Leah Goldberg moved in her early childhood to Kovno (now Kaunas), where in 1923 one-quarter of the population was Jewish. During World War I, her family, with many other Jews in Lithuania, was forced by the Russian government to move to the countryside, and they lived for a few years as refugees in Balashov (Saratov province).

text: Kaliningrad

text: Haskalah

text: Kaunas

text: Lithuania

text: Kaunas

text: Russian literature

text: Natan Al’tman

text: poetry

text: Yokheved Bat-Miriam

text: Hebrew literature


title: Kacyzne, Alter-Sholem

abstract: (1885–1941), Yiddish writer and critic; photographer. Born in Vilna to a working-class family, Alter-Sholem Kacyzne (Yid., Katsizne) attended heder and also a Russian-language Jewish elementary school. At 14, after his father’s death, he stopped his formal studies. Kacyzne was an autodidact and remained an avid reader not only of literature in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, but also of Polish, German, and French works. For about 11 years, he lived in Ekaterinoslav, where he learned to be a photographer and was married.

imgDesc: A brushmaker and his family, Międzyrzec Podlaski, Poland. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: heder

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: S. An-ski

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Warsaw

text: photography

text: Kiev

text: theater

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Der fraynd

text: The Dybbuk

text: Lwów

text: Tarnopol

text: Yiddish literature

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: prose

text: Ger Tsedek

text: Boris Kletskin

text: Holocaust

text: YIVO


title: Lavi, Theodor

abstract: (1905–1983), educator, journalist, Zionist leader, and historian. Theodor Lavi (originally Theodor Loewenstein) was born in Turnu-Severin, Romania, and attended schools in his native town. He studied educational psychology at the University of Bucharest, and in 1935 defended his Ph.D. with a thesis influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories. Lavi then served as the principal of the Israelite-Romanian school of Ploieşti.

text: Zionist

text: Romania

text: Bucharest

text: Ploieşti


title: TOZ

abstract: The Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej (Society for Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population; TOZ) was established in Warsaw in 1921, when the Polish branch of the Saint Petersburg–based Obshchestvo Zdravookhraneniia Evreev (Society for the Protection of Jewish Health; OZE [later, Oeuvre de Secour aux Enfants; OSE]) united in a national organization. The objective of TOZ, which was funded by memberships, donations, and foreign Jewish philanthropies, was to look after the welfare and well-being of Jewish citizens in independent Poland, promoting their health and the health of their children.

imgDesc: TOZ infant care clinic, Białystok, 1930s. Photograph by J. Rendel. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: OZE

text: Poland

text: World War I

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

text: ghettos


title: Lugoj

abstract: Town in southwestern Romania, on the Timiş River, 60 km east of Timişoara. The first documentary reference to Lugoj (Ger., Lugosch; Hun., Lugos) dates to 1334. From 1658 to 1688, Lugoj was under Turkish rule. The presence of Jews in the town was first recorded in the late seventeenth century.

text: Romania

text: Timişoara

text: Congress of Jews

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Holocaust

text: Bucovina

glossary: Neolog Talmud Torah


title: Beards

abstract: In his autobiography, the philosopher Salomon Maimon (d. 1800) recalled that the concept of beards “especially gave me trouble.” In reading the Zohar and other kabbalistic works, Maimon explored the image of “God’s Beard, in which the hairs are divided into numerous classes with something peculiar to each, and every hair is a separate channel of divine grace.” Maimon later wrote that with all of his efforts, “I could find no rational meaning in these representations.”

imgDesc: A teacher known as “Binyomin Hersh the Beard,” Biała Bielec, Poland, 1920s. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne. The photographer’s inscription: “The longest beard in Biała, which students have more than once nailed to the table while he dozes off. That’s why he has such wonderful, sad eyes.” (Forward Association/YIVO)

text: Salomon Maimon

text: Lurianic

text: Lubavitch Hasidism

text: Frankists

text: Lwów

text: Russia

text: Żółkiew

text: Galicia

text: Kaliningrad

text: Prague

text: Bohemia

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Volozhin

text: Mir

text: Slobodka

text: Telz

text: S. Y. Abramovitsh

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Bratislava

text: Sandz Hasidism

text: antisemitic

text: Holocaust

text: Isaac Babel

text: Galicia

text: Zhitomir

text: pogrom

text: Dubno

text: Warsaw

text: Gur Hasidim

text: Łódź

text: Silesia

text: Lublin

text: Sokhachever

text: Jedwabne

text: ghetto

text: Khayim Rumkowski

text: Judenrat’s

glossary: Zohar Kabbalah Responsa halakhah maskil rebbe

subconcepts:
Between Kabbalah and Modernity
Hair: His and Hers
Modern Antisemitism and Its Memories


title: Schwab, Löw

abstract: (1794–1857), Moravian and Hungarian rabbi; pioneer of moderate reforms in the Habsburg Empire. The son of a peddler in Moravský-Krumlov, Löw (later he would occasionally employ the archaic Hungarian equivalent, Arszlán) Schwab was a gifted child who mastered rabbinic literature under private tutelage. At age 11, he enrolled in the Nikolsburg yeshiva of the chief rabbi of Moravia, Mordekhai Banet, and upon bar mitzvah he briefly attended the Pressburg yeshiva, led by Mosheh Sofer. For the next four years, Schwab continued his studies at Nikolsburg and Trebitsch, where he also acquired a secular education independently and worked his way through the classics of medieval Jewish philosophy. In the new rabbi of Gewitsch (mod. Jevíčko, Czech Rep.), Joachim Deutschmann, Schwab found the mentor he had been seeking: a brilliant Talmudist who had also been part of the circle of Prague maskilim surrounding Baruch Jeitteles.

text: rabbinic literature

text: Nikolsburg

text: yeshiva

text: Moravia

text: Mordekhai Banet

text: Pressburg

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Prague

text: Baruch Jeitteles

text: Prostĕjov

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: Haskalah

text: Leopold Löw

text: Hirsch Bär Fassel

text: Abraham Neuda

text: Hungary

text: religious reform

text: Aharon Chorin

text: Hungary

text: Pápa

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah Neolog


title: Vogel, Dvora

abstract: (1900–1942), writer, art critic, and philosopher. Dvora Vogel was born in Burshtyn in Galicia into an intellectual family. During World War I, the family fled to Vienna. Upon their return, Vogel attended high school in Lwów and then studied philosophy and psychology at the universities of Lwów and Kraków. Her first literary efforts were in German, but subsequently Vogel switched to Yiddish, allegedly under the influence of her friend and fellow student Rokhl Oyerbakh (Rachel Auerbach).

text: Galicia

text: Lwów

text: Kraków

text: Rokhl Oyerbakh

text: Kraków

text: Aleksander Wat

text: Khone Shmeruk

text: Yiddish literature

text: Bruno Schulz


title: Szymel, Maurycy

abstract: (1903–1942), Polish and Yiddish poet, prose writer, translator, critic, and publicist. Maurycy (Mosheh) Szymel was born into an Orthodox family in Lwów, where he graduated from high school. He made his literary debut in Chwila in 1925, initially writing poetry for children. From the beginning of the 1930s, he participated in Warsaw’s Jewish literary life, publishing a manifesto on Polish Jewish poetry in the weekly Opinia (1933) and writing for the Jewish press in Yiddish and Polish. In 1939 he returned to Lwów and published Yiddish works in Sovetish literatur. During the Nazi occupation, Szymel worked as a clerk for the Judenrat in Lwów. He died at the Janów labor camp.

text: Lwów

text: Chwila

text: Warsaw

text: Opinia

text: Judenrat

text: fools of Chełm

text: Julian Tuwim


title: Yiddish Literary Journals (Literary Journals)

abstract: Most Russian maskilim of the 1860s were no less contemptuous of Yiddish, the noxious zhargon (jargon), than were their Berlin colleagues, yet—against the grain—the maskil  Aleksander Zederbaum (1816–1893) in 1862 issued Kol mevaser (Herald) in Odessa as a Yiddish supplement to the Hebrew weekly Ha-Melits (The Advocate) from 1862 to 1872.

imgDesc: Masthead of Yudishes folks-blat: A politish-literarishe tsaytung (Jewish People’s Newspaper: A Literary-Political Newspaper), 1.13 (October 1881), St. Petersburg. (YIVO)

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Kol mevaser

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Melits

text: Tsene-rene

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Yiddish literature

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: David Frishman

text: Shimen Shmuel Frug

text: Ha-Asif

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Shomer

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Yiddish literature

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Odessa

text: Warsaw

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Der yud

text: Kraków

text: Der fraynd

text: Russia

text: Sholem Asch

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: David Frishman

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Warsaw

text: Kishinev

text: Czernowitz Conference

text: Haynt

text: Łódź

text: Der moment

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Sholem Asch

text: Yisroel Shtern

text: Di yudishe velt

text: Michał Weichert

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Marc Chagall

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Globus

text: Soviet Union

text: censorship

text: Lithuania

text: Romania

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Der Nister

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Kiev

text: Minsk

text: Minsk

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Meir Wiener

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Arn Vergelis

text: Itsik Manger

text: Łódź

text: Folks-shtime

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

text: Shloyme Bikl

text: Vilna

text: Riga

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Leyzer Volf

text: Chaim Grade

text: Avrom Sutzkever

glossary: © 2006 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris


title: Stern, Samu

abstract: (1874–1947), business and communal leader. Samu Stern was born into a rural family in Nemesszalok, near Pápa in western Hungary. He received a general education, studied at the Jánosháza yeshiva for two years, and attended a science high school in Győr. He then moved to Budapest to study commerce.

text: Pápa

text: Hungary

text: yeshiva

text: Budapest

text: antisemitic

text: assimilation

text: Sándor Eppler

text: Judenrat

glossary:
yeshiva
Neolog
numerus clausus


title: Wahrmann, Mór

abstract: (Moritz; 1831–1892), merchant banker, communal leader, and member of parliament. The son of a Jewish trader, and grandson of Yisra’el Wahrmann, the first rabbi of Pest, Mór Wahrmann became one of that city’s most successful merchant bankers during the Gründerzeit, the great economic boom of the 1860s. He also played an important role in Jewish communal affairs and served as the first professing Jew in Hungary’s parliament.

text: bankers

text: Hungary

text: Jewish Congress

text: Orthodox

text: Ignác Goldziher

text: Galitsianer

text: pogroms

text: Russia

text: Budapest

text: Maurycy Gottlieb


title: Paperna, Avraham Ya‘akov

abstract: (1840–1919), Hebrew poet and critic. Avraham Ya‘akov Paperna was born in Kapolia (Kapyl), in the Minsk district of Russia, and was drawn to the Haskalah from an early age. In 1859, Paperna’s family moved to Bobruisk, and a year later he married. From 1862 to 1864, he studied at the rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir, and from 1864 to 1867 he was at the rabbinical seminary in Vilna. After teaching for a short time at a government school in Zakroczym, Poland (1868), he was appointed to teach religion at the government secondary school in Plotsk. During World War I, he fled to Bobruisk in 1915, and subsequently to Odessa, where he remained until his death.

