title: Sexuality

abstract: As an aspect of Jewish life, sexuality is considered to be a male religious obligation (concerning ‘onah [sexual relations], procreation, and sexual satisfaction of one’s wife) and source of human intimacy and pleasure; as a metaphor it has even been applied to fulfillment of divine–human relations in mystical thought. In the modern era, the Jewish legal system and society began to compete with the free professions and the state to define terms of sexual legitimacy and deviance.

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

text: Marriage

text: servants

text: Me’ir ben Gedalyah of Lublin

text: Prague

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Sabbatians

text: Frankists

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Hasidim

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Yekhezkl Kotik

text: Misnagdim

text: magic

text: rabbinic literature

text: ba‘ale shem

text: amulets

text: demons

text: Abraham Hirszowicz

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg

text: gender

text: yeshiva

text: Yiddish literature

text: S. Y. Abramovitsh

text: Warsaw

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Goratsii (Horace) Gintsburg

text: Poland

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Naḥmanides
halakhah
mikveh
Gaon
Kabbalah
Torah
tsadik
rebbe
Misnagdim
Zohar
maskil
Haskalah
yeshiva


title: Fefer, Itsik

abstract: (1900–1952), Yiddish poet. Born in Shpola, Ukraine, Itsik Fefer was 12 years old when he began to work at a printing shop. In 1917 he joined the Bund and became a trade union activist. A Communist from 1919, he served in the Red Army. He began writing poems in 1918, and in 1922 joined Vidervuks (New Growth) in Kiev, a group of young Yiddish literati whose mentor was Dovid Hofshteyn. That same year, the appearance of Fefer’s small collection Shpener (Splinters) established him as a rising literary star. His poetry amalgamated the Kultur-lige poets’ revolutionary romanticism with the propagandist objectives of the workers’ movement.

imgDesc: Proste trit (Simple Footsteps), by Itsik Fefer (Kiev, 1925). (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: Bund

text: Kiev

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Kultur-lige

text: shtetl

text: Birobidzhan

text: Yiddish literature

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: poetry

text: Isaak Levitan

text: Iakov Sverdlov

text: Lazar Kaganovich

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Der Nister


title: Kletskin, Boris Arkadevich

abstract: (1875–1937), Yiddish publisher. Born in Horodishche (now in Belarus), Boris Kletskin and his family moved to Vilna, the city with which his name would thereafter be associated. An only child of wealthy parents, he received a traditional religious education and was also tutored in secular subjects.

imgDesc: Insignia of Boris Kletskin’s publishing house in Vilna. From Briv fun Ester-Rokhl Kaminski (Letters from Ester-Rokhl Kaminska; Vilna, 1927). (YIVO)

text: publisher

text: Belarus

text: Vilna

text: Bund

text: Di folks-tsaytung

text: Yiddish literature

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Di yudishe velt

text: A. Vayter

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Zelig Kalmanovitsh

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Sholem Asch

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Perets Hirshbeyn

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Oyzer Varshavski

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Zalmen Reyzen

text: YIVO

text: Filologishe shriftn

text: Alter-Sholem Kacyzne


title: Wiener, Meir

abstract: (1893–1941), Yiddish and German writer, critic, and literary scholar. Born into a middle-class family in Kraków, Meir Wiener (also known as Meyer Viner) grew up speaking Polish, Yiddish, and German. He attended a German gymnasium and was tutored at home in Judaism and Hebrew culture by Tsevi ha-Kohen Rapoport. Before the outbreak of World War I, the family moved to Vienna. Discharged from military service on health grounds, Wiener went to Basel and Zurich to study philosophy in 1915 but did not complete his degree. He returned to Vienna in 1919, and subsequently traveled intermittently between his family in Vienna and his editorial job in Berlin until 1925, when he joined the Communist Party of Austria and moved to Paris.

text: Kraków

text: Soviet Union

text: Di royte velt

text: Kharkov

text: Kiev

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Moscow

text: Hebrew poetry

text: mysticism

text: Prague

text: Zionism

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: communism

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Yiddish literary scholarship

text: Haskalah

text: Yisroel Aksenfeld

text: Shloyme Ettinger

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: humor

text: Yiddish literature

glossary: Kabbalah Haskalah


title: Grosser, Bronisław

abstract: (1883–1912), Bundist, writer, and theorist on Jewish nationalism. Bronisław Grosser was born in Miechów, Congress Poland, to a middle-class Jewish family. Raised in a wholly Polish cultural milieu, he regarded himself as fully Polish during his childhood. Even though Grosser’s parents had not converted, they had severed their ties to the Jewish community to such an extent that Grosser did not know about his Jewish origins until the second decade of his life. During his years at a gymnasium in Warsaw, Grosser first began to wrestle with his Jewish background, gradually moving away from the assimilationist spirit in which he was raised. At 13, he studied Hebrew with his uncle.

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

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: assimilationist

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Lemberg

text: Maksymilian Horwitz

text: Saint Petersburg


title: Fareynikte

abstract: Jewish socialist party, formed in Russia in May 1917 after the February Revolution. The Fareynikte Yidishe Sotsyalistishe Arbeter Partey (United Jewish Socialist Workers Party; the party’s complete name) resulted from the amalgamation of two Jewish socialist parties that had emerged during the Revolution of 1905. The parties had come into being when a number of Po‘ale Tsiyon (Zionist socialist) groups distanced themselves from the authority of the Zionist Organization and adopted a separatist program in response to the Kishinev pogroms of April 1903 and the political furor over the Uganda Plan.

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

text: Russia

text: February Revolution

text: Revolution of 1905

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Zionist Organization

text: Kishinev

text: pogroms

text: Kiev

text: Ukraine

text: Soviet regime

text: Bund

text: Komfarband


title: Zel’dovich, Iakov Borisovich

abstract: (1914–1987), theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, physical chemist, and member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1958. Born in Minsk, Zel’dovich was raised in an educated family: his father was a lawyer and his mother a translator and member of the Writers Union. In May 1931 Zel’dovich was hired as a laboratory assistant at the Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences; he would maintain his ties with this institution for the rest of his life.

text: USSR

text: Minsk

text: Moscow


title: Berger, Lili

abstract: (1916–1996), Yiddish novelist and critic; resistance fighter. Lili Berger (née List; “Lili Berger” is a pseudonym) was born in Malkin, in the Białystok region of Poland. Brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family, she attended Hebrew school for three years and also received a secular education at the Polish Jewish secondary school in Warsaw. In 1933, Berger moved to Brussels and studied pedagogy. Three years later she joined the growing number of Polish Jewish refugees in Paris and soon married Louis Gronowski, a leading figure in the Jewish section of the Communist Party.

text: Białystok

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Janusz Korczak

text: Khaye Malke Lifshits


title: About this Article (Literary Journals)

abstract: Emphasizing the role of literary journals in the development of Jewish literature in Eastern Europe, this entry includes two articles, on Hebrew and Yiddish literary journals respectively. For further discussion, see Hebrew Literature; Yiddish Literature; and Literary Criticism and Scholarship.

imgDesc: From Ringen (Rings), January 1921. Illustration by Henryk Berlewi. (YIVO)

text: Hebrew Literature

text: Yiddish Literature

text: Literary Criticism and Scholarship


title: Leszno

abstract: Town in the Wielkopolska province of Poland. Established by the Leszczyński family, Leszno (known as Lissa in Yiddish and German) granted its population civic rights in 1547. Jews were living in Leszno as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century; records indicate that they paid a coronation tax in 1507. Many Protestants, including Czech Brethren, settled there as well.

text: Poland

text: Silesia

text: Russia

text: guilds

text: trade

text: Lithuania

text: Ukraine

text: Russia

text: Breslau

text: Akiva Eger

text: Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum

text: Warsaw

text: labor camp


title: Leningradskii Evreiskii Al’manakh

abstract: Russian-language Jewish samizdat journal published in Leningrad between 1982 and 1989. Leningradskii evreiskii al’manakh (Leningrad Jewish Almanac) was the organ of Leningrad refuseniks (persons denied the right to emigrate to Israel). Among the founding editors were Eduard Erlikh, Iakov Gorodetskii, Iurii Kolker, and Grigorii Vasserman. Initially its creators viewed the journal as the organ of Leningradskoe Obshchestvo po Izucheniiu Evreiskoi Kul’tury (Leningrad Society for the Study of Jewish Culture), which they had tried, unsuccessfully, to register with the authorities in 1982. Its editors changed as some were allowed to emigrate, and the first group was replaced by Mikhail Beizer, Semen Frumkin, and Rimma Zapesotskaia.

text: samizdat

text: refuseniks

text: USSR

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: antisemitism

text: Holocaust


title: Ginzburg, Evgeniia Semenovna

abstract: (1904–1977), activist, teacher, journalist, and memoir writer. An ardent member of the Communist Party who was arrested during the purges of the 1930s and sentenced to 18 years in the gulag, Evgeniia Ginzburg is renowned for her compelling articulation of that ordeal in her two-volume memoir Krutoi marshrut. Translated as Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, her account ranks with and complements Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s fiction in its suspenseful, introspective description of one woman’s “journey” through the Stalinist gulag.

text: Communist Party

text: Moscow

text: samizdat


title: Filderman, Wilhelm

abstract: (1882–1963), lawyer and communal leader. Wilhelm Filderman is considered by many to have been Romanian Jewry’s foremost leader between 1919 and 1947, as he headed virtually every major non-Zionist Romanian Jewish organization. After World War I, he represented the Union of Native-Born Jews at the Paris Peace Conference in the campaign for Romanian Jewry’s civil rights, leaving his mark on the final draft of the Romanian Minorities Treaty. From 1923 until 1947 he served as chair of the Union of Romanian Jews and the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, which included communities in the territories that had been added to Romania in the peace settlement. He also represented the union in the Romanian parliament.

text: Romania

text: Zionist

text: pogroms

text: Bessarabian

text: Bucovinian

text: Transnistria

text: Judenrat

text: Poland


title: About this Article (Children’s Literature)

abstract: This entry includes three articles on children’s literature in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish, respectively.

imgDesc: Children's writer and editor Janina Mortkowicz and her daughter Hanna, a poet and also a writer for children, Warsaw, 1925. (YIVO)


title: Charity

abstract: Providing assistance to the weak and needy is a religious and social tradition in the Jewish community. The attitude toward giving is rooted in the recognition that an impoverished person is an integral part of the local community and as such is bound by its norms; yet, all members of the community are entitled to a dignified existence. Poverty does not translate into exclusion from society and therefore does not grant the poor any special privileges with respect to conduct and acceptance of the community’s authority. For this reason, even those who receive assistance are not exempt from participating in communal efforts. Jewish halakhic principles hold that even a person maintained by charity is obligated to give charity.

