title: Weinberg, Tsevi Zevulun

abstract: (1884–1971), Hebrew author. Born in Praga (near Warsaw), Tsevi Weinberg was one of the most significant Hebrew writers in Poland during the interwar period. He taught Hebrew studies in Augustów and Warsaw, and was among the founders of the Association of Hebrew Authors and Journalists of Poland. With Eli‘ezer Steinman, Weinberg edited the monthly publication Kolot (Voices) in 1923–1924. He also assisted Malki’el Lusternik in founding the periodical Re’shit: Bamah le-‘inyane ha-ḥayim, sifrut u-mada‘ (Beginning: A Forum on Matters of Life, Literature, and Science), published between 1932 and 1934, and served on its editorial board. In 1934, he moved to Palestine and taught at a school in Tel Mond. Weinberg’s departure from Poland triggered a wave of reactions within his literary circle, as it had lost one of the most important voices of contemporary Hebrew literature.

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Eli‘ezer Steinman

text: Kolot

text: Malki’el Lusternik

text: Hebrew literature

text: Soviet Russia

text: antisemitism


title: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

abstract: Hebrew literary annual, published in Warsaw in 1893–1904 and 1923. Founded by the Aḥi’asaf publishing company, Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf (Aḥi’asaf Calendar [Almanac]) was under the patronage and influence of Ahad Ha-Am. Produced each year shortly before the beginning of the Jewish New Year, the publication was a cross between a journal and a literary anthology. Along with its practical sections (calendars, useful information, advertisements, etc.), most of each volume was taken up by a diverse literary section that included fiction, poetry, discussions of current affairs, reviews, literary essays, and biographies.

text: Warsaw

text: Aḥi’asaf

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: calendars

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: Re’uven Brainin

text: Avraham Shalom Friedberg

text: Yosef Klausner

text: David Frishman

text: Zionist

text: Hebrew literature

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Yehoshu‘a Thon


title: Vaslui

abstract: Town in the Moldavian region of Romania. Jewish settlement dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, with numbers increasing in the nineteenth century due to immigration from Galicia and Russia and occasional periods of decrease during times such as the cholera epidemic of 1848.

text: Moldavian

text: Romania

text: Galicia

text: Russia

text: crafts

text: Hasidim

text: Yeḥi’el Mikhl Taubes

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Buhuşi

text: Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein

text: Ana Pauker

text: Zionist

text: credit

text: Transnistria

glossary:
Talmud
Torah
Rebbe
Yishuv
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Kaunas

abstract: City in central Lithuania. Part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1795 when it came under Russian rule, Kaunas (Yid., Kovne or Kovna; Pol., Kowno; Rus., Kovno; Ger., Kovne) was occupied by Germany during World War I, after which it served as the capital of Lithuania between 1920 and 1941. Occupied by the Nazis until 1944, Kaunas again came under Soviet domination until Lithuania regained its independence in 1991.

imgDesc: View of Kaunas from the north, from the park in Wesoluwka, ca. 1922. (YIVO)

text: Lithuania

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Lithuania

text: Purim

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Yisra’el Lipkin

text: Musar

text: yeshiva

text: Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor

text: Haskalah

text: Zionist movement

text: yeshiva

text: Slobodka yeshiva

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Bund

text: Vilna

text: Max Solieli

text: Leyb Gorfinkel

text: Yudl Mark

text: youth movements

text: Judenrat

text: labor camps

glossary: Musar yeshiva Haskalah Kolel


title: Shtadlan

abstract: The shtadlan (intercessor; pl., shtadlonim) was, ideally, a well-connected, culturally adept, linguistically capable person whose official function was to intervene on behalf of local and intercommunal Jewish communities and local and national officials on all matters that the local kahal (community board) and the intercommunal va‘ad (council) deemed appropriate. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, they were often retained by detailed contracts for periods of up to three years, earning handsome salaries and receiving generous indirect payments and expense accounts.

text: kahal

text: council

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: Moravia

text: Hungary

text: Warsaw

text: Barukh ben David Yavan

text: Frankist movement

text: blood libel


title: Chekhanov Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: Avraham Landau of Chekhanov (Ciechanów; 1784–1875) was an important rabbi and Hasidic leader in central Poland. He was primarily a disciple of Fishel of Strikov (1743–1822), one of the founders of Hasidism in central Poland. Landau became rabbi of Chekhanov in 1820 and remained there for the rest of his life, despite offers from larger communities. He did not formally become a tsadik until after the death of his friend, Yitsḥak Me’ir of Ger (1789–1866), when many of the latter’s Hasidim came to him.