text: Minsk

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: Bobruisk

text: seminary

text: Zhitomir

text: Vilna

text: Poland

text: Odessa

text: poetry

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew literature

text: prose

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Yosef ha-Efrati


title: Rybakov, Anatolii Naumovich

abstract: (1911–1998), novelist and screenwriter. Anatolii Rybakov was born into an educated family Chernigov (Ukr., Chernihiv); the family moved to Moscow when he was eight years old. He attended the local high school and, in his last two years, an experimental “commune-school” staffed by outstanding teachers, many of them Civil War veterans. After working as a loader and driver for a chemical plant, he enrolled in the Moscow Transportation Economic Institute in 1930. Arrested for “subversion” in 1933, he spent three years in Siberian exile before working as a transport engineer in places that did not require citizens to have an internal passport (having been exiled, he was not entitled to one). After serving in the army in World War II, he turned to literature, first writing the novella Kortik (The Dagger; 1948) for children, followed by a novel based on his work experience, Voditeli (The Drivers; 1950).

text: Moscow

text: refuseniks

text: Holocaust

text: Russian literature

text: censorship


title: Fassel, Hirsch Bär

abstract: (1802–1884), rabbi, theologian, and scholar. Born in Boskovice (Ger., Boskowitz) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Hirsch Bär (Hebrew name, Tsevi Hirsh) Fassel attended yeshivas in Boskovice and Pressburg (mod. Bratislava). Upon his return to Moravia, he married Jozefa Arnstein, with whom he had eight children. In 1836, he was offered the rabbinate of Prostĕjov (Ger., Prossnitz) despite strident opposition from Moravia’s chief rabbi, Neḥemyah Trebitsch (1779–1842), who was wary of Fassel’s predilection for religious reform.

text: Boskovice

text: Moravia

text: Bratislava

text: Prostĕjov

text: Neḥemyah Trebitsch

text: religious reform

text: Passover

text: Moritz Steinschneider

text: circumcision

text: Hungary

text: Ben Chananja


title: Zaslavskii, David Iosifovich

abstract: (1880–1965), Bundist activist and Soviet publicist. Born in Kiev, David Zaslavskii became interested in Russian Jewish literature and Jewish history while still in his youth. In 1899, he took part in a Jewish student organization established by Zionists and socialists at Kiev University and was expelled from the university in 1901 for participating in student riots. He began his activities at the Bund in 1903, simultaneously writing for the Russian-language press. In 1905 and 1906, he worked for the Bund Central Committee, publishing in their press in both Yiddish (Di tsayt) and Russian (Evreiskie vesti). From 1907 to 1917, he also published widely in the general liberal Russian press in Kiev and Saint Petersburg.

text: Kiev

text: Zionists

text: Bund

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Vilna

text: Ukraine

text: Moscow

text: Tribuna

text: Der emes

text: Eynikayt

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Osip Mandel’shtam

text: Boris Pasternak


title: Borşa

abstract: Town in the extreme north of Romania, at the foot of Rodna Mountains and on the Vişeu River (157 km east of Baia Mare). The first documentary reference to Borşa (Hun., Borsa) dates to 1365, but a Jewish presence was not noted until 1728, when immigrants from Galicia and Bucovina settled in the area. The first synagogue was founded in 1783, and a burial society was set up in 1815.

text: Romania

text: Baia Mare

text: Galicia

text: Bucovina

text: charity

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary

text: ghettos

glossary: Talmud Torah


title: Aderca, Felix

abstract: (1891–1962), writer, playwright, literary critic, and journalist. Felix Aderca (originally Froim Zeilic Adercu) was born in the village of Puieşti, Moldavia, to a family of merchants, and did not complete high school. He published several collections of poetry, independently and without success. Under the name Oliver Willy, he also issued an essay titled “Naționalism? Libertatea de a ucide” (Nationalism? The Freedom to Kill; 1910).

imgDesc: Portrait of Felix Aderca. Artist unknown, drawing. (Centrul pentru Studiul Istoriei din România)

text: Moldavia

text: Romania

text: assimilation

text: Bucharest

text: Holocaust

text: Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea

text: Sholem Asch

text: Egon Erwin Kisch


title: Şafran Family

abstract: (Safran, Schafran, Shafran), rabbinical family. Originally from Galicia, Betsal’el Ze’ev Şafran (Rabaz; 1867–1929) settled in Romania in 1887 and became a rabbi in Sculeni; in 1889 he took a position in Ştefăneşti, and in 1905 he served as rabbi of Bacău, a position he held until the end of his life. Şafran’s sons were rabbis and educators, initially in Romania and later in Israel, Europe, and America.

imgDesc: Chief Rabbi Alexandru-Iehuda Şafran (standing, in hat) at a Ha-Po‘el ha-Mizraḥi demonstration, Bucharest, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Bacău

text: Land of Israel

text: Avraham Yitsḥak Kook

text: Me’ir Shapira

text: Lublin

text: Bucharest

text: Iaşi

text: Ploieşti

text: Seminary

text: Mizraḥi

text: ORT

text: OZE

glossary: Torah responsa Kabbalah


title: Natanson, Yosef Sha’ul

abstract: (1808–1875), rabbi, halakhic decisor, and Orthodox educator. Yosef Sha’ul Natanson was born in the Galician town of Brzeżany (Ukr., Berezhany; Yid. Berezhan) to a distinguished and wealthy family. In 1825, after he married his cousin, Sara Idel (of the Ettinger family), he moved to Lwów. Most of Natanson’s time in subsequent years was devoted to study and to writing Talmudic and halakhic works in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Mordekhai Ze’ev Ettinger. In 1848, Natanson established a small yeshiva in a Lwów bet midrash, and he was soon widely recognized as an Orthodox educator. In 1857, he was appointed district rabbi in Lwów, after the post had been unoccupied for some 10 years; he held that position until his death.

text: Berezhany

text: Ettinger family

text: Lwów

text: yeshiva

text: bet midrash

text: Galicia

text: rabbinate

text: Galicia

text: Hungary

text: Russia

text: Passover

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Yosef Kohen-Tsedek

glossary:
yeshiva
responsa
Torah
Pale of Settlement


title: Sfard, Dovid

abstract: (1905–1981), Yiddish writer. Born in Trisk (Turiysk), Ukraine, Dovid Sfard spent his childhood in Ozeryany, where his father was a rabbi. Having received a traditional Jewish education, Sfard studied in Kovel’ at secondary schools that taught Hebrew and Polish; he then attended school in Luts’k from 1919 to 1926. After publishing some Hebrew poems in a periodical produced by young Hebraists in the latter city, he decided to devote himself to literature.

text: Ukraine

text: Luts’k

text: Warsaw

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: poetry

text: Fraynd

text: Boris Kletskin

text: Alter Kacyzne

text: Soviet Union

text: Białystok

text: Moscow

text: Yiddish literature

text: Poland


title: Zabara, Nosn

abstract: (1908–1975), Yiddish writer. Born in Rogachev, Ukraine, into the family of a potter, Nosn Zabara received a traditional Jewish education, studied at a secondary school in nearby Novograd-Volynskii, and later worked in a Kiev bookstore. His first publications appeared in 1930. Zabara studied at the aspirantur (graduate program) of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture, and soon was recognized as an accomplished prose writer. Zabara’s first novel, Radio-roman (Radio Novel; 1932), devoted to Red Army soldiers and officers, was published after his demobilization.

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: prose

text: shtetl

text: Moscow

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Sephardic

text: Elye Falkovitsh


title: Shekhtman, Eli

abstract: (1908–1996), Yiddish writer. Born in Voskovichi in Ukrainian Polesye, Eli Shekhtman began writing in Yiddish at the age of 12, before entering a yeshiva in Zhitomir in 1921. His first publication—two poems—appeared in 1928 in the Kharkov literary monthly Di royte velt. Shekhtman studied at the literary department of the Yiddish Teachers Institute in Odessa from 1929 to 1933. He spent the following three years in Kharkov, later moving to Kiev.

text: yeshiva

text: Zhitomir

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: Kiev

text: prose

text: shtetl

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Der Nister

text: Shmuel-Nisn Godiner

text: Ukraine

text: Belarus

text: Holocaust

text: Moscow

text: Sovetish heymland


title: Razumny, Mark

abstract: (1896–1988), Yiddish writer. Born in the shtetl of Zhager, Mark Razumny grew up in Riga, where, in addition to receiving a traditional Jewish education, he studied art and architecture. As a young boy, he began to write poems in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew. In 1917–1918, he affiliated with the Labor Zionists. Mobilized to the Red Army in 1919, Razumny soon moved to Germany and lived in Hamburg, where he published his first story, in German, in the local Israelitisches Familienblatt (Israelite Family Journal). He worked as a clerk at a Hamburg-based bank and studied philosophy, aesthetics, and literature at the university.

text: shtetl

text: Riga

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Frimorgn

text: Ya‘akov Ze’ev (Wolf) Latzky-Bertholdi

text: Latvia

text: Warsaw

text: Folks-shtime

text: Moscow

text: Sovetish heymland


title: Gorshman, Shira

abstract: (1906–2001), Yiddish prose writer. Born in the Lithuanian town of Krakes, Shira (or Shirke; original surname unknown) grew up in poverty, with little attention from her parents. She moved to Palestine in 1924, but in 1929 arrived in Odessa with a group of disillusioned members of the Gedud ha-‘Avodah labor corps. Led by Mendl Elkind, they attempted to recreate their commune in the Soviet Union by establishing the agricultural settlement of Vojo Nova (“New Way [of life]” in Esperanto) in Crimea. At that point, Shira Kushnir (as she was known then; Kushnir may not have been her surname at birth) was a single mother of three daughters.

text: prose

text: Odessa

text: Soviet Union

text: Crimea

text: Moscow

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Warsaw

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Birobidzhan


title: Estate System

abstract: Preindustrial European societies were typically divided into hereditary estates, consisting of social groups distinguished by occupation, legal status, and customs. Nobility, clergy, and peasantry are classic examples from the early modern period. Subgroups existed within these categories (including nobles related by blood to the ruling dynasty; monastic clergy; and peasants who worked on lands owned by the monarch) and there were additional estates outside them (town dwellers, merchants, serfs, and so on).