imgDesc: Woman with pushkes (charity boxes) representing different communal organizations, at a cemetery, Lithuania, ca. 1935. (YIVO)

text: Tsevi Hirsh Koidanover

text: Land of Israel

text: Poznań

text: money

text: kahal

text: Passover

text: beggars

text: Simon Dubnow

text: pogroms

text: Land of Israel

text: Kraków

text: Vilna

text: servants

text: circumcision

text: Sabbath

text: Purim

glossary: Torah kahal

subconcepts: Sources of Funding, Collection, and Distribution


title: Kohen Family

abstract: Printers and publishers active in Prague. In the early sixteenth century, Prague became the leading center of Hebrew printing in Central and Eastern Europe, the first prayer book being produced there in 1512. From 1514 onward, the leading figure in the local group of printers was Gershom (also Gerson or Hermann) ben Shelomoh ha-Kohen (d. 1544). Between 1514 and 1522, this group issued four prayer books and an elaborate Pentateuch with a commentary by Rashi (1518; reprinted in 1530). Kohen is listed first in all the colophons, and his symbol—a pair of hands raised in blessing—appears on the opening page of the Pentateuch (1518) and the Maḥzor (1522). After 1522, the group disbanded. In 1526 Kohen, together with his brother Gronem, printed the earliest Passover Haggadah, containing more than 60 lavish woodcut illustrations (mostly by Ḥayim Shaḥor) in the style of Holbein and Dürer. This work became the preeminent model for subsequent Haggadahs and is widely regarded as a masterpiece.

text: Prague

text: printing

text: Passover

text: Helicz brothers

text: Kraków

text: Poland

text: shtadlan

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Yehudah Leib (Löw) ben Betsal’el

text: David Gans

text: Bak

glossary:
Rashi
Arba‘ah turim


title: Shraybman, Yekhiel

abstract: (1913–2005), Yiddish writer. Born in the Bessarabian town of Vad-Rashkev, Yekhiel Shraybman was educated in a heder, at a Romanian primary school, by private teachers, and in the Czernowitz Hebrew Teachers Seminary. In the 1930s he lived in Bucharest, working as a prompter at a Yiddish theater. Affiliated with illegal socialist circles, he took part in Komsomol underground work. Shraybman was also fascinated by Soviet Yiddish cultural life: as he recalled in 1990, even the reformed Soviet spelling “stirred up the flight of my fancy.”

text: heder

text: Czernowitz

text: Bucharest

text: Warsaw

text: Bessarabia

text: Soviet Union

text: Moldavia

text: Kishinev

text: Moscow

text: Holocaust

text: prose

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Moyshe Altman


title: Kaufmann, Izidor

abstract: (1853–1921), painter. Izidor Kaufmann was born in Arad (today in Romania), a frontier fortress of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, where his father served as captain of a Hungarian regiment. While working as a bank clerk in 1874, Kaufmann created his first painting—a head of Moses—and began to study art, first at the Budapest State School of Drawing and from 1875 at the Vienna Academy of Visual Arts. Among his early genre scenes, which from 1886 he successfully exhibited in Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, were scenes of Jewish life. Die Schachspieler (Chess Players), Das Examen oder Der Besuch des Rabbi (The Exam, or The Rabbi’s Visit), Isaak the Junk Dealer, Kaufmännischer Untericht (Commercial Instruction), and Geschäftsgeheimnis (Business Secret)—created between 1886 and 1893—depict traditional Jews in a humorous and sympathetic light.

imgDesc: Friday Evening. Izidor Kaufmann, 1897–1898. Oil on canvas. The Jewish Museum, New York. (Jewish Museum/Art Resource, NY)

text: Arad

text: Romania

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Moravia

text: Slovakia

text: Galicia

text: Ukraine

text: Poland


title: Friesenhausen, David

abstract: (1756–1828), Hungarian maskil and rabbi. Born in a small community in southern Germany, David Friesenhausen studied with Yosef Steinhardt in Fürth. Mosheh Sofer, the rabbi of Pressburg, knew Friesenhausen in his youth and would later testify to his reputation as one of the outstanding students in the yeshiva. Until the age of 30, Friesenhausen devoted himself exclusively to Torah study, but then—seized by an intellectual restlessness—he immersed himself in mathematics and astronomy.

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Haskalah

text: Hungary

text: Galicia

text: Bohemian lands

text: rabbinate

text: Sátoraljaújhely

text: Poland

text: Hasidism

text: seminary

text: Haskalah

text: Transylvania

glossary:
maskil
yeshiva
Torah
Haskalah
ethical will
Talmud
rebbe
Kabbalah


title: Lozovskii, Solomon Abramovich

abstract: (1878–1952), political figure and trade unionist. Born in Ekaterinoslav province, the son of a melamed, Solomon Lozovskii (born with the surname Dridzo) joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party in 1901 and in 1905 affiliated with the Bolsheviks. In 1908 he escaped from Siberia, where he had been exiled, and moved to France, where he was active in the Socialist Party. He returned to Russia in June 1917. From 1921 to 1937 he served as secretary-general of the Profintern, the Communist-controlled trade union international, which he had helped found. Simultaneously, Lozovskii was a presidium member of the Comintern (the Communist International) and a delegate at six of its congresses.

text: Russia

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Black Book


title: Sofer, Mosheh

abstract: (Schreiber; 1762–1839), rabbi and preeminent halakhic authority. Mosheh Sofer, who came to be known as Ḥatam Sofer, was born into a modest family in Frankfurt am Main. Early on, the gifted boy was taken under the wing of Pinḥas Horowitz (1730–1805), the rabbi of the community, head of its prestigious yeshiva, and one of the outstanding Talmudic scholars of his generation. He also studied several years at the yeshiva of Tevele Scheuer of Mainz. Even more significantly, Sofer became deeply attached to Natan Adler (1741–1800), a charismatic figure who gathered about him a pious circle of devoted followers. The unusual esoteric practices of this group drew the ire of the community, and Adler was threatened with a ban in 1779. It is ironic and revealing that the future conservative ideologue spent his formative years as a disciple of such an unconventional master.

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

text: yeshiva

text: Boskovice

text: Moravia

text: Haskalah

text: Prostějov

text: Sabbatianism

text: Haskalah

text: religious reform

text: rabbinic literature

text: rabbinate

text: Burgenland

text: Hungary

text: Bratislava

text: yeshiva of Volozhin

text: Lithuania

text: Passover

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: circumcision

text: assimilation

text: Land of Israel

text: agriculture

text: Akiva Eger

text: Hungary

text: Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman

text: Vilna

glossary:
yeshiva
maskil
Haskalah
Torah
pilpul
Talmud
halakhah
Rashi
Naḥmanides
responsa
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Diaspora
kehilah
Talmud Torah
Gaon


title: Kalisz

abstract: Town in Wielkopolska province, Poland. Kalisz (Yid., Kulish) is considered to be the oldest town in Poland. Jews first settled there as early as the twelfth century, where they minted coins for the prince. In 1264, Prince Bolesław the Pious issued a privilege or charter for Great Poland’s Jews—the first document of its kind in the Polish lands—that became the basis for many subsequent royal privileges. In 1287, a well-organized Jewish community existed with a cemetery.

imgDesc: View of a canal on Babbina Street, Kalisz, Poland. Postcard published by Ruch, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Poland

text: crafts

text: Silesian

text: yeshiva

text: Zionist groups

text: Bund

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: theater

text: YIVO

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Warsaw

text: Lublin

text: Kielce

text: Łódź

glossary:
yeshiva
Council of Four Lands


title: Glasner, Mosheh Shemu’el

abstract: (1856–1924), rabbi and a founder of religious Zionism in Hungary. A great-grandson of Mosheh Sofer (author of the Ḥatam Sofer), Mosheh Shemu’el Glasner was the son of Avraham Glasner, who served as the rabbi of Klausenburg (Hun., Kolozsvár; Rom., Cluj) between 1863 and 1877. Following his father’s death, Glasner was chosen to succeed him at the age of 21.

text: Zionism

text: Hungary

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Cluj

text: Orthodox

text: Misnagdim

text: Transylvania

glossary: Neolog halakhah pilpul Torah Misnagdim


title: Shternberg, Yankev

abstract: (1890–1973), Yiddish poet, critic, and theatrical director. Born in Lipkan, Bessarabia, Yankev Shternberg attended heder and completed five classes in the Russian secondary school in Kamenets Podolski. From 1913 on, he lived in Bucharest, moving to Kishinev when Bessarabia became a Soviet territory in 1940. He was in Tashkent during part of World War II and in Moscow beginning in 1943. In 1949, he was sentenced, together with other Yiddish writers of Bessarabia, to 10 years in Stalinist camps “for Trotskyite and Zionist activity.” After his release in 1954, Shternberg lived in Moscow until his death.

imgDesc: Postcard from Yankev Shternberg to J. Gruder, ca. 1930. From Yankev Shternberg in Riga to J. Gruder in Cernăuţi, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukr.), n.d. (ca. 1930). The issue of whether he will stay in Riga is complicated and bound up with all sorts of strategic interests and communal factionalism, but nonetheless he has been urged to stay, only without his troupe. Shternberg will decide about this soon but has not had any news about his theatrical troupe from his brother. Yiddish. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Yiddish poet

text: Bessarabia

text: heder

text: Kamenets Podolski

text: Bucharest

text: Kishinev

text: Moscow

text: Vilna

text: Folks-shtime

text: Poland

text: Romania

text: Cernăuți

text: Warsaw

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Itsik Manger

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Moyshe Altman

text: Goldfadn

text: Yiddish theater

text: Vilner Trupe

text: Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Dymov

text: Solomon Mikhoels

text: State Yiddish Theater

text: Soviet Union

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann


title: Globus

abstract: Yiddish literary monthly journal, published between July 1932 and April 1934. Globus was published in Warsaw by Arn Zeitlin, the chair of the Warsaw Yiddish PEN club. In this latter capacity (which he had held since 1930), Zeitlin aspired to present Yiddish literature as a modern form possessing an ancient and respectable past, while at the same time setting a high literary standard as a prerequisite for writers wishing to belong to the Yiddish PEN club.

imgDesc: Title page of the first issue of Globus, July 1932, Warsaw. (YIVO)

text: Warsaw

text: Arn Zeitlin

text: Yiddish literature

text: Poland

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Esterke

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Itsik Manger

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Yiddish literature

text: Bund

text: Literarishe tribune

text: Yoshue Rapoport

text: Khayim Shloyme Kazdan


title: Dor, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew weekly. Ha-Dor (The Generation) was published beginning in 1901 by the Aḥi’asaf publishing house in Warsaw to address the growing needs of its Hebrew readership. It was also offered as an alternative to the monthly Ha-Shiloaḥ (also published by Aḥi’asaf), which at that time focused exclusively on Jewish matters in the spirit of its founder, Ahad Ha-Am.