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

text: Poland

text: Hasidism

text: Ger

text: liturgy

text: Biała

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk

text: Kotsk

text: Vurke

text: Aleksander

glossary: tsadik rebbe responsa Torah


title: Goldziher, Ignác

abstract: (1850–1921), orientalist. Ignác Goldziher’s ancestors settled in the western Hungarian community of Kittsee (Köpcsény). His father, Adolf, moved to Székesfehérvár in 1842, where Goldziher was born. By the age of eight, Goldziher was studying the Talmud, and he published his first essay, on the origins and time of prayer (“Síhat Jizhaq. Abhandlung über Ursprung, Eintheilung und Zeit der Gebete” [Isaac’s Discourse: A Contribution to the Origin, Arrangement, and Timing of Prayers]; 1862) while still a child.

text: Ármin Vámbéry

text: Moritz Steinschneider

text: Hungary

text: Budapest


title: Chwila

abstract: Polish-language Zionist daily. Published in Lwów from January 1919 until September 1939, Chwila (Moment) was devoted to political, social, and cultural affairs. Initially edited by members of parliament Henryk Rosmarin and David Schreiber, the paper was later taken over by the Chwila Publishing Company. Its circulation reached 35,000 copies. An evening edition was launched in 1934, edited initially by Henryk Hescheles and later by Szymon Szpund.

text: Zionist

text: Lwów

text: Galicia

text: Leon Reich

text: Emil Sommerstein

text: Ignacy Schwarzbart

text: Bernard Singer

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Matthias Mieses

text: Maurycy Szymel

text: Poland

text: theater

text: chess

text: satire

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: S. An-ski

text: Israel Joshua Singer

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Itsik Manger

text: Sholem Asch

text: Joseph Roth

text: assimilation

text: Drohobycz

text: Tarnopo


title: Neufeld, Daniel

abstract: (1814–1874), Polish assimilationist activist, pedagogue, and journalist. Daniel Neufeld was born in Praszka near Wieluń, Great Poland, which from the beginning of the nineteenth century was a center of the Haskalah. He received a traditional religious education and attended a Catholic secondary school, although he ended his formal education in 1830. He was an autodidact both in the traditional literature of Judaism, as well as in contemporary academic literature about Jews, which he explored mainly in German.

text: Poland

text: Haskalah

text: Warsaw

text: Henryk Toeplitz

text: Samuel Orgelbrand

text: Hasidism

text: assimilation

text: Jutrzenka

text: Russia

glossary: Haskalah Torah


title: Sportcajtung

abstract: Yiddish-language sports periodical. The passion of a significant number of Jews in interwar Poland for organized sports was reflected in the pages of Sportcajtung (Sport News). Edited by L. Koprowicz and published in Warsaw between April 1931 and August 1939, this biweekly, illustrated periodical played an important role in encouraging enthusiasm for sports. Earlier attempts to publish weeklies of the same title in Warsaw and Łódź in 1924 had been unsuccessful.

text: Poland

text: sports

text: Warsaw

text: Łódź

text: Stanisław (Shepsel) Rotholc


title: Levanda, Lev Osipovich

abstract: (1835–1888), journalist and fiction writer. Born in Minsk, Lev Levanda studied in a local Jewish school that, in response to governmental pressures, offered secular subjects; the students came from poor families who could not afford traditional education. Levanda went on to a government-sponsored rabbinical school in Vilna and a teaching job in Minsk, where he was also appointed to the government post of Jewish Expert, assisting with programs to study Jewish life and editing state textbooks for Jewish children.

text: Minsk

text: Vilna

text: Odessa

text: Razsvet

text: Osip Rabinovich

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Voskhod

text: assimilationism

text: pogroms

text: Zionism

text: Russian Empire


title: Parody

abstract: With the onset of the modern period, parody became a quantitatively significant component within the genre of Jewish satire. The genre of parody was used to comment on a wide variety of themes connected to Jewish life, including Hasidism, socialism, Zionism, and socioeconomic issues. The majority of Hebrew and Yiddish parodies produced in Eastern Europe were imitative, in that they borrowed structures and language from well-known texts in order to comment on or mock unrelated topics, and did not attack the original, structural works. One of the earliest known parodies to appear in Eastern Europe was the Sefer ha-kundes (Book of the Prankster; 1824), a comic manual for pranksters based on the style of the Shulḥan ‘arukh. Published in Vilna, and commenting on the number of young pranksters there, this book was banned by the administrators of Vilna’s Jewish community, who collected all known copies and burned them, leaving only a small number to survive.