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Russia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: guilds

text: pogroms

glossary:
halakhah
Pale of Settlement

subconcepts:
The Reform Era
Legacies of Estate-based Integration


title: Eybeschütz, Yonatan

abstract: (ca. 1694–1764), one of the foremost and certainly the most controversial rabbinical figure of his generation. Born in Kraków, Yonatan Eybeschütz moved about 1700 to the Moravian community of Eibenschütz, where his father, Natan Note, was appointed rabbi. His father died within a year and the young orphan, who soon became widely acknowledged as a child prodigy, came under the wing of Me’ir Eisenstadt, the rabbi of Prossnitz (Prostějov). In 1711, Eybeschütz married into the Spira family, which held various rabbinical and lay leadership positions throughout the empire. Eybeschütz proved to be a very talented preacher, and was appointed to a position in Prague. Later he was chosen to head a private yeshiva.

imgDesc: Letter from Arn Zeitlin to Yoysef Opatoshu, 1930. From Arn Zeitlin in Warsaw, to Yoysef Opatoshu in New York, 8 April 1930. Zeitlin has been elected the chair of the local PEN Club and looks forward to seeing Opatoshu at the upcoming PEN Congress. He agrees with Opatoshu that Shmuel Niger is "our only literary critic." A recent issue of Literarishe bleter focusing on Opatoshu's work "made a strong impression." As per Opatoshu's request, Zeitlin has asked his father Hillel about the eighteenth-century Eybeschütz–Emden controversy, and the senior Zeitlin notes that some of Emden's pamphlets accused Eybeschütz of being an apostate who wore a "copper cross" on his chest; nonetheless, he regards this a slander on the part of Emden. Arn asks Opatoshu for news of the American Yiddish journal Di vokh and sends regards to writers H. Leivick and Aaron Glanz-Leyeles. Yiddish. RG 436, Joseph Opatoshu Papers, F206. (YIVO)

text: Kraków

text: Prostějov

text: Prague

text: yeshiva

text: yeshiva

text: David Oppenheim

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Sabbatian

text: Prague

text: Hungary

text: Ya`akov Yehoshu‘a ben Aleksander ha-Kohen Falk

text: messianism

text: piety

text: Haskalah

text: Kraków

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

glossary:
yeshiva
Torah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
responsa
pilpul
Talmud
agadah
Kabbalah
halakhah
Haskalah


title: Vainshtein, Aron Isaakovich

abstract: (1877–1938), Bund and Evsektsiia activist, then Soviet government official. Born in Vilna, Vainshtein, who used the pseudonym Rakhmiel, graduated from that city’s Jewish teachers’ institute in 1897. The following year he joined the Bund in Warsaw, and in 1901 (at the Bund’s Fourth Congress) became a member of its Central Committee. Vainshtein published widely in the Bundist Yiddish press (Arbeter shtime; Folks-tsaytung). He was arrested several times for revolutionary activity and was exiled to Siberia in 1914. Subsequently, after the February 1917 Revolution, he returned to Petrograd.

text: Bund

text: Evsektsiia

text: Soviet

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: February 1917 Revolution

text: Petrograd

text: Minsk

text: Khaye Malke Lifshits

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Evsektsiia

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


title: Chemeriskii, Aleksandr

abstract: (1880–1942), participant in the Russian Jewish revolutionary movement and Soviet Communist official. Born in Bar, Ukraine, Aleksandr Chemeriskii settled in Minsk in the mid-1890s and worked as a photographer. In 1898, he joined the Bund. The following year, he was arrested and sent to Moscow where Sergei Zubatov, head of the secret police, persuaded him to help found a legal Jewish workers’ party. The party would defend professional interests and seek to expand Jewish civil rights, but would not fight against the autocracy.

text: Ukraine

text: Minsk

text: Bund

text: Moscow

text: Kishinev

text: Łódź

text: revolution of 1905–1907

text: Russia

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Kiev

text: Folks-tsaytung

text: Komfarband

text: Evsektsiia

text: Der emes

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: USSR

text: Crimea


title: Liberman, Evsei Grigor’evich

abstract: (1897–1981), economist. Evsei Liberman was chair of the economics and engineering department at the Kharkov Institute of Economics and Engineering (1947–1963) and from 1963 headed the statistics department at Kharkov State University. He was a key figure in the debates over economic reform in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death.

text: Kharkov

text: Soviet Union


title: Finkelshteyn, Leo

abstract: (1895–1950), journalist, publicist, and Yiddish activist involved in socialism. Leo Finkelshteyn (Finkelstein) was born in Radom, where he received a general education and later studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 1923, he moved to Warsaw and became a member of the Folkist Party, serving as its representative on the executive committee of the Warsaw Jewish community from 1927 to 1937.

text: Radom

text: Kraków

text: Warsaw

text: Folkist

text: TSYSHO

text: Bund

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Kultur-lige

text: Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Yiddish literature

text: Białystok

text: Moscow

text: Łódź


title: Kaufmann, David

abstract: (1852–1899), scholar and manuscript collector. Born in Kojetín (Ger., Kojetein) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, one of five children of a rural leaseholder, David Kaufmann attended the town’s Jewish elementary school from 1856 to 1860. He then studied at the Piarist gymnasium in nearby Kromĕříž from 1860 to 1867, and at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau from 1867 until his ordination as a rabbi in 1877. He took courses at Breslau University, and in 1874 received his doctorate from Leipzig University for a dissertation about Sa‘adyah Gaon’s philosophy of religion.

text: Moravia

text: leaseholder

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

text: Budapest


title: Grünbaum, Yitsḥak

abstract: (1879–1970), Polish Jewish political leader and journalist. Yitsḥak Grünbaum was born in Warsaw, received a traditional Jewish education, and graduated from a high school in Płońsk. He became an active Zionist during his years in high school. He opposed Herzl’s Uganda plan, and demanded that Zionists pay greater attention to the day-to-day needs of Diaspora Jewry and commit themselves to the struggle for civil and national rights in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. This view, known as Gegenwartsarbeit (work for the present), was incorporated in the Russian Zionist Federation’s Helsingfors Program (1906), of which Grünbaum was a major architect. He served as secretary-general of the Russian Zionist Federation (1908–1910), deputy editor of the World Zionist Organization’s Hebrew weekly, Ha-‘Olam (1909–1914), and editor of the Zionist daily Petrograder togblat (1914).

imgDesc: Yitsḥak Grünbaum, a leader of the General Zionists (fourth from left), at the first convention of Jewish municipal representatives in Dobrzyń nad Wisłą, Poland, ca. 1920. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: Leon Reich

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Tarbut

text: Prague


title: Khar’kiv

abstract: In 1734, the Russian state permitted Jewish merchants to visit Kharkov (more properly Khar’kov; Ukr., Khar’kiv) to engage in retail and wholesale trade. Jewish residence in this city outside the Pale of Settlement, however, remained under strict control throughout the imperial period. In 1821, Jews lost their right to enter the city but regained this privilege in 1835 when the governor complained about the loss of more than 10 million rubles in trade revenue.

imgDesc: Kelman Gottmann, a Jewish wood merchant from Kharkov (now Khar’kiv, Ukr.) with two associates in one of his firm’s timber forests, ca. 1914. (YIVO)

text: trade

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Zionist movement

text: Ber Borokhov

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Grodno

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Evsektsiia

text: Bund

text: Soviet

text: Der Nister

text: Leningrad

text: Moscow

text: theater

text: Lubavitch

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
mikveh


title: Lerner, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1879–1918), Hebrew poet. Ya‘akov Lerner was born in the town of Brzeżany in Volhynia to an affluent family of rabbinic pedigree. During his childhood, the family became impoverished and was forced to relocate to a village near the town of Kostopol, settling in Kostopol itself a few years later. Lerner attended heders and became engrossed in Judaic studies. He also studied Russian and French with private teachers. In 1901, he went to Warsaw, hoping to earn a matriculation certificate, and for the next five years he eked out a subsistence living as a teacher.

text: Warsaw

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Ya‘akov Steinberg

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: David Frishman

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Berdichev

text: Grodno

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Vilna

text: Bialik

text: Hebrew poetry


title: Lipkin, Yisra’el ben Ze’ev Volf

abstract: (1810–1883), founder and leader of the Musar ethical movement. Known also as Yisra’el Salanter, Yisra’el ben Ze’ev Volf Lipkin was born into a rabbinical family in Zhagare, in the Kovno district. At a young age, he was sent to study Torah with the rabbi of Salant, Tsevi Hirsh Broyda. There, Salanter met Yosef Zundel, a close disciple of Ḥayim of Volozhin, and, through his influence, became interested in questions relating to moral improvement. In 1840, Salanter moved to Vilna, having been invited to serve as head of Rabbi Maila’s yeshiva. Soon thereafter he moved to Zaretcha, a Vilna suburb, where he taught Torah in the local bet midrash.

text: Musar

text: Kovno

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: yeshiva

text: bet midrash

text: Vilna

text: seminary

text: Kloyz

text: Lithuania

text: Orthodoxy

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: rabbinate

text: Russia

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

text: Haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Misnagdim

text: Haskalah

text: Musar movement

text: yeshiva

glossary: Musar Torah yeshiva halakhah Talmud darshan Gaon Kolel Haskalah Misnagdim

subconcepts: The Musar Method: The First Stage (1845–1849)


title: Langer, František

abstract: (1888–1965), dramatist, author, and essayist. František Langer was one of the most significant and internationally famous Czech dramatists of the twentieth century. He studied at the medical faculty of Charles University, specializing in psychiatry, and was awarded a doctorate in 1914. While a student, he was active in a group of anarchist writers, and in 1911 was a cofounder (with Jaroslav Hašek) of the Skupina Výtvarných Umělců (Artists’ Group [i.e., Club]), which became the political party Strana Mírného Pokroku v Mezích Zákona (Party of Moderate Progress within the Confines of the Law; SMPVMZ).

text: Bucovina

text: Prague

text: Jiří (Mordechai Georgo) Langer


title: Trębacz, Maurycy

abstract: (1861–1941), Polish painter and illustrator. Maurycy (Mojżesz) Trębacz was among the first generation of Jewish painters in Poland who followed in the artistic tradition of Maurycy Gottlieb. Along with Samuel (Szmul) Hirszenberg, Jakub Weinles (1870–1938), and Leopold Pilichowski (1869–1934), Trębacz chose subjects from religion, as well as from Jewish history and Jewish daily life.

imgDesc: Żyd z etrogiem (Jew and Etrog). Maurycy Trębacz. Oil on canvas. The etrog, a variety of citron, is one of the “four species” (along with the date palm, willow branches, and myrtle leaves) that are used in ceremonies during Sukkot. (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)

text: Poland

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Samuel (Szmul) Hirszenberg

text: Leopold Pilichowski

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Zionism

text: Łódź


title: East Prussia

abstract: (Ger., Ostpreussen), former Prussian province on the Baltic Sea. With its capital at Königsberg (today Kaliningrad, Rus.), East Prussia was bordered to the east by Lithuania, to the south by Poland, and to the west by the province of West Prussia. Teutonic knights forbade the settlement of Jews in the territory in the fifteenth century. This ban, promoted by the province’s constitutionally strong estates, was circumvented in Königsberg from the seventeenth century on. In the province’s next-largest cities, Tilsit (Sovetsk, Rus.) and Memel (Klaipėda, Lith.), only certain “protected Jews” were admitted on the basis of the Generaljudenprivileg (general Jewish privilege) of 1750. A few cities (such as Lyck [Ełk, Pol.]) tolerated the founding of small Jewish communities; others permitted entry to Jewish merchants from Poland and Lithuania only during trade fairs.

imgDesc: Portrait of Mrs. Kurtzig. Artist unknown, Rakwitz, East Prussia (now Rakoniewice, Pol.), ca. 1830–1840. Oil on canvas. Mrs. Kurtzig was the wife of Hirsch Kurtzig, a prosperous wool merchant and cantor. (Leo Baeck Institute, New York)

text: Kaliningrad

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Klaipėda

text: trade

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-Magid

text: censorship

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Yisra’el ben Ze’ev Wolf Salanter

text: Musar movement

text: Isaak Rülf

text: Zionist movement

glossary: Haskalah Musar


title: Olitski Brothers

abstract: Writers, poets, and educators. Born in Trisk (Turzysk), Volhynia, the Olitski brothers—Leyb, Borukh, and Mates—each made meaningful contributions to Yiddish education and literature. The eldest, Leyb (1895–1975), was an educator who wrote novels and short stories for adults and children. The second brother, Borukh (1907–1941), had a strong reputation as a poet and teacher of Yiddish language and literature. Mates (1915– ), the youngest, is a poet and educator, first in Europe and later in New York.