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: David Frishman

text: Zionism

text: Kraków

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Sholem Asch


title: Shofman, Gershom

abstract: (1880–1972), Hebrew writer. Born in Orsha (now in Belarus), Gershom Shofman was educated at heder and in several yeshivas. He also studied the classics of Russian and Hebrew literature and was especially captivated by the works of Mendele Moykher-Sforim. Orphaned during his childhood, Shofman grew up in poverty. The fearful circumstances of his youth left their marks in his stories.

imgDesc: Gershom Shofman, Lwów, ca. 1904. Photograph by Rivoli. (Asher Barash Gnazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

text: Belarus

text: heder

text: yeshivas

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Tushiyah

text: Warsaw

text: Gomel

text: Lwów

text: Stybel


title: Otsar ha-Sifrut

abstract: Hebrew publication, issued between 1887 and 1896 and again in 1902. Otsar ha-sifrut (Treasury of Literature), known also as Bet otsar ha-sifrut, appeared in five volumes between 1887 and 1896 and then was intended as a monthly paper; however, only a single issue was published in 1902. The first volume was published in Jarosław and was edited by Shalti’el Yitsḥak Graber, assisted by the author Re’uven Asher Braudes; later volumes were published in Kharkov.

text: Re’uven Asher Braudes

text: Kharkov

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Ha-Asif

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: assimilation

text: Orthodox Jewry

text: Shim‘on Bernfeld

text: Shelomoh Mandelkern

text: Avraham Ya‘akov Paperna

text: Eli‘ezer Zweifel

text: Shemu’el Leib Zitron

text: El‘azar Schulman

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Avraham Ber Gottlober

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Yehudah Leib Levin

text: Zionist


title: Fraynd, Der

abstract: The first Yiddish daily published in the Russian Empire. Der fraynd (The Friend), issued between 1903 and 1912, was a harbinger of the new, secular Jewish culture that would sweep Jewish communities in the final days of the tsarist empire. Founded by Sha’ul Ginsburg (1866–1940) and run out of the capital city of Saint Petersburg until its move to Warsaw in the fall of 1909, Der fraynd helped reshape and redefine both popular and elite culture for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Yiddish-speaking (and reading) Jews in the Russian Empire and beyond.

imgDesc: Masthead of Der fraynd, St. Petersburg, January 1903. (YIVO)

text: Russian Empire

text: Sha’ul Ginsburg

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: David Frishman

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sholem Asch

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Zionism

text: Revolution of 1905

text: cartoons

text: Białystok

text: Haynt

text: Der moment


title: Kuzmir-Modzits Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Line of rabbinic leaders that emphasized the centrality of music and melody. Its founder, Yeḥezkel ben Tsevi Hirsh Taub (1772–1856), was born in Płońsk. He was a disciple of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the Seer of Lublin), and Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe (Przysucha), and became a rebbe in Kuzmir (Kazimierz) in 1827. Taub grew famous for his musical talents and composed many Hasidic melodies. His teachings are collected in Neḥmad mi-zahav (1909).

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: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: Warsaw

glossary: rebbe tsadik


title: Gordon, Shmuel

abstract: (1909–1998), Yiddish writer. Born in Kovno (mod. Kaunas), Shmuel Gordon spent his youth in Jewish orphanages in Ukraine. In 1929, as a student in the Yiddish Department at the Second Moscow State University, he was castigated in the Soviet press for sending poems to the Warsaw “bourgeois nationalistic publication” Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages). This incident signaled the total alienation of Soviet Yiddish literary figures from their Western colleagues. Nevertheless, in 1931 Gordon graduated from the university and had a successful, albeit unglamorous, career as a Yiddish journalist and prose writer.

text: Kaunas

text: Ukraine

text: Warsaw

text: Literarishe bleter

text: Birobidzhan

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Eynikayt

text: Moscow

text: Sovetish heymland

text: shtetl

text: Dovid Bergelson


title: Bagritskii, Eduard Georgievich

abstract: (1885–1934), Russian poet and translator. Bagritskii, whose nom-de-plume was derived from the Russian for crimson, was born Eduard Godelevich Dziubin, to an Odessan family in which Judaic traditions were respected, but the lifestyle was that of secularized petit-bourgeoisie. He began publishing in 1913, contributing to literary publications in Odessa between 1915 and 1917. After the February 1917 Revolution, Bagritskii served briefly in law enforcement within the Provisional Government and joined the Red Army in 1919. In 1920 he married Lidiia Suok and had one son, the poet Vsevolod Bagritskii (1922–1942). In 1925 he moved to Moscow, and by the time of his death in 1934 was widely admired. The publication of his collection Iugo-Zapad (South-West; 1928) was followed by, among other books, Duma pro Opanasa (The Lay of Opanas), Izbrannye stikhi (Selected Poems), Pobediteli (Victors), Posledniaia noch’ (The Last Night), all published in 1932, and other works. In his daily life, Bagritskii never shed the skin of an Odessan Jew from Market Street. He retained a strong bond with Jewish culture, splendidly translating the Yiddish poetry of Itsik Fefer and Perets Markish. At the time of his death, he was hailed second only to Vladimir Mayakovsky and given an official funeral.

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: poetry

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Perets Markish

text: assimilation

text: Soviet Union

text: Isaac Babel

text: Ilya Ehrenburg


title: Ben-Ami

abstract: (pseudonym of Mark [Mordechai] Iakovlevich Rabinovich; ca. 1854–1932), writer, publicist, and early Zionist theorist. Ben-Ami’s life is a particularly representative example of the world of the shtetl. His articles and memoirs about the Jewish question reflect the period of the birth of Zionist thought in Russia.

text: Zionist

text: shtetl

text: Russia

text: Bessarabia

text: Odessa

text: Voskhod

text: pogroms

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ahad Ha-Am


title: Löw, Immánuel

abstract: (1854–1944), rabbi, orientalist, art historian, and member of the Hungarian Parliament. The son of Leopold (Lipót) Löw, chief rabbi of the Neolog Jewish community of Szeged, Immánuel Löw completed his university and theological studies in Berlin and Leipzig. The Jewish community of Szeged elected him its rabbi in 1878 (his father had died in 1875). After World War I, he was imprisoned for 13 months because of his condemnation of the White Terror and Admiral Miklós Horthy.

imgDesc: Rabbi Immánuel Löw (left) and actor Oszkár Beregi on the bimah of the main synagogue, Szeged, Hungary. Photograph by Bela Liebmann. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Bela Liebmann)

text: Leopold (Lipót) Löw

text: Budapest

text: rabbinic literature

text: Land of Israel

text: Lipót Baumhorn

text: Seminary

text: Breslau

glossary: Neolog Talmud halakhah agadah


title: Harkavy, Avraham

abstract: (1835–1919), historian, public activist, and librarian. Avraham (Albert Iakovlevich) Harkavy was born into a wealthy and prominent family in Novogrudok, Minsk guberniia, where he received a typical religious education. As an adolescent he studied briefly at the Volozhin yeshiva before transferring in 1858 to the state-sponsored Vilna Rabbinical Seminary. In 1863, he enrolled at Saint Petersburg University, where he received a master’s degree in oriental studies in 1868. He then went to Berlin and Paris to study Egyptology and Assyriology. He returned to Saint Petersburg and was awarded a doctorate in 1872. After teaching briefly at the university, Harkavy was appointed to a position at the Russian Imperial Public Library and became the librarian of the Oriental and Semitic Department in 1877.

text: Minsk

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Crimea

text: Ha-Karmel

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Avraam Firkovich

text: Karaites

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

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Voskhod

text: Ha-Melits

glossary: yeshiva Karaites Gaon


title: Calmanson, Jacques

abstract: (1722–1811), medical doctor and early proponent of the Enlightenment among Polish Jews. Jacques Calmanson was born in Hrubieszów, Poland, where his father was probably a rabbi. Calmanson studied medicine in France and was fluent in French, German, and Polish as well as Yiddish and Hebrew. In addition to Germany and France, his travels took him to the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Calmanson eventually settled in Warsaw, serving as physician to the last Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski.

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: Hasidism

text: dress

text: East Prussia


title: Daas Toyre

abstract: (Heb., da‘at Torah; Torah view), doctrine attributing authority to rabbis for deciding matters secular and spiritual alike, usually associated with the Agudas Yisroel political movement of Orthodox Jewry. While the term daas Toyre does appear in the Babylonian Talmud (Ḥulin 90b), where it has the meaning of an unequivocal legal opinion that may be taught publicly, it carries none of the ideological significance that latter-day Orthodox thinkers assigned to it.

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Orthodox Jewry

text: Hasidic

glossary: Torah Talmud Musar


title: Babad, Yosef

abstract: (1801–1874), Galician rabbinical scholar. Yosef Babad was born in Tarnopol to a family of rabbinical scholars; from his earliest years he devoted his life to the study of the Torah. As an adult, he was introduced to Hasidism and regarded Naftali of Roptshits (Ropczyce) as his spiritual mentor. Of his four marriages, two were to women from Hasidic dynasties: after his first wife died at an early age, he married the sister of Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz (Nowy Sacz); his third marriage was to the daughter of Rabbi David Hager of Zabludove (Zabludów). Almost nothing is known about his fourth marriage.

text: Tarnopol

text: Hasidism

text: Sandz

text: Haskalah

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: yeshiva

glossary:
Torah
Haskalah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
yeshiva


title: Mieses, Matthias

abstract: (1885–1945), philologist and journalist. Born in Przemyśl, Galicia, to a maskil family, Matthias Mieses had studied 10 languages by the age of 18. He published a Hebrew poem in the weekly Ha-Magid at 15, followed by hundreds of articles dealing with science and politics; these appeared in the Hebrew, German, and Jewish Polish press.

text: Przemyśl

text: Galicia

text: Ha-Magid

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Czernowitz Conference

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ahad Ha-Am


title: Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich

abstract: (1893–1984), literary critic and theorist, writer, and a founder of Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Iazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language; Opoiaz). Shklovskii was born in Saint Petersburg and studied literary history there at the university. If one is to believe his retrospective miscellany Tret’ia fabrika (The Third Factory; 1926), academic philology had little to offer this irreverent and restless student. Brilliant, exuberant, versatile, he felt more at home amid the noise of literary cafés than in the calm atmosphere of the university classrooms. A close association with futurist poets and artists gave Shklovskii what his professors sadly lacked—awareness of literary form and of artistic construction. “With the aid of futurism and sculpture one could already understand a great deal. It was then that I grasped art as an independent system.” And it was then that Shklovskii became eligible for the role of a leading spokesman and a pungent phrasemaker of Russian formalism.

text: Saint Petersburg


title: Olbracht, Ivan

abstract: (Kamil Zeman; 1882–1952), Czech novelist and journalist. Ivan Olbracht’s mother, Kamila Schonfeldová, came from a German-speaking Jewish family in northern Bohemia; his father, the writer Antal Stašek (originally Antonín Zeman), forced her to convert to Catholicism before he would marry her. (“For me,” he wrote to her in a letter, “departure from my church would be an excommunication from Czech society.”) Olbracht studied law in Berlin and Prague, but eventually left his studies to become a full-time journalist for a Czech Social Democratic paper in Vienna, where he worked from 1909 until 1916.