imgDesc: “The Sukkah in Danger.” Di royte fon (The Red Flag), edited by Yoysef Tunkel, Warsaw, ca. September 1918. The cartoon depicts the leaders of Jewish political parties (some newly legalized) holding their respective party-oriented newspapers and arguing with each other. Meanwhile, they ignore the “counterrevolution” (pig) leaning against the shaky upright that holds up the roof of the flimsy postrevolutionary political structure (Sukkah). (YIVO)

text: satire

text: Hasidism

text: Zionism

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Vilna

text: Ashkenaz

text: Lwów

text: Haskalah

text: Hasidism

text: Yosef Perl

text: Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: trade

text: Zhitomir

text: Yitsḥak Kaminer

text: Minsk

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: censorship

text: 1905 Russian Revolution

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Warsaw

text: humor

text: folk songs

text: songs

text: Yoysef Tunkel

text: Moment

text: Haynt

text: Soviet Union

text: Evsektsiia

glossary:
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Talmud
Rashi
Tosafot
Haskalah
tsadik
Pale of Settlement
maskil
Mishnah
publicist


title: Walachia

abstract: Region of Romania, between the southern Carpathian Mountains and the Danube River. Walachia (Rom., Valahia, or Vlahia; known also as Țara Românească [Romanian Land]) is made up of two provinces: Muntenia (east of the Olt River) and Oltenia (west of the river). Until its political union with Moldavia in 1859, followed by an administrative amalgamation in 1862, Walachia was a principality that had been founded at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Its princes were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, to which it paid tribute beginning about 1417. The population spoke Romanian and practiced Greek (Romanian) Orthodoxy. Its capitals were Curtea de Argeş (fourteenth century), Târgovişte (fifteenth century), and Bucharest (Rom., Bucureşti; beginning in the sixteenth century).

imgDesc: The Great Synagogue, Câmpulung Moldovenesc, 2006. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber. (Courtesy of the photographer)

text: Romania

text: Moldavia

text: Bucharest

text: Hungary

text: Transylvania

text: Sephardic Jews

text: Ashkenazic

text: Lwów

text: conversion

text: Focşani

text: Craiova

text: Ploieşti

text: dress

text: Iaşi

text: guilds

text: Braşov

text: Haskalah

text: Iuliu Barasch

text: Davicion Bally

text: religious reform

text: Me’ir Leib ben Yeḥi’el Mikha’el

glossary: Torah Haskalah


title: Galitsianer

abstract: Yiddish term for a Jew who lived in Galicia, a territory that existed from 1772 to 1918, as one of the crown lands of the Austrian Empire. In addition to the adjective that defines geographical origin, Galitsianer became a cultural identifier bearing, for the most part, negative connotations. Among the stereotypes attributed to the Galitsianer were the following: a troublemaker, a shrewd operator, a money grubber, a religious fanatic, a spineless compromiser, a speaker of popular, vulgar Yiddish, and someone ashamed of his or her origins who liked to pose as an Austrian. Jokes about Galitsianer men and women became very popular; some of these continue to exist despite the fact that Galicia itself disappeared long ago.

imgDesc: Galicia. Boundaries shown are ca. 1914.

text: Galicia

text: dress

text: Karl Emil Franzos

text: Russia

text: Kraków

text: Gershom Bader

text: YIVO

text: Maurycy Gottlieb

text: Drohobycz

text: Izidor Kaufmann

text: Hungary

text: Joseph Roth

text: Brody

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Buchach

text: memoir


title: Sebastian, Mihail

abstract: (Iosef Hechter; 1907–1945), writer, playwright, and essayist. Son of Mendel and Clara (née Weintraub) Hechter, Mihail Sebastian was born in Brăila, where he also attended high school. He studied law in Bucharest from 1927 to 1929 and in Paris from 1930 to 1931, then worked occasionally as a lawyer while mainly focusing on literary and journalistic work.

text: Brăila

text: Bucharest

text: assimilation

text: Zionism

text: antisemitism

text: Isac Ludo

text: Iaşi

text: Bessarabia

text: Bucovina

text: Holocaust


title: Taytsh, Moyshe

abstract: (1882–1935), Yiddish poet and prose writer. Born in Vartai, Moyshe Taytsh studied with private teachers until the age of 14, when he was sent to nearby Vilna. He finished school at the Jewish Teachers Institute and was admitted to the institute proper, but soon was expelled for disciplinary reasons. In 1901, Taytsh was imprisoned for involvement in Bundist revolutionary activities. In prison he began to write Yiddish poems, influenced by Avrom Reyzen.