text: TSYSHO

text: Bund

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Leo Finkelshteyn

text: Yoshue Rapoport

text: Soviet Union

text: heder

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Grodno

text: Literarishe bleter


title: Shkop, Shim‘on Yehudah

abstract: (1860–1939), Lithuanian Talmudist. Shim‘on Shkop studied in the Mir and Volozhin yeshivas, where he stood out as a brilliant student. In Volozhin he met Ḥayim Soloveichik, who became his principal teacher and greatly influenced his approach to Talmud study.

text: Mir

text: Volozhin

text: Ḥayim Soloveichik

text: Talmud study

text: Telz

text: Musar movement

text: yeshiva

text: Grodno

text: Lithuania

text: Vilna

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Zionism

text: Land of Israel

glossary: Talmud Musar Torah


title: Shneour, Zalman

abstract: (1886–1959), Hebrew and Yiddish poet and novelist. A scion of the Shneerson dynasty that has led the Lubavitch Hasidic movement since its inception, Zalman (Zalkind) Shneour was born to a middle-class, somewhat traditional family in the Belorussian town of Shklov, a center of Jewish learning, of Lubavitch Hasidism, and of the Haskalah. His childhood (which he colorfully evoked in his novella cycle Shklover yidn [Jews of Shklov; 1929]) was not a happy one. A recipient of a traditional heder education with the addition of some tutoring in modern secular studies (including Russian and modern Hebrew), Shneour became, from a very early age, an avid reader of Hebrew literature. This was definitely not encouraged by his parents, who wished to see him turn his attention to a practical career in commerce.

imgDesc: Zalman Shneour (right) and playwright Perets Hirshbeyn (left), Vilna, 1905. (YIVO)

text: Lubavitch

text: Shklov

text: Haskalah

text: heder

text: Hebrew literature

text: Warsaw

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Odessa

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Tushiyah

text: poetry

text: prose

text: Sabbath

text: Sholem Asch

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Shneur Zalman of Liady

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Abramovitsh

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: shtetl

glossary: Haskalah heder


title: Schenirer, Sarah

abstract: (1883–1935), founder of the Orthodox education network Beys Yankev (Bet Ya‘akov; Beth Jacob). Born in Kraków to a Belz Hasidic family, Sara Schenirer finished her studies in a government-sponsored primary school, and worked as a seamstress while educating herself intensively in Jewish philosophy and scripture. She was deeply influenced by the writings of Samson Raphael Hirsch.

imgDesc: Class at a Beys Yankev school, Kraków, 1936. The Hebrew signs read, “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord” (Ps. 111:10) and “Teach us to count our days rightly” (Ps. 90:12). (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Orthodox

text: Beys Yankev

text: Kraków

text: Belz

text: Agudas Yisroel


title: Călugăru, Ion

abstract: (1902–1956), writer, playwright, and journalist. Ion Călugăru (pseudonym of Ştrul Leiba Croitoru) was born in Dorohoi to an impoverished family; he was a top student at the Israelite-Romanian school, where the Jewish community supported him through elementary school. Although he failed to graduate from high school, his Latin teacher, the influential literary critic Eugen Lovinescu, hired him to serve on the editorial staff of the review Sburătorul, in which Călugăru used his pseudonym for the first time (he had published articles in the Jewish newspaper Mântuirea [The Redemption] as B. Croitoru).

text: Dorohoi

text: Mântuirea

text: communism

text: sexuality

text: shtetl


title: Berkowitz, Yitsḥak Dov

abstract: (1885–1967), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Born to a working-class family in Slutsk, in the Minsk region, Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz was an avid reader of Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish literature. When he was about 15 years old, he began to write stories and recorded impressions for a private newspaper that he produced with his friends. His real literary career, however, began in 1903 when he was appointed to a teaching position in Łódź, and befriended the young poet, Yitsḥak Katzenelson. With Katzenelson’s encouragement, Berkowitz published his first Hebrew stories in the daily Ha-Tsofeh, and at the end of 1903 he won first place in a story competition held by that newspaper—an award that brought him overnight fame.

imgDesc: Jewish writers and intellectuals, Vilna, 1905. (From left to right) Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky, M. Kabak (seated), Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz (standing), Berta Tshernovits, Ernestina Rabinovitz (daughter of the writer Sholem Aleichem and Berkowitz’s wife), playwright Perets Hirshbeyn, and Shemu’el[?] Tshernovits. (YIVO)

text: Slutsk

text: Minsk

text: Łódź

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Vilna

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Zionism

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Stybel

text: Slutsk

text: Childhood

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Hebrew literature


title: Kabak, Aharon Avraham

abstract: (1883–1944), Hebrew novelist, critic, and translator. Aharon Avraham Kabak was born in Smorgon in the province of Vilna and died in Jerusalem. His education began at home with his father, who was a rabbi, and continued in a heder and various yeshivas. Kabak lived in several towns, working as a teacher and writing for Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers. Headed for Palestine, he stopped in Constantinople, where he taught and edited. In 1911, he arrived in Palestine and taught at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. In 1914, he returned to Europe, where he studied psychology and philosophy at universities in Berlin, Geneva, and Lausanne. In 1921, he came back to Palestine, settled in Jerusalem, and devoted himself to writing and teaching literature in the Reḥavyah gymnasium. Later in life, during a period of illness, he underwent a spiritual change that is evident in his writing.

text: heder

text: yeshivas

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: assimilation

text: Minsk

text: Kovno

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Zionist

text: Hebrew literature

glossary: heder Haskalah


title: Tchernowitz, Ḥayim

abstract: (1870–1949), rabbi, scholar, publicist, and public figure. Born in the shtetl of Sebesh in Vitebsk guberniia, Ḥayim Tchernowitz (known as Rav Tsa‘ir) studied in Kovno in 1895–1896 and received rabbinical ordination from Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor. From 1897, Tchernowitz served as a rabbi in Odessa, where he also established a yeshiva.

imgDesc: Ḥayim Tchernowitz, ca. 1920s. The Hebrew inscription reads: “To poet Rabbi Yeḥezkel, a memento from Ḥ. Tchernowitz.” (YIVO)

text: shtetl

text: Vitebsk

text: Kovno

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Odessa

text: yeshiva

text: seminary

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Sabbath

text: conversion

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionism

glossary:
publicist
yeshiva
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
halakhah


title: Kleynkunst

abstract: A genre of Yiddish performance, kleynkunst (“little art”; also known as minyatur teater [miniature theater]) developed in the early twentieth century, primarily under the influence of Russian and Polish literary cabaret. The genre was also indebted to older forms of Yiddish performance, that of purim-shpilers and badkhonim, as well as to the nineteenth-century semiprofessional performers known as the Broder Singers. Rooted in traditional Jewish societies, such performers nevertheless subjected the Jewish community and its leadership to merciless parody while exposing a range of injustices. Integrating song and dance with sketches and routines of various kinds, kleynkunst satirized both Jewish society and the political and social order of the non-Jewish world, especially its impact on Jews.

imgDesc: Actresses Malwina Rappel (left) and Lili Liliana, members of the kleynkunst troupe Di Yidishe Bande (The Jewish Gang), performing Lobuslekh (Little Urchins), a play by Itzik Manger, Warsaw, 1937. The troupe’s name echoed the name of a popular Polish cabaret of the era, Banda (The Gang). Photograph by Leo Forbert. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: purim-shpilers

text: badkhonim

text: song

text: dance

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Bucharest

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Henryk Berlewi

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Itsik Manger

text: Alter Kacyzne

text: Yoysef Tunkel

text: Łódź

text: Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher

text: Vilna

text: Khane Levin

text: operetta

text: Yisroel Shtern

text: Kalisz

text: Białystok

text: Grodno


title: Dubin, Mordekhai

abstract: (1889–1956), Lubavitch activist, leader of Agudas Yisroel in Latvia, and politician. A lumber merchant by trade, Mordekhai Dubin began at a young age to devote himself to community service. He gained wide popularity within Latvian Jewry for his work in interceding with the authorities on behalf of individual Jews or Jewish institutions. Starting with the founding National Assembly, Dubin represented Agudas Yisroel in all the legislative bodies of democratic Latvia, from the Constituent Assembly of 1920–1922 to the four Seimas (diets) elected between 1922 and 1934. He also served on the Riga city council, and was one of the founders of the reorganized Riga kehilah, which he chaired. Dubin was recognized as a leader of the world Agudas Yisroel movement, despite the generally limited, often hostile relations between Lubavitch and Aguda.

text: Lubavitch

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Latvia

text: Riga

text: shtadlan

text: Soviet Union

text: Moscow


title: Yung-teater

abstract: (Young Theater; 1932–1939), Yiddish avant-garde theater company. Yung-teater emerged out of the Yiddish Theater Studio, founded by Michał Weichert in Warsaw in 1929; it was supported by the Yiddish cultural organization Kultur-lige. Weichert, a highly educated theater director, historian, and critic, was influenced by the avant-garde, politically activist work of Max Reinhardt in Berlin and the Moscow State Yiddish Theater.

imgDesc: “Napoleon’s oytser” (Napoleon’s treasure). Yiddish poster advertising a Yung-teater production of a play by Sholem Aleichem. Artwork by M. Gruszka. Printed by P.O.L., Warsaw, 1934. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Michał Weichert

text: Warsaw

text: Kultur-lige

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: shtetl

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: parody

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Jakub Rotbaum

text: Vilna

text: Kadia Molodowsky

text: Leyzer Volf


title: Khazaria

abstract: The Khazar Empire (ca. 650–ca. 965/68), one of the largest states of medieval Eurasia, dominated a region from the Ukrainian steppes to lands approaching the Ural River and from the Middle Volga region to the North Caucasus and Crimea. Important segments of its population converted to Judaism in the mid-to-late eighth century. Khazaria’s ruling core of Turkic tribes stemmed from the Türk Qaghanate (qaghan “emperor”) centered in Mongolia and ruling a domain stretching from Manchuria to the Black Sea. The Türk Empire divided into eastern (552–630, 682–742) and western (552–659, ca. 690–ca. 766) halves for administrative purposes. The Khazar Qaghanate, apparently led by a breakaway branch of the Türk ruling clan, the Ashina, seceded from the fragmenting Western Türk realm around 630–650.

text: Crimea

text: Karaite

text: conversion

text: Kiev

text: Ashkenazic


title: Baia Mare

abstract: Town in northwestern Romania, on the Săsar River at the foot of the Gutâi Mountains. Baia Mare, a mining town, was known in German as Frauenbach and Neustadt, in Latin as Rivulus Dominarum, and in Hungarian as Asszonypatak and Nagybánya. After several sporadic reports of a Jewish presence there in the second half of the seventeenth century, and after the establishment of Austrian rule, in 1693–1700 Jewish people’s access to mining towns and neighboring areas was forbidden. These restrictions were in place until 1850; in 1855 the presence of Rabbi Tsevi Yehudah Horovitz in Baia Mare is documented.