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Soviet Union

text: Subcarpathian Rus’

text: Czechoslovakia

text: Orthodox Jews


title: Dzigan and Shumacher

abstract: Comedy team that performed in Yiddish theaters, cabarets, and films. Shimen (Szymon) Dzigan (1905–1980) and Yisroel Shumacher (or Szumacher; 1908–1961) were both born in Łódź. Dzigan was apprenticed as a teenager to a tailor, but when the well-known writer and poet Moyshe Broderzon noticed his improvised parodies of speakers at a banquet in 1927, he invited Dzigan to join the Ararat literary cabaret that he was founding in Łódź. The following year, Shumacher graduated from a Hebrew gymnasium and also joined the Ararat company. They began to perform together, first with Ararat and then in Warsaw with the troupe Yidishe Bande. In response to their growing popularity, in 1935 they founded their own cabaret company at the Nowości Theater in Warsaw. They also starred in the Yiddish films Al khet (I Have Sinned; 1936), Freylekhe kabtsonim (Jolly Paupers; 1937), and On a heym (Without a Home; 1938).

imgDesc: Szymon Dzigan (center), Yisroel Shumacher (right), and an unidentified actor in On a heym (Without a Home), directed by Alexander Martin, based on the play by Jacob Gordin. (Poland, 1938). (YIVO)

text: theaters

text: films

text: Łódź

text: Moyshe Broderzon

text: Warsaw

text: humor

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Birobidzhan

text: Itsik Manger

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Poland

text: Białystok

text: Minsk

text: Moscow

text: Leningrad

text: Kiev

text: Kharkov

text: Holocaust


title: Vertov, Dziga

abstract: (1896–1954), documentary film director and film theoretician. The most radical of Soviet montage theorists and father of cinéma verité was born Dovid (later Denis) Kaufman, the son of a Białystok bookseller and a rabbi’s daughter. A precocious poet and aspiring avant-garde composer who renamed himself Dziga Vertov (a Polish-Ukranian hybrid that suggests “perpetual motion”), he studied medicine first in Moscow and then Saint Petersburg, while continuing to write music. After the October Revolution, Vertov left school to edit a weekly newsreel; during the civil war, he served as a battlefield cameraman.

text: film

text: Białystok

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg


title: Trauberg, Leonid Zakharovich

abstract: (1902–1990), film director, scriptwriter, and educator. In 1920 Trauberg moved from Odessa to Petrograd, where he worked as a journalist and participated in amateur plays. He also attended the Comic Opera Theater School and studied directing. In 1921 Trauberg became acquainted with the directors Grigorii Kozintsev, Sergei Iutkevich, and Georgii Kryzhitskii, with whom he organized Fabrika Ekstsentricheskogo Aktera (Factory of the Eccentric Actor; FEKS); their collaboration continued until 1926, first as a theater and then as a cinema collective that exerted great influence over the aesthetics of Soviet cinematography throughout the 1930s.

text: Odessa

text: Petrograd

text: Grigorii Kozintsev

text: cinema

text: Moscow

text: cosmopolitanism


title: Portnoy, Yekusiel

abstract: (1872–1941), leader of the Bund in Poland. Under the name Noyekh (and sometimes as Józef), Yekusiel Portnoy (actually Portney—the spelling can be traced to an error on the part of a Russian registrar) was one of the leading representatives of non-Zionist Jewish socialism in Eastern Europe. To adherents of the Bund (the General Union of Jewish Workers) in Poland between the wars, he was a charismatic paternal figure with enormous moral authority.

text: Bund

text: Poland

text: heder

text: Vilna

text: Kovno

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Lithuania

text: Warsaw

text: Medem Sanatorium

text: Henryk Erlich

text: Wiktor Alter

glossary: heder kehilah


title: Lange, Antoni

abstract: (1861–1929), poet, literary critic, and translator. Born into an assimilated, patriotic Polish family in Warsaw, Antoni Lange first studied sciences in Warsaw, then spent 1886–1890 in Paris, studying oriental languages, philosophy, and literature. There he met members of the French literary elite, including Stéphane Mallarmé. Back in Warsaw, he wrote literary criticism, popular essays on history, philosophy, and aesthetics, as well as poetry, literary translations, and plays.

text: Warsaw

text: assimilation

text: Zionists

text: Poland

text: messianism


title: Opotshinski, Perets

abstract: (ca. 1895–1943), Yiddish writer and journalist. Born in Lutomiersk (near Łódź) into a poor Hasidic family and orphaned at a young age, Perets Opotshinski (name also rendered Peretz Opoczinski) received only a traditional Jewish education in heder and at various yeshivas. In Kalisz, where he joined a circle of breakaway former yeshiva students, Opotshinski came under the spell of the Yiddish poet and enlisted soldier Osher Shvartsman, who convinced him to switch from Hebrew to Yiddish.

text: Łódź

text: heder

text: Kalisz

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Warsaw

text: Yiddish literature

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: ghetto

text: Judenrät

text: Poland

text: shtetl

text: Sholem Asch

glossary: heder yeshiva


title: Lipkin, Semen Izrailevich

abstract: (1911–2003), poet, translator, and fiction writer. Semen Lipkin was born and raised in Odessa, where his first poetic experiments attracted the attention of Eduard Bagritskii, the major romantic revolutionary poet who also lived in that city. Lipkin’s childhood recollections appear in his vibrant autobiographical sketches, Zapiski zhiltsa (Notes of an Inhabitant; 1992). By 1932, Lipkin’s poetry was no longer publishable and he became a translator, having mastered Farsi on his own. He served at the front during World War II, an experience he recounts in his narrative poem “Tekhnik-intendant” (Quartermaster; 1963, published in 1981).

text: Odessa

text: Eduard Bagritskii


title: Lerer, Yekhiel

abstract: (1900 [1910 in some sources]–1942), poet. Born in Mrozy, Warsaw district, to a prominent Hasidic family, Yekhiel Lerer spent his childhood and adolescence in the shtetl of Żelechów, where he received traditional Jewish training and a general education from private tutors. In his adolescence (during the years of World War I), he became acquainted with modern Yiddish and Hebrew writings, and read Polish and German literature. Concurrently, he studied watchmaking and the fur business, but preferred to live in the He-Ḥaluts movement’s agricultural collective. When his hopes of leaving for Palestine fell through, he moved to Warsaw, apparently at the end of the 1920s.

text: Warsaw

text: shtetl

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: shtetl

text: Dror

text: Emanuel Ringelblum


title: Varshavskii, Avram Moiseevich

abstract: (1821–1888), philanthropist, public figure, and businessman. Avram Varshavskii (sometimes spelled Warshawski) was from a wealthy family in Poltava. He had a traditional Jewish education supplemented with secular subjects, and was a supporter of the moderate Haskalah.

text: Haskalah

text: trade

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow

text: Brest

text: Russia

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Pale of Settlement

text: ORT

glossary:
Haskalah
Pale of Settlement
maskil


title: Khariton, Iulii Borisovich

abstract: (1904–1996), physicist; one of the creators of the Soviet atom bomb and scientific director of the hydrogen bomb project. Iulii Khariton was born into a middle-class Jewish family. Both of his parents left Russia before he completed his education. His mother lived in Berlin from 1910 and moved to Tel Aviv in 1933. His father, a journalist who was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 with many Russian intellectuals, lived in Riga and perished during World War II.

text: Russia

text: Riga

text: Abram Ioffe

text: USSR

text: Iakov Borisovich Zel’dovich


title: Cahan, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1881–1960), Hebrew poet and playwright. Born in Slutsk, Ya‘akov Cahan moved with his family to the vicinity of Łódź, where he was educated at a progressive Jewish school. Largely self-taught in world literature and Hebrew, he wrote poetry and criticism in that language at a young age, and also translated poems from German. Acclaimed for his style by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Cahan earned his reputation as the most purely lyrical of modern Hebrew poets.

text: Slutsk

text: Łódź

text: poetry

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Zionism

text: Poland

text: Hebrew literature

text: Warsaw

text: Revisionist Zionism

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky


title: Dorohoi

abstract: Romanian town on the border between Moldavia and Bucovina. An important entrepôt for trade with Poland, Dorohoi attracted Jews as early as the fifteenth century, but the oldest documented reference to their presence is a gravestone dating to 1656. Among the Jews who were called upon to establish or to populate towns in Moldavia, a few settled in Dorohoi. A charter (hrisov) issued by prince Constantin Şuțu in 1795 includes a list of duties and taxes payable by Jews.

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

text: Moldavia

text: Bucovina

text: trade

text: Poland

text: charity

text: crafts

text: Maccabi association

text: Zionist movement

text: youth movements

text: Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Betar

text: Iaşi

text: Transnistria

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Mihăileni

text: Rădăuți

text: Transnistria

text: Bucharest

text: Ion Călugăru

glossary:
Talmud
Torah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Moment, Der

abstract: Yiddish daily newspaper. Published between 11 May 1910 and 22 September 1939, Der moment was one of the two longest running and most important Yiddish daily newspapers published in Warsaw. Its founder and official editor was Noah Pryłucki (1882–1941), the son of Tsevi Pryłucki, who was founder and editor of the first daily Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw, Der veg (1905–1907); the elder Pryłucki was Der moment’s actual editor for most of its existence. In its first few years, the paper was nonpolitical, but displayed a pro-Zionist and antiassimilationist stand in line with the ideology of its columnist Hillel Zeitlin. Der moment was able to compete successfully with its rival Haynt (founded in 1908) because of such popular, prominent contributors and columnists as Mordkhe Spektor, B. Yeushzon (Moyshe Bunem Yustman), Yoysef Tunkel, and Noah Pryłucki himself.

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

text: newspaper

text: Warsaw

text: Noah Pryłucki

text: Tsevi Pryłucki

text: Warsaw

text: Hillel Zeitlin

text: Haynt

text: Mordkhe Spektor

text: Moyshe Bunem Yustman

text: Yoysef Tunkel

text: Folkist Party

text: Zionist movement

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Zusman Segalovitsh

text: Yoshue Perle

text: Haynt

text: Revisionist party

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky


title: Volozhin, Yeshiva of

abstract: For most of the nineteenth century, the Volozhin (Bel., Valozhyn) yeshiva was the most important institution of its type in Eastern Europe. It was founded around the year 1803 by Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak, the leading disciple of the Gaon of Vilna. Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak’s fame attracted many youths to Volozhin, and when the small town could no longer support so many students, he established a yeshiva that provided subsidies to students. His success at dispatching fund raisers enabled him to build a private study hall that allowed the yeshiva to be both financially independent and physically isolated.

text: yeshiva

text: Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: bet midrash

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Ḥayim Soloveichik

text: Talmud study

text: rabbinate

text: Avraham Kook

text: Eliyahu Meisel

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

glossary: yeshiva Gaon Torah Talmud


title: Blank, Maurice

abstract: (1848–1929), banker. Maurice Blank was born in Piteşti, Romania, into the family of a Jewish tradesman and entrepreneur, Mauriciu Blanco. Blank studied economics in Vienna and Leipzig, and upon his return to Romania became Iacob Marmorosch’s partner in running the largest bank in Romania, which in 1874 was renamed the Marmorosch-Blank Bank.

text: Romania

text: banking

text: Ploieşti

text: Dorohoi

text: Iaşi

text: Bacău

text: Brăila

text: Bucharest

text: Timişoara


title: Grossman, Vasilii Semenovich

abstract: (1905–1964), Russian writer. Vasilii (Iosif Solomonovich) Grossman was born and raised in Berdichev, where his parents belonged to the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia. After graduating as a chemist from Moscow University, he worked in the Donbass (1929–1933), and then returned to Moscow. Beginning in 1934, he devoted himself to literature, becoming a member of the Writers Union in 1937.