text: Romania

text: Congress of Jews

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Orthodox

text: yeshiva

text: yeshiva

text: ghettos

text: Transylvania

glossary: yeshiva Talmud Torah


title: Gordon, Yehudah Leib

abstract: (1831–1892), the most important Hebrew poet of the nineteenth century; leading figure of the Russian Haskalah movement. Yehudah Leib Gordon was born in Vilna in 1831 and started writing Hebrew poetry at a young age. He soon became close to the circle of maskilim in that city, a group that included Adam ha-Kohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn) and his son Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn. Writers associated with this group sought to expand their poetic and literary work and commitment to the renaissance of Hebrew letters in an Enlightenment key.

imgDesc: Title page of Ahavat David u-Mikhal (The Love of David and Michal), Yehudah Leib Gordon (Vilna, 1856). (Columbia University Library)

text: Haskalah

text: Hebrew poetry

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn

text: sexuality

text: prose

text: Hebrew literature

text: Russia

text: crafts

text: agriculture

text: Lithuania

text: Saint Petersburg

text: religious reform

text: Orthodoxy

text: Ha-Melits

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Ha-Melits

text: Aleksander Zederbaum

text: Ha-Yom

text: Land of Israel

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Maksim Vinaver


title: Kvitko, Leyb

abstract: (1890 [or 1893]–1952), Yiddish and Russian writer. Born in Holoskovo, near Odessa, Leyb Kvitko lost both of his parents very early and was raised by his grandmother. At age 10 he began working as a quilter’s apprentice and lived briefly in Nikolaev, Odessa, and Kherson. He moved to Uman in 1915, and from there he sent several of his poems to Shmuel Niger, editor of the Vilna-based journal Di yudishe velt (The Jewish World), who rejected them as “worthless.”

imgDesc: Gerangl (Struggle), by Leyb Kvitko (Kharkov: Tsentral farlag, 1929). (YIVO)

text: Odessa

text: Uman

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Di yudishe velt

text: Moyshe Khashchevatski

text: Ezra Fininberg

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Kaunas

text: Moscow

text: Der shtrom

text: Der Nister

text: pogroms

text: Ukraine

text: Soviet Russia

text: Kiev

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Der emes

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Perets Markish

text: Children’s Literature

text: Perets Markish

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee


title: Committee of Rabbis in the USSR

abstract: Clandestine Jewish religious organization in the Soviet Union, 1922–1930. The Committee of Rabbis was founded by the Lubavitcher rebbe, Yosef Yitsḥak Shneerson (1880–1950), who was its chairman until his departure from the USSR in October 1927. The Committee was subsequently led by Rabbi Ya‘akov Klemes of Moscow (1880–1953) and the organization’s secretary, Rabbi Shelomoh Yosef Zevin (1890–1978).

text: Soviet Union

text: Lubavitcher

text: Moscow

text: Lev Kamenev

text: Sabbath

text: Passover

text: crafts

text: artels

text: Leningrad

text: Odessa

text: Minsk

text: Riga

text: Latvia


title: Kalmanovitch, Zelig

abstract: (1881–1944), Yiddish linguist and translator. Born in Goldingen, Courland, Zelig Kalmanovitch (Yid., Kalmanovitsh) received a traditional education until the age of 15. In 1901, he passed the external examinations for a certificate of Russian secondary school education and subsequently studied humanities, primarily Semitic philology, in Germany. He was in Berlin from 1902 to 1905 and in Königsberg in 1909 and 1910. He then defended his doctorate in Petrograd in 1919.

imgDesc: A gathering of Jewish intellectuals in Kulautuva, Lithuania, 1920 or 1921. Those identified in the photograph include journalist Reuven Tsarfat (2, in fedora); Bal-Makhshoves (4, wearing white boater); Dovid Bergelson (6, on ground with his head on his neighbor’s knee), his wife (10, seated, second from left), and son (5, small child to Bergelson’s left); Zelig Kalmanovitch (7, with striped tie, center); Jakob Lestschinsky (8, to Kalmanovitch’s right); and Nokhem Shtif (9, to the left of Bergelson’s wife). (YIVO)

text: Courland

text: Königsberg

text: Folkism

text: Zionism

text: Boris Kletskin

text: Vilna

text: Petrograd

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Minsk

text: Lithuania

text: Latvia

text: Riga

text: Panevėžys

text: YIVO

text: Yosef Perl

text: Max Weinreich

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Yudl Mark

text: Estonia


title: Hazaz, Ḥayim

abstract: (1898–1973), Hebrew writer. Ḥayim Hazaz was born in a village in the district of Kiev. Because his father was a logger, Hazaz spent extended periods of his childhood in Ukrainian forests and received some of his Jewish and secular education from private teachers. When he reached adolescence he left his parents’ home to complete his high school studies, and became an avid reader of Russian and Hebrew literature. During the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed, he witnessed pogroms, the experience of which gave a foundation to his future literary works.

text: Kiev

text: pogroms

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Russia

text: Zionists

text: Yokheved Bat-Miriam

text: Ukraine

text: shtetl

text: Haskalah

glossary: Yishuv Haskalah


title: Pomerantz, Berl

abstract: (1901–1942), Hebrew poet and translator. Berl Pomerantz was born in Odrizhin, a village near Pinsk. From his youth, he was an avid reader of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian literature. After the Revolution of 1917, his family moved to Janów; later, Pomerantz went on his own to Vilna, where he was admitted to the Hebrew Teachers Seminary and to the conservatory. While in Vilna he became fluent in Polish; he then taught Hebrew and Bible at the Tarbut secondary school in Janów.

text: Hebrew poet

text: Pinsk

text: Vilna

text: Tarbut

text: Warsaw

text: Malki’el Lusternik

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Holocaust

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg


title: Hame’iri, Avigdor

abstract: (1890–1970), Hebrew writer. Avigdor Hame’iri was born in a small village in Hungary, where he received a traditional Jewish education. From 1905 he studied at the high school associated with the (state-run) Budapest Rabbinical Seminary. While still an adolescent, he became actively involved in the Zionist cause, wrote for the Hungarian press, and tried his hand at writing Hebrew literature. His first poem was published in 1909, and his first poetry anthology appeared in Budapest in 1912, arousing much interest. In September 1913, while attending the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna as a journalist, he befriended a number of leading Hebrew writers, including Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik.

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Galicia

text: Kiev

text: Odessa

text: Russian Civil War

text: Hungary


title: Sokhachev Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: One of the major schools of Hasidism in Poland. Its founder, Avraham Bornstein (1839–1910) was a leading intellectual figure of Polish Hasidism. He married the daughter of Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk (Kock; 1787–1859), who became his spiritual guide and mentor. Four years after Menaḥem Mendel’s death, Bornstein accepted his first rabbinical position, serving first in several communities until he settled in Sokhachev (Yid., more properly Sokhechev; Pol., Sochaczew) in 1883, where he remained for the rest of his life.

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

text: Hasidism

text: Poland

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: yeshiva

text: Sabbath

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Łódź

text: Passover

text: Land of Israel

text: Warsaw

text: Holocaust

glossary: yeshiva Torah


title: Frimorgn

abstract: Daily independent Yiddish newspaper. Frimorgn (Morning) was a nationally oriented, democratic newspaper issued in Riga from 17 January 1926 until 15 May 1934. The paper was founded by a group of employees who had left the Riga newspaper Dos folk (The Folk), who used the facilities of the publishing group of the popular Riga Russian-language newspaper Segodnia (Today). The paper initially enjoyed financial support from a number of Jewish public figures.

text: newspaper

text: Riga

text: Mark Razumny

text: Poland

text: Ya‘akov Ze’ev Latzky-Bertholdi

text: Zionist movement

text: Kaunas

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: General Zionists

text: Bund


title: Sava, Iosif

abstract: (1933–1998), musicologist, radio and television host, and journalist. Iosif Sava (originally Segal) was born in Iaşi to a family of musicians—his grandfather, Iosif Segal (1868–1927), after whom he was named, was a violinist and a close friend and collaborator of Avrom Goldfadn, the founder of the Yiddish theater. Sava’s father, Bernard Segal (1897–1958), was a violist in the Iaşi philharmonic who also made his mark as a composer and conductor at the Jewish theater in Iaşi.

text: Iaşi

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: theater

text: Bucharest

text: Romania


title: Kohen-Tsedek, Yosef

abstract: (1827–1903), publisher, journalist, and Orthodox maskil. Yosef Kohen-Tsedek (last name also rendered Kohen-Zedek) was born in Lwów. While primarily engaged in rabbinic scholarship, he also taught himself languages and secular studies. In 1853, he established a publishing house in Lwów and was among the pioneering publishers of Hebrew periodicals in Galicia. He founded and edited the first Hebrew weekly in Galicia, Ha-Mevaser, with its literary supplement, Ha-Nesher, between 1861 and 1866. The newspaper served, among other things, as a platform for rabbinic authors as well as for moderate maskilim from Galicia and Lithuania. Kohen-Tsedek often challenged radical positions expressed in the competing newspaper, ‘Ivri anokhi, published by Barukh Werber.

text: Lwów

text: Galicia

text: Lithuania

text: Kraków

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Przemyśl


title: Ha-Efrati, Yosef

abstract: (1770–1804), Hebrew playwright and poet. Born in Troplowitz (Pol., Opawica), Silesia, Yosef Ha-Efrati (also known as Joseph Troplowitz) served as a private tutor for a wealthy household in Ratibor (Pol., Racibórz) until 1791. Between 1791 and 1794, he lived in Prague. Many of his poems were printed in the Hebrew periodical Ha-Me’asef, which also published his translation (from German) in 1788 of works by Heinrich Von Kleist.

text: Silesia

text: Prague

text: Yeḥezkel Landau

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Haskalah

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: purim-shpil

glossary: maskil Haskalah


title: Eppler, Sándor

abstract: (1890–1942), Hungarian community leader. Sándor Eppler was born in Pest into a family affiliated with the Neolog movement. His father served as chief secretary of the Shas Ḥevrah (Talmud Study Society), and his uncle Viktor Sussmann was an Orthodox rabbi in Budapest. Eppler remained stringently observant his entire life. After completing elementary school, he spent three years at a commercial academy, where he gained financial and business training. The many statistical tables accompanying Eppler’s writings testify that his early training was valuable. At age 18, he became an employee of the Neolog Pest Israelite Community (PIH), thanks in large part to his personal contacts.

text: Orthodox

text: Budapest

text: Samu Stern

text: Zionists

text: Hungary

text: ORT

glossary: Talmud Neolog


title: Bikl, Shloyme

abstract: (1896–1969), Yiddish writer, critic, and journalist. Born in the shtetl of Ustechko, in Austrian eastern Galicia (now Ukraine), Shloyme Bikl (alternately, Bickel), received a traditional Jewish education and then attended high school in Kołomyja (mod. Ukr., Kolomyia). Between 1915 and 1918, Bikl was an officer in the Austrian army, and from 1919 to 1922 he studied law at Chernivtsi University. From 1922 until 1939 Bikl lived in Bucharest, combining his law practice with journalism, publicistics, and literary activity. In 1939, he immigrated to the United States, and died in New York City 30 years later.

imgDesc: Letter from Shloyme Bikl to Gruder, 1938. From Shloyme Bikl in Bucharest to "Gruder" in New York, 13 December 1938, about arrangements for Bikl’s emigration to America with his family. Bikl cites Yiddish writers such as Yoysef Opatoshu for having helped him procure a visa. He gives news about other Jewish writers in Bucharest, such as Yankev Shternberg, Moyshe Altman, Kraft, and Shefler, and says that everyone is thinking of emigrating. Yiddish. Romanian letterhead: Dr. S. Bickel, Advocat. RG 107, Letters Collection. Published with permission. (YIVO)

text: shtetl

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Kolomyia

text: Chernivtsi

text: Bucharest

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Warsaw

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Romania

text: Yiddish literature

text: Moyshe Altman

text: Kultur-lige

text: YIVO

text: newspapers and periodicals

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer


title: Feierberg, Mordekhai Ze’ev

abstract: (1874–1899), Hebrew writer; pioneer of psychological realism, neoromanticism, and symbolism. Mordekhai Feierberg was born in Novograd Volynsk (now Ukr., Novohrad Volyns’kyi) and was first taught by his father, who was a shoḥet (kosher slaughterer). Although Feierberg then studied at the Chernobil yeshiva, he grew impressed with the ideas of Jewish philosophy and the Haskalah, and subsequently led a group of maskilim. He was persecuted for his activities by traditional Jews, including his own father.

text: Haskalah

text: Warsaw

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Avraham ben Avigdor

text: Voskhod

text: Haskalah

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

glossary: yeshiva Haskalah


title: Rényi, Alfréd

abstract: (1921–1970), mathematician. Alfréd Rényi was born in Budapest. His father, Artúr, was a mechanical engineer and translator; his mother, Barbara (Borka), was a photographer and the daughter of philosopher Bernát Alexander (1850–1927). It was from his mother’s side that Rényi acquired a love of literature and Greek philosophy; in secondary school his studies focused more on humanities than on sciences.

text: Budapest

text: Bernát Alexander

text: Lipót Fejér

text: Debrecen


title: Soviet State Yiddish Theaters

abstract: Known by the acronym GOSET (Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr), the Soviet State Yiddish Theaters were part of a network of state-subsidized theaters in the Soviet Union. At its height in the 1930s, the network included four major theaters in Ukraine, Belorussia, Birobidzhan, and Moscow, as well as some 15 minor theaters in smaller Jewish population centers.

imgDesc: Natan Al’tman’s set design for Le Trouhadec by Jules Romain, Moscow State Yiddish Theater, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Soviet Union

text: Ukraine

text: Belorussia

text: Birobidzhan

text: Moscow

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Aleksandr Granovskii

text: Kharkov

text: Minsk

text: Kultur-lige

text: Kiev

text: Odessa

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Zhitomir

text: Emmanuil Kazakevich

text: L’vov

text: Ternopol’

text: Białystok

text: Grodno

text: Vilna

text: Kovno

text: Riga

text: Kishinev

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Avrom Vevyorke

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Perets Markish

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Avrom Goldfadn

text: Solomon Mikhoels


title: Rubin, Rivke

abstract: (1906–1987), prose writer, critic, and translator. Rivke Rubin was born into a family of artisans in Minsk. In 1930, she received a degree from the literature faculty of the Minsk Pedagogical Institute and took graduate studies at the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. She later taught Yiddish literature and literary theory at the Minsk Pedagogical Institute. In 1934, Rubin moved to Moscow and began teaching in that city’s Pedagogical Institute’s Yiddish department.

text: prose

text: Minsk

text: Yiddish literature

text: Moscow

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: USSR

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Shmuel Halkin

text: Zelik Akselrod

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Zalmen Vendrof

text: Ezra Fininberg

text: Itsik Kipnis

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: shtetl


title: Beider, Khayim

abstract: (1920–2003), Yiddish poet, journalist, and literary historian. The son of an artisan, Khayim (Efim in Russian publications) Beider was born in the shtetl of Kupel, near Proskurov (mod. Khmel’nyts’kyi), Ukraine. After finishing the local seven-year Yiddish school, Beider studied at the Odessa Yiddish Teachers’ Training College and a rabfak (workers’ faculty) in Zhitomir, and from 1936 to 1940 at the Yiddish department of the Odessa Teachers’ Training Institute. After graduating in 1940, he worked as a teacher in the Stalindorf Jewish National District, one of three such Jewish districts in pre–World War II Ukraine.

text: shtetl

text: Ukraine

text: Odessa

text: Zhitomir

text: Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi

text: Birobidzhan

text: Birobidzhaner shtern

text: Moscow

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Aron Vergelis

text: Yiddish literature

text: Soviet Union

text: Russia


title: Rabin, Yoysef

abstract: (1900–1987), Yiddish writer. Born in Grodno, Yoysef Rabin moved to Vilna in 1915 and studied at an evening school. As the leader of the underground Vilna Komsomol organization, he fled in 1920 to Moscow, where he worked as a Yiddish typesetter and studied at the Moscow Yiddish Printing School. In 1922, he was among the first recruits to the proletarian literary group lead by Khayim Gildin and Moyshe Taytsh.

text: Grodno

text: Vilna

text: Moscow

text: Khayim Gildin

text: Moyshe Taytsh

text: Der emes

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Bund

text: Shmuel-Nisn Godiner

text: Yitskhok Nusinov

text: Birobidzhan

text: shtetl

text: USSR

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sovetish heymland


title: Schorr, Yehoshu‘a Heshel

abstract: (1814–1895), Hebrew poet, editor, and author. Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr (also known by the acronym Yahash) was born in Brody, Galicia to a wealthy family. As a young boy, he was introduced to Haskalah literature and, in 1828, he visited Naḥman Krochmal. Schorr was influenced by the writings of Yitsḥak Erter, who lived in Brody and with whom he developed a lasting friendship.

text: Hebrew poet

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: Naḥman Krochmal

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Lwów

text: Prague

text: rabbinic literature

text: Ha-‘Ivri

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

glossary: Haskalah halakhah


title: Szabolcsi, Lajos

abstract: (1889–1943), editor and publisher. Lajos Szabolcsi was the son of journalist and editor Miksa Szabolcsi (1857–1915), the brother of music historian Bence Szabolcsi (1899–1973), and the father of literary historian Miklós Szabolcsi (1921–2000). Lajos completed his studies in Hungarian and French at the Philological Faculty of Pázmány Péter University in Budapest and then studied in Munich and Paris. He received his doctorate in philosophy in 1907 in Budapest. Upon completion of this degree, Szabolcsi started working for the Jewish weekly Egyenlőség, edited by his father. He himself became associate editor in 1911 and full editor in 1915 upon his father’s death, remaining in this position until the paper was banned in 1938. Szabolcsi was already very ill when he was taken into the forced labor service in 1940–1941.

text: Miksa Szabolcsi

text: Budapest

text: Vilmos Vázsonyi

text: Pál Sándor

text: József Kiss

glossary:
Neolog
numerus clausus


title: Blau, Lajos

abstract: (1861–1936), Talmudic scholar, historian, and rector of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. Born in Putnok, Hungary, Lajos (Ludwig) Blau studied at the Pressburg yeshiva and attended the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. After his ordination he joined the seminary’s faculty, and when Vilmos Bacher died in 1913, Blau succeeded him as rector until his own retirement in 1932.

text: Seminary

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Pressburg

text: yeshiva

text: Vilmos Bacher

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle

text: Breslau

text: magic

glossary: yeshiva Talmud


title: Brăila

abstract: Port on the lower Danube, in Walachia (Romania); the town was called Braillago in the fourteenth century and was known as Ibraila while under Turkish rule from 1542 to 1828. The presence of Jewish merchants in Brăila was first documented in the seventeenth century. In 1828, there were 105 Sephardic Jews in the town. A cemetery opened in 1819, and a synagogue was built in 1820. After the town was annexed to Walachia in 1829, Ashkenazic Jews also settled in Brăila and their synagogue was founded in 1836.

text: Walachia

text: Romania

text: Sephardic

text: trade

text: crafts

text: industry

text: banking

text: Zionists

text: heder

text: Lev Pinsker

text: Mihail Sebastian

text: Ury Benador

text: Holocaust

glossary:
heder
Yishuv
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Shimonovitz, David

abstract: (1886–1956), poet and translator, known in Hebrew as David Shim‘oni. Born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, David Shimonovitz moved to Palestine in 1909, where he stayed for about a year, working as a laborer and watchman at various moshavim (communal settlements). There he formed close friendships with the Hebrew writers Aharon David Gordon and Yosef Ḥayim Brenner.

text: Bobruisk

text: Aharon David Gordon

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Hebrew literature

text: Shimen Frug

text: poetry

text: Warsaw

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Stybel


title: Kol’tsov, Mikhail Efimovich

abstract: (1898–1940), journalist. Mikhail Kol’tsov (originally Fridliand) was born into an artisan family in Kiev. In 1915, he started his studies at the Petrograd Psycho-Neurological Institute, and in 1916 wrote articles for the periodical Put’ studenchestva (Students’ Way). Kol’tsov participated in the February and October 1917 revolutions, and as a member of the workers’ militia took part in the arrest of tsarist ministers.

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Cinema

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Tribuna

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


title: Te’omim Family

abstract: Wealthy and prominent family that produced rabbis and community leaders in Bohemia, Poland, and Galicia from the end of the sixteenth century. Mosheh Aharon Te’omim of Prague (d. 1609?) was the first to bear the family name. His descendant, Aharon Te’omim (d. 1690), who wrote Mateh Aharon (1678), a commentary on the Haggadah, and Bigde Aharon (1710), a collection of homilies, was a preacher in Prague and a rabbi in Worms. In 1690 he began serving as rabbi in Kraków, but several months later, while on his way to a meeting of the Council of Four Lands, he was arrested on the orders of a Polish nobleman, and died soon thereafter.

text: Bohemia

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Prague

text: Kraków

text: Lwów

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Brody

text: Buczacz

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: yeshiva

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
responsa
Torah
yeshiva


title: Bercovici, Israil

abstract: (1921–1988), Yiddish poet, playwright, translator, literary historian, and journalist. Israil Bercovici (Yid., Yisroel Berkovitsh) was born in Botoşani to a poor family and had to earn his own living as a teenager. He was self-taught and studied foreign languages on his own, becoming fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Romanian. He also acquired a thorough literary and humanistic cultural foundation independently.

text: Botoşani

text: Romania

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucharest

text: Zionism

text: theater


title: Gellner, František

abstract: (1881–1914?), Czech poet, caricaturist, and journalist. Gellner was born in the town of Mladá Boleslav, southwest of Prague, into the family of a small textile factory owner whose business had just collapsed. As a secondary school student, Gellner began writing poetry, drawing, and translating Goethe and Heine for school magazines. His subsequent studies were erratic: over the next decade he abandoned studies at a technical university in Vienna, a mining academy in Příbram, and art schools in Munich and Dresden. While living in Příbram, Gellner often visited the circle of anarchists in nearby Prague, led by the poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann, and contributed poems and drawings to his magazine Nový kult. After 1905, Gellner lived mainly in Paris; in 1911, he settled down in the Moravian city of Brno, where he joined the newspaper Lidové noviny and edited its Sunday supplement Večery. He became known for his satiric poetry and caricatures.

text: Mladá Boleslav

text: Prague

text: Brno


title: Vas, István

abstract: (1910–1991), poet, translator, essayist, and memoirist. István Vas’s ancestors were small-town rabbis on his father’s side and well-to-do merchants on his mother’s. His father was an eager first-generation assimilationist who had a checkered career as a businessman and entrepreneur. The young Vas was in some ways a typical second-generation rebel, rejecting his parents’ wholehearted adoption of a conventionally bourgeois lifestyle, their unqualified respect for monetary wealth, their “enlightened” Judaism, and gravitated, politically, to the left and artistically toward the avant-garde movements of the late 1920s.

text: assimilationist

text: converted

text: Budapest

text: Imre Kertész


title: Horovits, Ber

abstract: (1895–1942), Yiddish poet, writer, and artist. Ber Horovits was the only son of a Jewish family from the rural village of Majdan, in the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Galicia. He received a traditional Jewish education at home, from private tutors, while at the same time studying at a Ukrainian elementary school. In 1914, he graduated from the Polish gymnasium in Stanisławów (now Ukr., Ivano-Frankivs’k). During World War I, he was recruited into the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and was sent to various areas of the empire. He ultimately arrived in Vienna, where he enrolled as a medical student and was stationed at a military hospital. During his time in the army, he wrote Yiddish poems that reflected his war experiences.