text: Berdichev

text: Moscow

text: Holocaust

text: Eynikayt

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Black Book

text: communism

text: antisemitism

text: shtetl

text: Pale of Settlement

text: pogroms

text: Boris Iampol’skii


title: Sverdlov, Iakov Mikhailovich

abstract: (Moiseevich; party pseudonyms Andrei, Maks; 1885–1919), revolutionary and Soviet party figure. Born in Nizhnii Novrgorod to an artisan engraver who also owned a typographical and printing workshop, as a youth Iakov Sverdlov became a pharmacist’s apprentice and began to spread revolutionary propaganda among workers. He joined the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party; RSDRP) in 1901 and was arrested for participating in a demonstration against the expulsion of Maksim Gorky from Nizhnii Novgorod. Sverdlov worked as a professional revolutionary there as well as in Kostroma, Yaroslavl’, Kazan’, and other towns. When the RSDRP split, he joined the Bolsheviks.

text: Moscow

text: Saint Petersburg

text: February Revolution of 1917

text: Lev Kamenev

text: Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic

text: Fannie Kaplan

text: Soviet


title: Yustman, Moyshe Bunem

abstract: (1889–1942), journalist, wit, and public affairs writer. Born in Warsaw to a Hasidic family, Moyshe Bunem Yustman (known also as Ba‘al Ye’ush [master of despair]) identified with Orthodox Jewry all his life. He began writing at an early age; his first articles were published in Hebrew in David Frishman’s paper Ha-Boker (1906). He also adopted the pen names B. Yeushzon (Son of Despair), Itshele, and Lorente.

text: Warsaw

text: Orthodox

text: David Frishman

text: Haynt

text: Der moment

text: Borekh Shefner

text: prose

text: the Dybbuk

text: parody

text: The Dybbuk

text: Der moment

text: Haynt

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionist

text: Bund

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Vilna


title: Katzenelson, Yitsḥak

abstract: (1885–1944), Hebrew and Yiddish poet. Born in Karelitz, near Minsk, Belorussia, Yitsḥak Katzenelson acquired his Hebrew education from his father, Ya‘akov Binyamin Katzenelson, a maskilic teacher and writer. From 1896, Katzenelson lived with his family in Łódź. His earliest Hebrew poetry was published in children’s newspapers beginning in 1899, and he quickly earned a reputation as one of the most prominent members of the generation of poets to be influenced by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik.

imgDesc: Local group of “lovers of literature” with visiting writer Yitsḥak Katzenelson (center, in white hat), Brzeziny, Poland, ca. 1920s. (YIVO)

text: Minsk

text: Łódź

text: poetry

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: shtetl

text: children’s literature

text: theater

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Perets Hirshbeyn

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Warsaw

text: Yitsḥak (Antek) Zuckerman

text: Hebrew literature

text: Holocaust


title: Szabó, Ervin

abstract: (1877–1918), librarian and socialist theoretician. Ervin Szabó was born in northern Hungary in a region that is now part of Slovakia. He changed his name from Samuel Armin Schlesinger and converted to Calvinism while still in his teens. Later, as a revolutionary, he expressed no attachment either to Judaism or Christianity. Szabó studied at the faculties of law and administration at universities in Budapest and Vienna, and earned a doctorate in 1903. Beginning in 1904 he worked as founder and director of the Budapest Municipal Library, where he adopted the model of the American public library, unknown until then in Hungary. Even today, the Hungarian library network remains named for him.

text: Hungary

text: Slovakia

text: Budapest

text: Russia

text: Oszkár Jászi


title: Evsektsiia

abstract: Jewish section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Socialists viewed nations as ephemeral creations of the capitalist order, and expected them to disappear with the advent of socialism. Vladimir Lenin pointed approvingly to European Jews, who, in his view, had already begun assimilating into the nations among whom they lived. In 1913 Joseph Stalin argued that since Jews lacked a common territory, language, and economy, they did not constitute a nation.

text: Communist Party of the Soviet Union

text: communism

text: Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs

text: Zionist

text: Bund

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: Ukraine

text: Semen (Shimen) Dimanshtein

text: Bund

text: Fareynikte

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Bund

text: Moyshe Rafes

text: Aleksandr Chemeriskii

text: Aron Vainshtein

text: Malke Lifshits Frumkin

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Artels

text: Birobidzhan


title: Erter, Yitsḥak

abstract: (1791–1851), Hebrew satire writer, physician, and a leader of the Haskalah movement in Galicia. Yitsḥak Erter was born in the village of Koniuszek in the Premishla (Przemyśl) district of Galicia, and grew up as a Hasid. At age 13 he married a rabbi’s daughter who died six months later. He was married again in 1806, also to the daughter of a rabbi (her name was Ḥayah Sarah) and he moved to his wife’s town of Wielkie Oczy where he was supported by his father-in-law. There, Erter formed a deep bond with the maskil Yosef Tarler (a probable later convert to Christianity), who introduced him to medieval Jewish philosophy and Haskalah literature.

imgDesc: Yitsḥak Erter. Postcard printed by Verlag Hatchijah, Stanisławów. The harp, the feather pen, inkwell, and books were symbols often used on postcards featuring writers. (YIVO)

text: satire

text: Haskalah

text: Galicia

text: Przemyśl

text: Hasid

text: Haskalah

text: Lwów

text: Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport

text: Yehudah Leib Mieses

text: Brody

text: Ya‘akov Orenstein

text: Budapest

text: Galicia

text: angels

text: satire

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Hebrew literature

text: Me’ir Letteris

glossary: Haskalah maskil pilpul


title: Sovetish Heymland

abstract: Yiddish literary and political journal published in Moscow from 1961 to 1991. A product of the post-Stalinist “thaw,” Sovetish heymland (Soviet Homeland) was created on the ruins of Soviet Yiddish culture silenced during the repression of the late 1940s. The title underlined continuity with the Moscow-based Yiddish literary periodicals Sovetish (1934–1941) and Heymland (1947–1948).

imgDesc: First issue of Sovetish heymland, July–August 1961. (YIVO)

text: Moscow

text: USSR

text: Aron (Arn) Vergelis

text: Zionism

text: Moyshe Altman

text: Shmuel Gordon

text: Shira Gorshman

text: Yoysef Rabin

text: Mark Razumny

text: Eli Shekhtman

text: Yekhiel Shraybman

text: Nosn Zabara

text: Khayim Beider

text: Hirsh Osherovitsh

text: Yankev Shternberg

text: Rivke Rubin

text: Elye Falkovitsh

text: Moyshe Shapiro

text: shtetl

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Holocaust

text: love

text: prose


title: Larin, Iurii Aleksandrovich

abstract: (1882–1932), Soviet economist, political figure, and publicist. Iurii Larin was born in Simferopol’ as Mikhail Aleksandrovich Luria. His father, Shneur (Shelomoh) Zalman Luria, was an engineer, Hebrew author, Zionist, and, according to some sources, a kazennyi ravvin, or “crown rabbi.”

text: crown rabbi

text: Russia

text: Soviet

text: Brest

text: Ukraine

text: Crimea

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

text: Birobidzhan

text: Evsektsiia

text: antisemitism


title: Armed Resistance

abstract: The Jewish armed resistance movement during the Holocaust (1939–1945) was an unprecedented phenomenon. The enslaved Jewish population, facing annihilation, had no effective means to fight off their aggressors. Thus the Jewish armed underground organizations in dozens of East European ghettos did not see armed resistance primarily as a way to save lives. Instead, they sought what they regarded as the most honorable death possible. Even if their armed struggle was only symbolic, the Nazi murder campaign demanded active response.

imgDesc: “Fascism must be smashed.” Cover of Yugnt shtime (Voice of the Youth), a mimeographed underground Yiddish newspaper put out by the Bund’s youth group Tsukunft, Warsaw ghetto, January–February 1941. (YIVO)

text: Holocaust

text: ghettos

text: Fareynikte

text: Vilna

text: Abba Kovner

text: Kovno

text: Minsk

text: Warsaw

text: killing center

text: youth movements

text: Bundists

text: Revisionist Zionists

text: Mordekhai Anielewicz

text: Białystok

text: Będzin

text: Tarnów

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Kraków

text: Russia

text: labor camps

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Lublin

text: Abba Kovner

text: Yitsḥak Zuckerman

text: Land of Israel

text: Slovakia


title: Diamand, Herman

abstract: (1860–1930), socialist, editor, publisher, and parliamentarian. Born in Lwów to a middle-class Jewish family, Herman Diamand attended a modern Jewish primary school. After completing Realschule (a modern German secondary school system adopted in several countries) in Lwów, he studied law and political science at the university there and in Vienna, earning a doctorate in 1894.

text: Lwów

text: Zionism

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna


title: Circumcision

abstract: Popular customs and practices regarding circumcision (Yid., bris; Heb., berit milah) seem to have been fairly consistent within the East European Jewish community, both Hasidic and Misnagdic, although there were some regional variations as to details. Through out the days leading up to the bris, care was taken to prevent the demon Lilith from taking the child: schoolboys were brought to recite the Shema‘ prayer every night (for which they were rewarded with sweets), and amulets were placed in the room with the child. The night before the ceremony was to take place, a special vigil (vakhtnakht) was kept. Candles were lit throughout the house. After a special meal (se‘udah), the men present recited psalms and studied Torah until midnight. The ritual circumciser (mohel) who was to perform the ceremony would also be present and would sometimes leave his circumcision knife under the mother’s pillow. All would recite the Shema‘ before leaving.

imgDesc: Rosh Hashanah card depicting a circumcision ceremony (Yid., bris; Heb., berit milah). The fruits on the “tree of life” are labeled (left to right), “luck,” “life,” and “joy,” and the Yiddish verse reads: “A child, boy is born / May he have happiness and live long! / A child, a joy, sugar-sweet / Today was his bris.” Published by Verlag Central, Warsaw. (YIVO)


title: Vayter, A.

abstract: (also Waiter; pseudonym of Ayzik Meyer Devenishski; ca. 1878–1919); Yiddish writer, political activist, and cultural figure. Born in a shtetl in the Vilna region to a strictly observant family that operated a tavern, Ayzik Meyer Devenishski received a traditional Jewish education. In his youth, he became familiar with Haskalah literature, and later studied Russian and Polish literature and the works of radical and revolutionary thinkers. Devenishski left the traditional world and joined the Bund at the time of its inception. He was active in Kovno, Minsk, and Vilna under his party pseudonym “Comrade Aron,” and endeavored to strengthen the national elements of the Bund platform. Devenishski was arrested several times and exiled to Siberia.