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: Galicia

text: Ivano-Frankivs’k

text: Shmuel Yankev Imber

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Yiddish poetry

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Lwów


title: Sapgir, Genrikh Veniaminovich

abstract: (1928–1999), Russian poet, children’s author, screenwriter, fiction writer, and translator. Not permitted to publish any of his original work for adult audiences in the Soviet Union until 1989, Sapgir was a well-known underground poet during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as one of the most beloved authors for children. During perestroika, Sapgir’s “adult” work finally appeared in the USSR, and he spent his last decade regarded as a patriarch of Russian avant-garde letters.

text: Soviet Union

text: Vitsyebsk

text: Belarus

text: Marc Chagall

text: Moscow


title: Strashun, Shemu’el and Matityahu

abstract: Rabbinic scholars and public figures in nineteenth-century Vilna. Shemu’el Strashun (1793–1872) continued the Lithuanian style of scholarship that had been formulated by the Gaon of Vilna. Shemu’el’s son Matityahu (1817–1885) was a rabbi and a prominent maskil, biblical commentator, bibliographer, historian, and community organizer.

imgDesc: Reading room of Strashun Library, Vilna, 1939. (YIVO)

text: Vilna

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: bet midrash

text: Romm

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: kahal

text: Haskalah

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Max Lilienthal

text: conscription

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Ha-Magid

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Ha-Asif

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Karaite

text: Hasidic

text: Holocaust

text: charity

text: Land of Israel

glossary:
Gaon
maskil
Talmud
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Maimonides
kahal
Haskalah
Torah


title: Lewin Brothers

abstract: Rabbis and political activists. Aron Lewin (1879–1941) was a leader of the Agudas Yisroel movement and a deputy in the Polish parliament. His younger brother Yeḥezkel Lewin (1898–1941) was a Zionist leader and rabbi of the progressive (Reform) community of Lwów. They were sons of Natan Lewin, rabbi in Rohatyn and Rzeszów, and maternal grandsons of the noted scholar Yitsḥak Shmelkes of Lwów.

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Zionist

text: Lwów

text: Rzeszów

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Romania

text: Lithuania

text: Kraków

text: Katowice


title: Rozenfeld, Yona

abstract: (1880–1944), Yiddish prose writer. Born in Tshartorisk (mod. Staryi Chartoriisk), Ukraine, Yona Rozenfeld received a traditional Jewish education that was interrupted when his parents both died of cholera in 1893. Shortly thereafter, under arrangements made by his older brother, 13-year-old Yona began an apprenticeship with a turner in Odessa—an experience vividly depicted in his autobiographical novel Eyner aleyn (All Alone; 1940). Rozenfeld showed his early writings to Y. L. Peretz when the latter visited Odessa in 1902. As a result, Rozenfeld’s first (autobiographical) story, “Dos lernyingl” (The Apprentice), was published in Der fraynd in 1904.

text: Yiddish prose

text: Ukraine

text: Odessa

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Der fraynd

text: Vilna

text: Kiev

text: Russian civil war

text: Yiddish literature


title: Horwitz-Kancewiczowa, Kamila

abstract: (1879–1952), Polish socialist activist, feminist, and psychiatrist. Kamila Horwitz-Kancewiczowa was born in Warsaw to a middle-class Jewish family in which both Polish and Yiddish were spoken. After completing gymnasium in Warsaw, she went abroad in 1898 to study medicine, first in Berlin and then in Zurich, and became active on the Foreign Committee of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).

text: Warsaw

text: Maksymilian Horwitz

text: Poland

text: Soviet Russia

text: communism

text: Moscow


title: Tairov, Aleksandr Iakovlevich

abstract: (1885–1950), theater director, founder of the Kamernyi Theater in Moscow. Aleksandr Tairov (originally Kornblit) was born into a teacher’s family in the town of Romny, Poltava province. He gained his first theatrical experience as a gymnasium student in Kiev, where he played in amateur productions. In 1905, while studying at the Kiev University Law Faculty, Tairov began acting on the professional stage. Accepted into the Saint Petersburg troupe of Vera Komissarzhevskaia in 1906, he transferred to Saint Petersburg University.

imgDesc: “The Moscow State Chamber Theater on Tour around the USSR.” Cover of Zhizn’ iskusstva (Art Life), no. 11, year unknown, featuring portraits of members of the Kamernyi Theater, including its director, Aleksandr Tairov (top row, center). (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Riga

text: Moscow

text: anticosmopolitan campaign


title: Vogler, Elkhonen

abstract: (1907–1969), Yiddish poet and essayist. Elkhonen Vogler (born Rozhanski) was a symbolist poet and a leading member of the interwar Yiddish literary group Yung-Vilne. His three volumes of Yiddish verse, A bletl in vint (A Leaf in the Wind; 1935), Tsvey beriozes afn trakt (Two Birch Trees by the Highway; 1939), and Friling afn trakt (Springtime by the Highway; 1954) are hymns to the Lithuanian and Belorussian countryside.

imgDesc: Letter from Elkhonen Vogler to Yehoshue Grosbart, 1939. From Elkhonen Vogler in Vilna to "Sz. Wielkobroda" (Yehoshue Grosbart) in Warsaw, 3 June 1939. He's been sick but has won the Peretz Prize from the Pen Club, triumphing over his "enemies." (Note: "Wielkobroda" is a joke, a literal Polish translation of the recipient's real name, Grosbart, which means "big beard" in Yiddish.) Yiddish. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Yung-Vilne

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Warsaw

text: Moscow

text: Łódź

text: Tsukunft


title: Schwarzbart, Ignacy

abstract: (1888–1961), Polish Zionist leader. Born in Chrzanów, Ignacy (Yitsḥak) Schwarzbart took a law degree at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, where he was a member of the Zionist student association Przedświt (The Dawn). Following service in the Austrian and Polish armies during and after World War I, he settled in Kraków and opened a law practice.

text: Zionist

text: Kraków

text: Galicia

text: Silesia

text: General Zionists

text: Poland

text: Holocaust


title: Kunfi, Zsigmond

abstract: (1879–1929), Social Democratic politician, publicist, and editor. Zsigmond Kunfi was born in Nagykanizsa, Hungary, the son of a civil servant of Jewish origin, and converted to Calvinism. Kunfi was never interested in religion, but as Zoltán Rónai (his friend and brother-in-law) wrote, he labored under the weight of “an invisible yellow star.” At Kolozsvár (now Cluj, Romania) University, Kunfi earned a doctorate and a degree that enabled him to teach Hungarian and German, which he did at a gymnasium in Temesvár (now Timişoara, Romania) for five years. As a teacher, he contributed to local and Budapest democratic and Social Democratic papers and journals and criticized Hungarian policies in Neue Zeit (published in Stuttgart).

text: Hungary

text: Cluj

text: Romania

text: Timişoara

text: Budapest

text: Oszkár Jászi


title: Gensch Family

abstract: Prominent residents of Tartu (Ger., Dorpat), a town in eastern Estonia. Members of the Gensch family were active in the public and cultural life of the town from the nineteenth century. The father, merchant Barukh Gensch, was involved with local charitable associations, including the Lines Tsedek (Righteous Lodging for the Night) Society.

imgDesc: Bookplate of Iulius (Julius) Gensch. Artist unknown, Estonia, ca. 1930s. From Katalog biblioteki i sobrania Iuliia Gensa (The Julius Gensch Library of Art), Tallinn, 1939. (YIVO)

text: Tartu

text: Estonia


title: Vázsonyi, Vilmos

abstract: (Weiszfeld; 1868–1926), lawyer, member of parliament, minister of justice, and the first professing Jewish cabinet minister in Hungary. Vilmos Vázsonyi’s father, a principal of the local Jewish school in Sümeg, was the son of a rabbi; Vilmos’s maternal grandfather owned a factory. The family moved to Budapest in 1874, where Vázsonyi’s father worked as a schoolteacher. Vázsonyi studied in a Catholic gymnasium and started legal studies in the University of Budapest in 1886.

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Ármin Vámbéry

text: Budapest

text: Russia


title: Arnshteyn, Mark

abstract: (ca. 1879–1943), Yiddish and Polish playwright and theater director. Mark Arnshteyn (Arnsztejn) was born in Warsaw. In the Polish world, he used the pseudonym Andrzej Marek. His extended family included a Yiddish actress, Roze Arnshteyn, and a Polish poet, Franciszka Arnsztajnowa. He was educated in both Jewish and Polish schools and at an early age began publishing literature and criticism in both the Yiddish and Polish press.

imgDesc: “Got's trer,” by Mark Arnshteyn, n.d. Short play by Mark Arnshteyn, “Got's trer: A maysele for gevaksene” (God's Tear: A Tale for Adults), n.d. Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F6.14.4. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Kaminska

text: film industry

text: The Dybbuk

text: assimilation

text: Łódź


title: Berezhany

abstract: A town now in western Ukraine, better known by its traditional Polish name, Brzeżany (also Yid., Berezhan). Brzeżany was originally a village, but it was granted the status of town by the Polish king Sigismund the Old in the sixteenth century. It became part of the Habsburg Empire in 1772.

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: USSR

text: Ukraine

text: youth movements


title: Shapira, Me’ir

abstract: (1887–1933), rabbi, educator, Sejm deputy, and leader of Agudas Yisroel. Me’ir Shapira was born in Shotz, Bucovina (today Suceava, Romania), to a Hasidic family of prominent lineage. By the time he reached adolescence, he had already been granted ordination by prestigious rabbis. Gaining renown as a scholar, Shapira married the daughter of Ya‘akov Breitman, a wealthy businessman from Tarnopol and a Hasid of the rebbe of Czortków, to whom Shapiro transferred his allegiance. At various points in his career, Shapira himself took on some of the mannerisms of a Hasidic rebbe. The young rabbi served congregations in Gliniany (1910–1920) and Sanok (1920–1924). In both communities he distinguished himself by his rhetorical ability and zealousness both in carrying out the duties of the rabbinate and in setting up and supervising traditional educational institutions for the young. His first book was Imre da‘at, on the weekly Torah portions (1910).

imgDesc: Rabbi Me’ir Shapira with a model of the Second Temple at Yeshivat Ḥakhme Lublin, Lublin, ca. 1930s. At the time, the replica was the only model of the Temple in the world and drew international visitors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. (YIVO)

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Bucovina

text: Suceava

text: Romania

text: Tarnopol

text: Galicia

text: Kattowitz

text: Piotrków

text: yeshiva

text: Lublin

text: Poland

glossary: rebbe Torah responsa Talmud yeshiva


title: Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin

abstract: (1855–1920), socialist ideologist, theoretician, and literary critic. Solomon Katz, known later in Romania under the pseudonym Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, was born in Slavianka, Ukraine, and attended elementary school in his native village and secondary school in Ekaterinoslav. In 1872, Dobrogeanu-Gherea left for Kharkov and studied at the faculty of science. He joined student revolutionary (Narodnik) circles, traveling to villages to spread propaganda among the peasants. Constantly followed by the police, he crossed the border into Romania in March 1875. One month later, he left for Switzerland, where numerous Russian revolutionaries had emigrated, and then in May came to Iaşi, where he was involved with socialist Romanian student and intellectual groups.

text: Romania

text: Ukraine

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Iaşi

text: Bucharest

text: Russia

text: Bund


title: Tribuna

abstract: Russian-language journal produced by the central board of OZET (Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land) between 1927 and 1937 in Moscow. Semen Dimanshtein, its editor in chief (1927–1934, 1936–1937), was chairman of OZET. Tribuna was published at times monthly (1927–1928, 1933–1935), biweekly (1928–1929, 1932–1933, 1936–1937), and at one point every 10 days (1930–1932). Circulation numbers averaged 13,900.

text: Moscow

text: Semen Dimanshtein

text: Soviet Union

text: shtetl


title: Porumbacu, Veronica

abstract: (pseudonym of Veronica Schwefelberg; 1921–1977), poet, prose writer, and translator. Veronica Porumbacu was the daughter of Arnold Schwefelberg, a renowned Jewish community leader. She was born in Bucharest and died as a victim of the earthquake that ravaged the city on 4 March 1977. She took the name Porumbacu from the name of the Transylvanian village where the nurse who raised her was born.

text: Arnold Schwefelberg

text: Bucharest

text: poetry

text: Romania


title: Mieses, Yehudah Leib

abstract: (1798–1831), Galician maskil. Yehudah Leib Mieses was born in Lemberg (Lwów) to a wealthy family of rabbinical lineage; he received a broad Jewish and secular education. From his early years, Mieses was acknowledged as a forceful champion of Haskalah and an opponent of Hasidism. He supported yeshiva students who wished to receive a university education, supplying them with books from his large personal library and providing generous financial assistance. With his help, many young men were able to attend universities in Germany and Austria.

text: Lemberg

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidism

text: yeshiva

text: Galicia

text: Yitsḥak Erter

text: angels

text: amulets

text: ba‘ale shem

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Kerem ḥemed

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Ya‘akov Shemu’el Bick

glossary: maskil Haskalah yeshiva Maimonides


title: About this Article (Dance)

abstract: This entry comprises three articles on East European Jewish dance traditions. An Overview surveys historical attitudes toward dance, the social and religious contexts in which dancing took place, and notes some of the basic dance forms. Traditional Dance explores folk dance genres. Theatrical Dance focuses on the choreographic styles and forms of the Yiddish theater. For additional discussion, see Hasidism: Dance.

imgDesc: Judith Berg and Felix Fibich, in four different poses, New York (?), ca. 1950s. The couple was among the handful of professional choreographers who worked in the Yiddish theater. (YIVO)

text: theater

text: Hasidism: Dance


title: Hârlău

abstract: Town in northeastern Moldavia, located within 50 kilometers of Botoşani and 73 kilometers of Iaşi. A Jewish presence in Hârlău apparently existed during the reign of Stephen the Great (1475–1504), as the prince hired the Jewish doctor Şmil of Hârlău to work at his court in Suceava. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jewish craftsmen and merchants, encouraged by Moldavian rulers, began to arrive from Poland, some settling in Hârlău.

text: Moldavia

text: Botoşani

text: Iaşi

text: Suceava

text: Poland

text: trade

text: craftsmanship

text: ionist associations

text: Bessarabia

text: Renaşterea noastră

text: Horia Carp

text: Holocaust

text: Romania


title: Löw, Leopold

abstract: (1811–1875), rabbi, historian, and Judaic scholar. Leopold (Lipót) Löw was the outstanding Reform rabbi of nineteenth-century Hungary. One of the first rabbis in Hungary to combine rigorous traditional training with a university education, he advocated religious, educational, and communal reforms in his manifold roles as preacher, polemicist, editor, scholar, and historian. He played an important part in the fight for Jewish emancipation and the Magyarization of Hungarian Jewry.

text: Hungary

text: Moravian

text: Boskowitz

text: Maharal

text: Prague

text: Kolín

text: Eisenstadt

text: Haskalah

text: Löw Schwab

text: Arad

text: Aharon Chorin

text: religious reform

text: Hungary

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Tarnopol

text: Pest

text: Pressburg

text: assimilation

text: Pápa

text: Brno

text: Lemberg

text: Sabbath

text: Orthodox

text: Jewish Congress

text: Immánuel

text: Ben Chananja


title: Steinberg, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1887–1947), Yiddish and Hebrew poet, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and translator. Ya‘akov Steinberg left his parents’ home in Belaya Tserkov’, Ukraine, for Odessa at the age of 14. He soon moved to Warsaw, the center of Hebrew belle lettres at the time, where he lived in poverty. His first poem, “Alon ha-dema‘ot” (The Wailing Oak; 1901), marked the beginning of a prolific literary career that was noted by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik (in an article titled “Shiratenu ha-tse‘irah” [Our Young Poetry]) when Steinberg was just 20 years old. From 1903 to 1909, Steinberg widened his scope and wrote prose, publishing three stories in Ha-Tsofeh, followed by scores of poems and stories in a variety of Hebrew periodicals. In 1910, Steinberg published two small lyrical books of poetry and satire: Sefer ha-satirot (The Book of Satires; 1910) and Sefer ha-bedidut (The Book of Loneliness; 1910).

text: Ukraine

text: Odessa

text: Warsaw

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Der fraynd

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ya‘akov Fichman

text: Devorah Baron

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Asch

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Avrom Reyzen


title: Barash, Asher

abstract: (1889–1952), Hebrew writer and editor. Born in Lopatyn, near Brody in Galicia, Asher Barash was the son of Naftali Herts Barash, a grain merchant who was descended from a rabbinical family. Barash received both a traditional Jewish education at heder and bet midrash and a secular education at a local Polish government school. He was proficient in languages and by adolescence was familiar with Hebrew maskilic literature as well as Polish and German texts. He was also attracted to the Zionist movement.

imgDesc: Hebrew writer and editor Asher Barash, Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukr.), 1908. Photograph by W. Russ. (Asher Barash Gnazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: heder

text: bet midrash

text: Lwów

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Warsaw

text: David Frishman

text: Poland

text: Ya‘akov Rabinowitz

text: Land of Israel

glossary: heder Diaspora


title: Rabinovitz, Aleksander Ziskind

abstract: (1854–1945), Hebrew writer. Aleksander Ziskind Rabinovitz (known as Azar) was born in Liady, in the Mogilev district, to a poor family. Although he received a comprehensive Talmudic education, as an adolescent he grew acquainted with Hebrew maskilic literature. At the same time, he took it upon himself to study the (Jewish) Bible and, later on, Russian. He married at age 18 and went to live at his father-in-law’s home in nearby Romnova. Three years later, he became a peddler, as his father had done before him, but was not successful in that venture. He then traversed Lithuania, eking out a living from tutoring until eventually finding a permanent teaching position in the Smolensk regional town of Viazma. He published his first batch of articles in the Jewish Russian press, nurturing the hope that eventually he would become a Russian journalist.

text: Lithuania

text: Moscow

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Haskalah

text: Zionism

text: Ha-Melits

text: Tsevi (Grigorii) Gershuni

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

glossary: Haskalah melamed agadah


title: Karmel, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew journal, published between 1860 and 1880. As Russia’s first Hebrew-language periodical, Ha-Karmel (Mount Carmel) was issued weekly in Vilna between 1860 and 1871, and monthly between 1871 and 1880. Supplements in Russian and German were included from time to time. Its editor was Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn.

imgDesc: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn, Vilna, ca. 1890s. Fuenn’s signature (right) has been reproduced on this mass-produced portrait, which was intended for sale and distribution to his admirers. (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn

text: Avraham Dov Lebensohn

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Haskalah

text: religious reform

text: proverbs

text: Yitsḥak Kaminer

text: Avraham Uri Kovner

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

glossary: Mishnah Talmud Haskalah


title: Múlt és Jövő

abstract: (Past and Future), literary, artistic, social, and critical periodical, published in Hungary between 1911 and 1944 and renewed in 1988. Founded by József Patai, Múlt és Jövő first appeared in 1911 as a stylish almanac, becoming a monthly from 1912 until March 1919, when the Hungarian Soviet Republic shut it down. In the first years of the counterrevolutionary regime, between 1919 and 1923, it was published as a political weekly. Beginning in October 1921, it reverted to monthly publication, continuing until March 1944. When Patai immigrated to Palestine in 1939, Ernő Molnár—his brother-in-law and the editor of the periodical’s youth supplement, Remény (Hope)—became editor in chief, though the masthead continued to list Patai’s name in that position. Molnár died in the Holocaust.

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

text: Hungary

text: József Patai

text: Holocaust

text: Cluj

text: Bratislava

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Zionist

text: József Patai

text: Ernő Szép

text: Károly Pap


title: Veynger, Mordkhe

abstract: (1890–1929), Yiddish linguist and dialectologist; creator of the first atlas of Yiddish-speaking regions. Born in Poltava, Ukraine, Mordkhe Veynger moved as a boy to Warsaw, where he went on to study Germanic philology in the faculty of philology at Warsaw University. In 1912 and 1913 he published studies on Yiddish syntax and on the role of Hebrew sounds in Yiddish, and also proposed spelling reforms for Yiddish. His work was included in Shmuel Niger’s Vilna Pinkes (Record Book) of 1913.

text: Ukraine

text: Warsaw

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Minsk

text: Kharkov

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: Soviet Union

text: Leyzer Vilenkin


title: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

abstract: One of several Soviet anti-fascist groups formed after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. On 24 August 1941, two dozen Jewish cultural figures, led by the Yiddish actor and theater director Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1948), issued an international radio appeal to Jews around the world to unite in the struggle against Nazi Germany. To allow Jews to appeal to their fellow Jews was an extraordinary step for the Kremlin. But Stalin understood the need for the regime to repair relations with the Western powers in the face of the German onslaught.

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: USSR

text: theater

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Perets Markish

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Vasilii Grossman

text: Lina Shtern

text: Moscow

text: Iakob Kreizer

text: Berdichev

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Babi Yar

text: Kiev

text: Black Book

text: Holocaust

text: Crimea

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Solomon Lozovskii

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Solomon Lozovskii

text: Lina Shtern

text: Moscow