imgDesc: The body of A. Vayter, executed by Polish Legionnaires during the pogroms that accompanied the entry of the Polish Army into Vilna in April 1919. His death became emblematic for Jews, representing antisemitism and other challenges they faced in the period immediately after the establishment of the Polish Republic. (YIVO)

text: shtetl

text: Vilna

text: Haskalah

text: Bund

text: Kovno

text: Minsk

text: Russian Revolution

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Der fraynd

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: B. Kletskin

text: pogrom

text: memory

text: Poland

text: Zalmen Reyzen


title: Gens, Jakub

abstract: (1903–1943), commander of the Jewish police in the Vilna ghetto and later the ghetto’s strongman. Born in Illovieciai, Lithuania, Jakub Gens joined the Lithuanian army at age 16, eventually rising to the rank of captain. In 1935 he graduated from Kaunas University in law and economics. A member of Betar, the rightist youth movement of the Revisionist Zionist party, he moved to Vilna following the annexation of Lithuania to the Soviet Union in June 1940. In September 1941, when the ghetto was established following the German invasion and occupation of Lithuania, Anatol Fried, chairman of the Judenrat, appointed him commander of the ghetto Jewish police. Gradually becoming the ghetto’s strongman by establishing direct contacts with the German authorities, he made the police a decisive force in ghetto life. In the summer of 1942 the Germans dismissed the Judenrat, and Gens officially became the only representative of the ghetto, as well as of the camps and small ghettos nearby. A year later, on 14 September 1943, just 10 days before the final liquidation of the ghetto, he was shot to death in the Gestapo courtyard.

text: Vilna

text: Lithuania

text: Kaunas

text: Betar

text: youth movement

text: Revisionist Zionist party

text: Lithuania

text: Soviet Union

text: ghetto

text: Judenrat


title: Kun, Béla

abstract: (1886–1938), Hungarian Communist leader. Béla Kun (originally Kohn) was born to a poor Transylvanian family in the village of Lele. His father, then a village official, was later fired and struggled to find work, but nevertheless managed to educate his son at the best gymnasiums of the region. In 1904, Kun began to study law at Kolozsvár (now Cluj, Romania) University and at the same time changed his name (as did many assimilated Jews). Even though he abandoned Judaism, he was never baptized.

imgDesc: Béla Kun (third from right, facing left) and other members of the leadership of the Communist revolution at a demonstration, Hungary, 1919. Among the revolutionaries pictured are others of Jewish origin, including Ottó Korvin, Béla Szántó, Tibor Szamuely, Jenő Varga, and Jenő Hamburger. (Hungarian National Museum)

text: Cluj

text: Romania

text: Russia

text: Petrograd

text: Zinov’ev

text: Hungary

text: Soviet

text: Moscow


title: Holder, Yoysef

abstract: (1893–1945?), poet and translator. One of the most important Yiddish writers in Hungary, Yoysef (Hun., József) Holder was born to a Hasidic family in Nagybocskó (Rom., Bocicou Mare; Hun., Veliky Bichkif; the town is now divided between Romania and Ukraine) near Máramarossziget (Rom., Sighet Marmației, in Maramureş), where Yiddish was spoken as a matter of course. He left the Hasidic milieu quite early, yet continued to speak his first language. At age 15, he wrote Hebrew poems and a story about the famous yeshiva of Pressburg; he published this story in the Kraków monthly Ha-Mitspeh. After writing for other Hebrew papers such as Ha-‘Olam (London), Ha-Tsefirah (Warsaw) and ‘Al ha-mishmar (Jerusalem), Holder found his calling as a Yiddish poet.

imgDesc: Three sonnets by Yoysef Holder, n.d. Three sonnets by Yoysef Holder: “Mayn zeyde,” “Mayn tate,” and “Mayn mame” (My Grandfather; My Father; and My Mother), n.d. "At the third meal of the Sabbath, my old grandfather used to quietly sing the old rabbi's nigun [melody]. . . ." Yiddish. RG 108, Manuscripts Collection, F23.9. (YIVO)

text: Hungary

text: Romania

text: Ukraine

text: Sighet Marmației

text: yeshiva

text: Pressburg

text: Kraków

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: prose

text: poetry

text: poetry

text: Vilna

text: Warsaw

text: Budapest

text: Transylvania


title: Komfarband

abstract: Short-lived political formation of leftist Jews in the USSR in 1919. As World War I drew to a close in November 1918, the tensions among Jewish socialist parties in Ukraine regarding the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime came out into the open. Communist uprisings in Germany, which seemed to support the Bolshevik prognosis that the revolution would spread across Europe, together with the growing stability of the Bolshevik government, intensified inter- and intraparty conflict. Jews were increasingly fearful of persecution and distrusted the Ukrainian powers who opposed the Bolsheviks.

text: USSR

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Bund

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Fareynikte

text: Bund


title: Horwitz, Maksymilian

abstract: (1877–1937), theoretician, Polish socialist activist, writer, and editor. Maksymilian Horwitz, known also by the pseudonym Henryk Walecki, was born in Warsaw to a middle-class Jewish family in which both Polish and Yiddish were spoken. After completing gymnasium in that city, Horwitz studied at the university in Ghent, Belgium, where he was active in the Union of Polish Socialists Abroad and wrote for the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) organs, Robotnik and Przedświt.

text: Warsaw

text: 1905 Revolution

text: Russia

text: assimilationist

text: Feliks Perl

text: Rosa Luxemburg

text: Bund

text: Moscow


title: Royte Velt, Di

abstract: Yiddish journal published in Kharkov between 1924 and 1933. Di royte velt (The Red World) was established at the initiative of Moisei Ravich-Cherkasskii, head of the press department of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Central Committee, and Motl Kiper, head of the party’s Jewish section. Ravich-Cherkasskii and the experienced Yiddish journalist Henekh Kazakevich edited the periodical.

text: Kharkov

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Shmuel Persov

text: Ezra Fininberg

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Khayim Gildin

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Perets Markish

text: Der Nister

text: Minsk


title: Yudishe Velt, Di

abstract: Literary journal edited by Shmuel Niger and published in Vilna by Boris Kletskin from January 1913 until April 1915. Di yudishe velt (in modern orthography, Di yidishe velt; The Jewish World) was considered the most influential Yiddish journal of its type to appear in Eastern Europe before World War I. Each issue of this Russian-style “thick” monthly was as long as 160 pages and included belles lettres, literary criticism, essays on philology and ethnography, and in-depth journalistic pieces known as publitsitik.

imgDesc: Letter from Zelig Kalmanovitch to Kenig, 1913. From Zelig Kalmanovitsh in Vilna to Kenig on publishing Kenig's articles about Jewish art from Di yudishe velt in book form, 5 March 1913. Kalmanovitch points out that Di yudishe velt will need to exercise caution about publishing certain illustations (nudes?) because they are still a new publication and are looked on with suspicion by the Jewish public. Yiddish. Yiddish letterhead: Monatlikher zhurnal. Di yudishe velt, Vilna, Kleyn-stefen gas 23. RG 107, Letters Collection. (YIVO)

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Vilna

text: Boris Kletskin

text: Zelig Kalmanovitch

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sholem Asch

text: Dovid Eynhorn

text: Perets Hirshbeyn

text: Der Nister

text: Bal-Makhshoves

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Saint Petersburg

text: S. An-ski

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Yisroel Tsinberg

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Leyb Naydus

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Nakhmen Mayzel

text: Perets Hirshbeyn

text: I. J. Singer


title: Levitan, Isaak Il’ich

abstract: (1860–1900), Russian painter. Russia’s outstanding landscape painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, Levitan was born in Kubarty, a town in the Lithuanian province of Suvalki. He was educated at the Moscow School of Painting, Architecture, and Sculpture, studying with the landscape painter Aleksei Savrasov and the prominent Russian realists Vasilii Perov and Vasilii Polenov. Early poverty undermined his health, and he died at the age of 40. He nonetheless left an oeuvre of more than 1,000 paintings, among them iconic depictions of the Russian landscape like Vladimirka (1892), Nad vechnym pokoem (Above “Eternal Rest”; 1894), and Svezhii veter. Volga (Fresh Wind: The Volga; 1891–1895). The Moscow collector Pavel Tret’iakov built up a large holding of Levitan’s works, and the Tret’iakov Gallery holds many of his masterpieces. During his short career, Levitan was elected to the Russian Academy of Art. He likewise associated with significant Russian and Western European artistic movements such as the Peredvizhniki (Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions), the Munich Secession, and Sergei Diaghilev’s journal Mir iskusstva (The World of Art).

imgDesc: Nad vechnym pokoem (Above “Eternal Rest”). Isaak Il’ich Levitan, 1894. Oil on canvas. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. (© The State Tretyakov Gallery)

text: Russia

text: Suvalki

text: Moscow


title: Me’ir ben Gedalyah of Lublin

abstract: (1558–1616), rabbinical scholar and authority. Me’ir ben Gedalyah of Lublin, known as Maharam (an acronym for “Our teacher, the Rabbi Me’ir”) or Maharam of Lublin, was a major figure in the Golden Era of Torah study in Poland during the second half of the sixteenth century. He was born in Lublin and was a student of Shalom Shakhnah; he also studied with Yitsḥak ha-Kohen Shapira of Kraków, whose daughter Esther he married. In 1582, he founded a yeshiva in Lublin, and five years later was a rabbi and head of the yeshiva in Kraków. In 1595, he moved to Lwów, where he served as a dayan (rabbinic judge) and head of the yeshiva.

text: Lublin

text: Poland

text: Shalom Shakhnah

text: Kraków

text: yeshiva

text: Lwów

text: Yehoshu‘a ben Aleksander ha-Kohen

text: economic life

text: Russia

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Shemu’el Edels

text: Shelomoh Luria

text: Natan Note Spira

text: Binyamin Slonik

text: Shabetai ha-Kohen

glossary:
Torah
yeshiva
responsa
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
Rashi
Tosafot
pilpul
Arba‘ah turim


title: Tushiyah

abstract: Hebrew-language publishing house that was established in 1896 in Warsaw by Avraham Leib Shalkovich; it produced secular and cultural books until 1928. From its inception, Tushiyah (which may be translated into English as “insight”) had two main priorities. On the one hand it was ideologically committed to revamping the Hebrew bookshelf, and on the other, it hoped to run a self-sufficient commercial venture that could provide a livelihood for its owners and workers. Shalkovich, who was known by the pseudonym Ben-Avigdor, had brought changes to Hebrew publishing as early as 1891. In 1896, he gave up his managerial position at the Aḥi’asaf Press to set up Tushiyah, the first privately owned, modern secular Hebrew printing press.

imgDesc: Title page of Maḥanayim (The Two Camps), by Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski (Warsaw: Tushiyah, 1900). (Ginze Mikhah Yosef, Holon, Israel)

text: publishing

text: Warsaw

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Sandz Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Led by the Halberstam family and including many dozens of tsadikim and subdynasties, the Sandz Hasidic dynasty was founded in the mid-nineteenth century in Nowy Sącz (Hasidim always refer to the place as Tsanz) in western Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many offshoots of the dynasty are still active today.

imgDesc: Ben-Tsiyon Halberstam (second from right), the second Bobover rebbe, with followers in the resort town of Krynica, Poland, 1937. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Norman Salsitz)

text: Hasidic

text: Galicia

text: Barukh Fränkl-Te’omim

text: Poland

text: Ropshits

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Czernowitz

text: Hungary

text: Russia

text: Land of Israel

text: Ruzhin Hasidic Dynasty

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Cluj

text: Transylvania

text: yeshiva

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Zionism

text: Lwów

text: Slovakia

glossary:
tsadik
Torah
responsa
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
Diaspora
rebbe
halakhah
Kabbalah
yeshiva


title: Gel’fond, Aleksandr Osipovich

abstract: (1906–1968), Soviet mathematician. Born in Saint Petersburg into a family of physicians, Aleksandr Gel’fond studied at the Bauman Higher Technical School in Moscow, and later at the physics and mathematics faculty of Moscow State University. After completing his studies in 1927, he entered a postgraduate program. During his university and postgraduate years, Gel’fond worked under the guidance of Viacheslav Stepanov and Aleksandr Khinchin.

text: Soviet

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Moscow


title: Ber of Bolechów

abstract: (in some sources, Ber Birkenthal; 1723–1805), wine merchant, Hebrew writer, and memoirist. Born in the Polish province of Ruthenia (later Galicia), Ber of Bolechów proves the existence of a class of men within the eighteenth-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth whose worldviews encompassed deep traditional Jewish learning and broad secular knowledge even before the formal Jewish Enlightenment movement began in Eastern Europe.

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Hungary

text: Frankists

text: Lwów

text: shtadlan


title: Tencer, Pál

abstract: (Tenczer; 1836–1905), journalist and public figure. Pál Tencer was a pivotal figure of nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewry, or at least of the Neolog (Reform) community in Budapest, although much of the information available about him would not make this evident. A true portrait of him inevitably seems vague, illustrated by the fact that he used a varying spelling for his name (Tencer, rather than Tenczer, as others spelled it), and the fact that the newspaper Egyenlőség—the public forum with which he was most closely associated—celebrated his sixtieth birthday a year early. Major manuals, encyclopedias, and biographical collections give contradictory—and to a large extent false—information about him. All this appears to be a result of his role as an éminence grise, an expression that seems to characterize him most appropriately.

text: Reform

text: Budapest

text: Mór Mezei

text: Jewish Congress


title: Lev Tov, Seyfer

abstract: Ethical work in Yiddish. The Seyfer lev tov (Book of the Good Heart) was first printed in Prague in 1620. Nothing is known about its author, Yitsḥak ben Elyakim of Posen (Poznań). The book has 20 chapters that present appropriate Jewish behavior from a religious perspective; it deals with the conduct of the Jew in the religious context (mainly the synagogue) as well as in everyday life.

text: Prague

text: Poznań

text: Yehudah Ḥasid

text: Prague

text: Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el

text: Ashkenaz

text: Shabetai Sheftel ben Yesha‘yahu Horowitz

text: Yonatan Eybeschütz

text: Sabbatianism

text: Kraków

glossary:
musar
Arba‘ah turim


title: About this Article (Sport)

abstract: To treat Jewish participation in sporting activities, this entry includes two articles. The first surveys the topic with attention to the relationship between Jewish sporting clubs and political organizations and youth movements. The second focuses on the particular situation of Jewish athletes under the Soviet sports system.

imgDesc: Track event at a Jewish girls’ sports club, Prague, 1930s. Photo by Herbert Sonnenfeld. (Beth Hatefutsoth. Print courtesy YIVO)

text: youth movements


title: Neuda, Fanny Schmiedl

abstract: (1819–1894), writer. Born in Lomnice (Lomnitz), Moravia, to a family of rabbis, Fanny Schmiedl Neuda was the daughter of Juda Schmiedl (d. 1855), a rabbi. Her brother, Adolph Schmiedl (1821–1913), was a rabbi in Prostějov (Prossnitz) and Vienna. Fanny was married to Abraham Neuda (1812–1854), a rabbi in Loštice (Loschitz).

text: Prostějov

text: Abraham Neuda

text: Bohemia and Moravia

text: Prague


title: Săucan, Mircea

abstract: (1928–2003), film director and writer. Born in Paris of a Jewish mother and Romanian father, both Romanian immigrants, Săucan spent his early childhood among Jewish immigrants in France. The family moved to Prague, where his father studied at the Polytechnical University, and then, in 1934, returned to Romania, settling in the town of Carei in northern Transylvania. In 1940, when this region of Romania was transferred to Hungary, they fled to Sibiu and Sighişoara. From 1948 to 1952, Săucan studied in Moscow at the USSR Institute of Cinematography (VGIK); among his teachers were Sergei Eisenstein, Mark Donskoi, and Sergei Gerasimov.

text: Prague

text: Romania

text: Transylvania

text: Hungary

text: Sibiu

text: Moscow

text: Bucharest

text: cinema

text: Bucharest


title: Ruzhin Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Established by members of the Friedman family and consisting of several dozen rebbes (admorim), the Ruzhin (Yid., more properly Rizhin) Hasidic dynasty originated in the town of that name in Kiev province, Russia. It continued to flourish in Sadagora (Sadegere; in Austrian Bukowina) and had many offshoots in Galicia and Romania. In the 1870s, this branch of Hasidism and its unique approach to the religious life were the subject of a fierce controversy because of a ban pronounced on it by Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz (Nowy Sącz) in 1869. The loyalty of thousands of Ruzhin Hasidim to their leaders was unaffected, however, and the ban’s purpose was not achieved.

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: Kiev

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Hasidism

text: Sandz

text: Holocaust

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Land of Israel

text: Dov Ber

text: Pale of Settlement

text: banking

text: Berdyczów

text: Buhuşi

text: Ukraine

text: Bucovina

text: Czernowitz

text: Makhzikey ha-Das

text: Bessarabia

text: Haskalah

text: Hungary

text: Yisra’el of Ruzhin

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Apt

text: Brody

text: Kosov

text: Vaslui

glossary:
Pale of Settlement
tsadik
kolel
rebbe
Haskalah


title: Kolot

abstract: Hebrew literary monthly, published in 1923–1924 in Poland. Kolot (Voices) was established by the writer Eli‘ezer Steinman in Warsaw, where he had arrived as a refugee from Ukraine in 1920. The journal represented one of the boldest attempts to renew Hebrew literary activity in Poland after World War I, and as was true of the majority of other attempts, it was short-lived. The journal reflected its editor’s rebellious, modernist outlook and sought to provide an opportunity for individualistic, nonconformist voices to be heard, as a way of protesting against both the Zionist and the Hebrew literary establishment.

text: Poland

text: Eli‘ezer Steinman

text: Warsaw

text: Ukraine

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Hebrew literature

text: Aharon (Arn) Zeitlin

text: Yokheved Bat-Miriam

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Avigdor Hame’iri

text: Berl Pomerantz

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Ḥayim Hazaz

text: Tsevi Zevulun Weinberg


abstract: Established in January 1918, the Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs (Evreiskii Komissariat; EVKOM) was affiliated with the People’s Commissariat for Nationality Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat po delam Natsionalnostei; Narkomnats). EVKOM’s purpose was to win Jewish support for the Bolshevik regime both within Soviet Russia and abroad by disseminating Communist and Soviet materials in Yiddish. In contrast to the other ethnic commissariats established slightly earlier, EVKOM was considered temporary. Semen Dimanshtein was appointed commissar. During the first months of EVKOM’s existence, its central body included delegates representing Left Social Revolutionaries or SRs (Il’ia Dobkovskii) as well as Po‘ale Tsiyon (Tsevi Fridlender; 1897–1936). EVKOM’s Yiddish newspaper Di varhayt appeared from 8 March to 1 September 1918.

imgDesc: Participants at a conference of the Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs (EVKOM), Moscow, 1919. This may have been the June 1919 convention that marked the beginning of the weakening of EVKOM’s status in favor of the Evsektsiia (the Jewish section of the Bolshevik Party). (YIVO)

text: Russia

text: Semen Dimanshtein

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: antisemitism

text: Vitebsk

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Evsektsiias

text: Evsektsiia


title: Jelgava

abstract: (Ger., Mitau), city in Latvia; provincial capital of Courland. Founded in the thirteenth century by the Livonian Order of German (Teutonic) Knights, Jelgava, along with the Duchy of Courland, was taken over by the Russian Empire in 1795. Jews are known to have lived in the town from the seventeenth century. Earlier tombstones, dating from the fourteenth century, mark the graves of Jewish merchants who passed through the region.

text: Latvia

text: Courland

text: Russian Empire

text: Haskalah

text: Ventspils

text: Re’uven Yosef Wunderbar

text: Haskalah


title: Vevyorke, Avrom

abstract: (1887–1935), Yiddish poet, playwright, and critic. Born in Babiak, Poland, Avrom Vevyorke was trained to be a rabbi, but instead became a Labor Zionist and began writing in Yiddish. He made his literary debut with stories and poems in the Warsaw daily Der veg (The Way) in 1906 and the weekly Roman-tsaytung (Novel-Newspaper) in 1907. Vevyorke moved to Galicia in 1908, working for the Kraków Tog (Day) from 1911. His small collection Baladn (Ballads; 1912) was published in Kraków under the imprint of Dos Bukh (The Book). He edited the journal Dos bukh in Berlin, but soon went to Antwerp and then to London, working as a Yiddish journalist and editor until 1916, when he moved to Russia.

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Galicia

text: Kraków

text: Russia

text: Der emes

text: Moscow

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Arn Kushnirov

text: Shmuel Gordon

text: Shmuel Persov

text: Der shtrom

text: Minsk

text: Moscow State Yiddish Theater

text: Kharkov

text: Kiev

text: Yiddish literature

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Shomer


title: Khashchevatski, Moyshe

abstract: (1897–1943), Yiddish poet. Born in Buki, near Uman, Ukraine, into the family of a Talmud Torah teacher, Moyshe Khashchevatski studied at a heder and later at a commerce school in Uman, which he finished in 1916. He wrote poems in Russian and Yiddish, but initially had only one outlet to showcase his works—a handwritten Yiddish journal that he produced in Uman with his friends Leyb Kvitko and Ezra Fininberg. In 1916, Yekhezkl Dobrushin, already a central figure among the Kiev Yiddish literati, wrote to him, criticizing his poems for lack of “color scale and new cultural achievements.”

text: Uman

text: Ukraine

text: heder

text: Leyb Kvitko

text: Ezra Fininberg

text: Yekhezkl Dobrushin

text: Kiev

text: Yiddish literature

text: Moscow

text: Der emes

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: Der shtrom

text: Crimea

text: Itsik Fefer

text: Perets Markish

text: Shmuel Rosin

text: Birobidzhan

text: Der Nister

text: Shmuel Niger

glossary: Talmud Torah heder


title: Yugnt

abstract: Youth movement of the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon Party, literally meaning youth in Yiddish. Founded in 1904 in Galicia, Yugnt worked in parallel with two organizations: the student youth organization Frayer Shoymer (The Free Scout), whose membership consisted of Polish-speaking gymnasium students in Warsaw, from 1926; and the children’s movement Yungbor (Yung Borokhovisten [Young Borochovists, after the Labor Zionist Ber Borokhov]), which was primarily a scouting organization, from 1927. Yet another youth group affiliated with Yugnt was the sports union Shtern, the only Jewish sports organization that was a member of a general socialist Polish sports union.

imgDesc: Leaders of a local branch of Yugnt with a portrait of Karl Marx, Łowicz, Poland, 1919. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Youth movement

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Galicia

text: Warsaw

text: Ber Borokhov

text: Shtern

text: Zionism

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Land of Israel

text: YIVO

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Raphael Mahler


title: Kármán, Mór

abstract: (1843–1915), educator and cultural policymaker. Mór Kármán was born in Szeged, Hungary, where he came under the influence of Rabbi Lipót (Leopold) Löw, a pioneer of Neolog Judaism in Hungary. Kármán studied philosophy, pedagogy, and philology at the University of Vienna, and received his doctoral degree from the faculty of humanities of the University of Pest in 1866.

text: Hungary

text: Lipót (Leopold) Löw

text: Hungary

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Múlt és Jövő

glossary: Neolog Talmud


title: Druyanow, Alter

abstract: (1870–1938), Hebrew writer, researcher, editor, and Zionist activist. Alter Druyanow was born in the shtetl of Druja, in the Vilna region, to a rabbinic family. In 1886, he entered the Volozhin yeshiva, where he joined the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and in 1890 began publishing articles in the Hebrew press. Under the influence of his friend Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski, Druyanow went to Breslau in 1891, hoping to enroll at the university. Failing to do so, he returned to Druja.

imgDesc: Alter Druyanow (left) with (left to right) writers Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, and Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz, Odessa (?), ca. 1910. (Asher Barash Gnazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

text: Zionist

text: shtetl

text: Vilna

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Breslau

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Adam ha-Kohen

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Der yud

text: Land of Israel

text: Odessa

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Bessarabia

text: Poland

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

glossary: yeshiva Yishuv


title: Shiloaḥ, Ha-

abstract: Hebrew monthly. Ha-Shiloaḥ, published between 1896 and 1926, was the leading Hebrew-language literary journal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Founded by the Aḥi’asaf publishing house in Warsaw, the publication was predominantly inspired by its founding editor, Ahad Ha-Am, who had been appointed head of the institution in 1896. Ahad Ha-Am intended the monthly to serve not only as a vehicle to raise the national consciousness of the Jewish people, but also as a central platform for discussion and analysis on past and present issues relevant to Judaism. Its name refers to a river mentioned in Isaiah 8:6, “The waters of Shiloaḥ flow slowly,” characterizing the journal’s moderate temper.

imgDesc: Yosef Klausner, during the period when he was editor of the monthly Ha-Shiloaḥ, Odessa (?), 1911. (The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem)

text: literary journal

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Warsaw

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Kalonymus Ze’ev Wissotzky

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Kraków

text: Odessa

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: prose

text: poetry

text: Hebrew literature

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Shim‘on Bernfeld

text: Ḥayim Tchernowitz

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Simḥah Alter Gutmann

text: Aleksander Ziskind Rabinovitz

text: Aharon Avraham Kabak

text: Yehudah Steinberg

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Sha’ul Tshernichowsky

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Sholem Asch

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

text: Asher Barash

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: Ya‘akov Steinberg

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Eli‘ezer Steinman


title: Scheiber, Sándor

abstract: (1913–1985), rabbi and scholar, rector of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. Sándor Scheiber was a descendant of rabbis on both sides of his family; he studied at the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest and was ordained in 1938. At the same time, he attended Pázmány Péter University, earning a doctorate of philosophy in 1937. He was a student of the famous Jewish scholar and head of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest, Bernát Heller.

text: Seminary

text: Budapest

text: Debrecen

text: Immánuel Löw

text: Ignác Goldziher


title: Shmeruk, Khone

abstract: (1921–1997), historian of Yiddish literature and Ashkenazic Jewry. Khone Shmeruk was born and raised in Warsaw, where he studied in a modern heder and in the Krinski secondary school before beginning studies at the University of Warsaw and the YIVO Institute. In the latter part of his career, he was instrumental in renewing Jewish studies in Poland.

text: Yiddish literature

text: Ashkenazic

text: Warsaw

text: heder

text: YIVO

text: Poland

text: USSR

text: Belorussia

text: printing

text: book illustrations

text: children’s literature

text: theater

text: purim-shpil

text: prose

text: Rivke bas Me’ir of Tikotin

text: Bohemia–Moravia

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: Haskalah

text: Menaḥem Mendel Lefin

text: Yosef Perl

text: Naḥman of Bratslav

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Itsik Manger

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Isaac Bashevis Singer

text: Avrom Sutzkever

text: Hasidism

text: Kraków

text: Łódź

glossary: heder Haskalah


title: Kozintsev, Grigorii Mikhailovich

abstract: (1905–1973), Soviet film director. Grigorii Kozintsev began his career as a student of the artist Aleksandra Ekster; after the revolution, he organized large-scale street theater. In 1920 he entered the studio school of the Petrograd Academy of Arts.

text: film

text: Leonid Trauberg

text: Iurii Tynianov

text: Viktor Shklovskii

text: Soviet Union


title: Horontshik, Shimen

abstract: (1889–1939), Yiddish author and novelist. Shimen Horontshik (Pol., Szymon Horonczyk) was born in Wieluń, in the Kalisz district of Poland. When Horontshik was 8 years old, his father died, and until he was 11, he lived with his grandfather, a Kotsk Hasid. Following the death of his grandfather, he returned to his mother’s home and received a traditional Jewish education. At 17, he worked as a production laborer at a lacework factory in Kalisz, where he lived until the town was captured by Germany in early August 1914. Horontshik then escaped to Łódź.

imgDesc: Baym shvel (At the Threshold), by Shimen Horontshik. (Warsaw: Kinder-fraynd, 1936). (YIVO)

text: Kalisz

text: Poland

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Włocławek

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Vilna


title: Benador, Ury

abstract: (1895–1971), writer, playwright, and journalist. Ury Benador (Simon Schmidt) was born in southern Bucovina in the village of Milişăuți; his father was an impoverished tailor and the family had many children. As a teenager, Benador was forced to leave school to work at various trades. He began to write in Yiddish, his mother tongue, and contributed his first works in 1916 to Der hamer. He continued to publish sporadically in Yiddish until the 1940s, but eventually made Romanian his language of preference.

text: Bucovina

text: Bucharest

text: Brăila


title: Peretz, Yitskhok Leybush

abstract: (1852–1915), Yiddish and Hebrew poet, writer, essayist, dramatist, and cultural figurehead. Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was born to a prominent family in Zamość, a multiethnic Polish city ruled by Russia during his lifetime, and a stronghold of Jewish Enlightenment. Peretz’s father, Yude, was a merchant; his mother Rivke, who shared the running of their shop, bore nine children of whom Leybush, the second, was the oldest of three who survived into adulthood.

imgDesc: Yitskhok Leybush Peretz in his study, Warsaw, before 1915. (YIVO)

text: Zamość

text: Russia

text: poetry

text: Opatów

text: Sandomierz

text: Warsaw

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Jan Bloch

text: censorship

text: Sholem Asch

text: S. An-ski

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Der Nister

text: Alter-Sholem Kacyzne

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Poland

text: assimilation

text: Haskalah

text: David Frishman

text: Yosef Klausner

text: Simon Dubnow

text: Voskhod

text: Y. H. Ravnitski

text: Ha-Melits

text: Yankev Dinezon

text: satire

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: land of Israel

text: Hasidism

text: Zionist

text: Der yud

text: piety

text: theater

text: Russia

text: Czernowitz Conference

text: assimilation

glossary: Talmud Maimonides maskil Haskalah tsadik

subconcepts:
At the Crossroad of Languages
Forging a Modern Literature
In Service of Cultural Autonomy


title: Bat-Miriam, Yokheved

abstract: (1901–1979), Hebrew poet and one of the most influential female figures in Hebrew modernism. Yokheved Bat-Miriam (born Zhelezhiak) completed pedagogical courses in Kharkov and then studied at universities in Odessa and Moscow. She immigrated to Palestine in 1928.

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: poetry


title: Winter, Gustav

abstract: (1889–1943), journalist, writer, and translator. Gustav Winter (brother of politician Lev Winter), was born in the Czech village of Radenín near Tábor in southern Bohemia, and studied at Charles University in Prague and at the Sorbonne. Fully integrated into the Czech linguistic and cultural milieu, in 1913 he began to teach Czech and French language and literature at a secondary school in Prague.

text: Lev Winter

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Richard Weiner

text: Czechoslovakia


title: Ágai, Adolf

abstract: (1836–1916), writer, journalist, editor, and humorist. Adolf Ágai established his literary reputation in Budapest during the 1870s and 1880s, where he was the pioneer of a new kind of popular urban culture implicitly associated with the city’s assimilated Jewish lower-middle classes. Ágai was born in the west Hungarian town of Jánoshalma into a Polish Jewish family whose language remained Yiddish, even though his father had changed the family name from Rosenzweig to the more Hungarian-sounding Ágai in 1848.

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

text: Budapest

text: assimilation

text: humor


title: Hirszowicz, Abraham

abstract: (fl. 18th century), factor of the Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732–1798), and author of a project aimed at reforming Jewish lifestyles. He was probably the same person as Abraham Hirszewicz, a goldsmith and factor who was granted the status of servitor regis by Poniatowski on 19 January 1775.

text: crafts

text: Ukraine

text: money

text: sumptuary laws

text: rabbinate

text: shtadlonim

text: Warsaw

text: marriage


title: Babi Yar

abstract: Site of the murder of Kiev Jews by the Nazis in 1941. On 19 September 1941, the Germans occupied Kiev, after approximately 70 percent of a total Jewish population of 225,000 (as of 1939) had managed to flee. On 29–30 September, the eve of Yom Kippur, 33,771 of those who remained—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were murdered in Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the city. All in all, during the Nazi occupation of Kiev, an additional 70,000–80,000 people of various ethnic groups, mostly but not solely Jews, were killed there as well, but the locale became especially known for the first and largest aktion.

imgDesc: Red Army veteran Ilya Torchinskiy, a Kievan Yiddish instructor, at a memorial ceremony at Babi Yar, ca. 1990. His Yiddish sign declares that the thousands of Jews murdered at the site in September 1941 lie in a mass grave in which Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish victims of the “Fascist occupiers” are also buried. Photograph by Dmitry Peysakhov. (© 2006 Dmitry Peyshakhov)

text: Kiev

text: Soviet Union

text: Black Book

text: Ilya Ehrenburg

text: Perets Markish

text: Ukraine

text: Moscow


title: Gniezno

abstract: Town in the Wielkopolska province of Poland. In the eleventh century, Gniezno (known in Yiddish and German as Gnesen) was established as the first capital of the Polish state; since the year 1000 it has been the seat of an archbishop. Jews likely lived in the town as early as the twelfth century, where they managed the mint of a local prince. The oldest images of Jews in Polish lands are found on the bronze door of the Gniezno cathedral, dating from the second half of the twelfth century.

text: Poland

text: crafts

text: guilds

text: Zionist movement

text: Radom

text: Piotrków