text: Vilna

text: Bundist

text: Avrom Reyzen

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: shtetl

text: Moscow

text: Kharkov

text: ORT

text: Folkspartey

text: Kiev

text: Der emes

text: Khayim Gildin

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Kletskin

text: Minsk


title: Akselrod, Zelik

abstract: (1904–1941), Yiddish poet. Born in Molodechno, Belorussia, Zelik Akselrod was 11 years old when his family found themselves among the Jews expelled by the Russian army from the World War I theater of operation. From Tambov, where the family lived after the expulsion, they moved to Minsk, while Zelik went to Moscow to study at the Briusov Institute for Literature and Art (1922–1925). His brother Meyer (or Meer; 1902–1970) also studied in Moscow, becoming a noted artist. Zelik Akselrod was close to his fellow students Izi Kharik and Shmuel-Nisn Godiner, who were active in proletarian literary circles. Aesthetically, however, Akselrod was quite removed from the proletarian poets. His first poetry collection, Tsapl (Tremble; 1922), was published in Kiev by Kultur-lige. From 1925, he lived in Minsk, working at an orphanage and, later, at the State Publishing House.

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

text: Minsk

text: Moscow

text: Izi Kharik

text: Shmuel-Nisn Godiner

text: poetry

text: Kiev

text: Kultur-lige

text: Shtern

text: Izi Kharik

text: Moyshe Kulbak

text: Yashe Bronshteyn

text: Vilna

text: Białystok

text: Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg

text: Rivke Rubin


title: Kazakevich, Emmanuil Genrikhovich

abstract: (1913–1962), Yiddish and Russian writer. Emmanuil Kazakevich was born in the Ukrainian town of Kremenchug. His father, Henekh Kazakevich (1883–1935), was a Jewish political activist and journalist who joined the Bolsheviks and edited Communist Yiddish periodicals, notably the Kharkov literary journal Di royte velt (The Red World). In Kharkov, Emmanuil studied machine building, and was a member of the Yiddish literary group at the Communist newspaper Yunge gvardye (Young Guard), which published his early poems. From 1931 to 1937, Kazakevich lived in Birobidzhan, where his father edited the local Yiddish newspaper, Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan Star).

text: Birobidzhan

text: Birobidzhaner shtern

text: Dovid Bergelson

text: Berdichev

text: Minsk

text: Kiev

text: Moscow

text: Arn Vergelis

text: Soviet Union

text: Warsaw

text: L. Martov

text: Grigorii Zinov’ev


title: Lukács, György

abstract: (1885–1971), Marxist philosopher and literary critic. György (Georg) Lukács was one of the foremost cultural theorists of the twentieth century; his Hegelian Marxism laid the groundwork for contemporary critical theory. Born György Bernát Lőwinger, in Budapest, Georg Lukács came from a wealthy Hungarian Jewish family that had been granted noble status and was equally fluent in German and Hungarian. József Lukács, his father, was a self-made man who had risen from an impoverished rural background to become director of the Hungarian General Credit Bank in 1906. Although Lukács had a troubled relationship with his father, the elder Lukács remained a warm and generous supporter of his son’s academic ambitions, which he saw as an extension of his own social mobility.

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Béla Kun

text: Moscow

text: mysticism

text: Hasidism


title: Ettinger Family

abstract: Prominent rabbinic family. The Ettinger family originated in the city of Öttingen, Bavaria. One branch was related by marriage to a number of other prominent families, including the Orensteins, Natansons, and Rapoports. Several members of the family distinguished themselves as rabbinic leaders in Poland and Galicia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

text: Orensteins

text: Natansons

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Yosef Sha’ul Natanson

text: Lwów

text: Kraków

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Przemyśl

text: Land of Israel

text: Bucovina

text: Land of Israel

glossary:
halakhah
Talmud
responsa
Pale of Settlement
kolel


title: Leaseholding

abstract: The payment of cash for the use of property or monopoly rights, leaseholding was one of the most important Jewish occupations in Eastern and Central Europe from the Middle Ages. Its importance grew considerably in the early modern period: according to the Jewish census of 1764–1765 in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, more than one-third of employed Jews were leaseholders of various kinds. In the nineteenth century, the importance of leaseholding declined with economic modernization, but continued to be a principal source of income for Jews.

imgDesc: Gentiles dancing and drinking in a Jewish tavern. Lithograph by G. Pillati published by A. Chlebowski, “Swit,” and printed by B.Wierzbicki and Sons, Warsaw, n.d. (Moldovan Family Collection)

text: Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

text: money

text: Khmel’nyts’kyi rebellion

text: taverns

text: Bohemia

text: Hungary

text: Hasidic movement

text: credit

text: ḥazakah

text: Russia

text: Galicia

text: Kiev

text: Kharkov

text: Russia

text: Poland

text: agriculture

text: Galicia

text: Hungary

text: industry

text: trade

glossary:
arenda
Congress Poland


title: Goldberger, Leó

abstract: (1878–1945), industrialist. Leó Goldberger studied at the Evangelical High School in Budapest and in 1900 received a juris doctor degree. In 1867, his grandmother had been Hungary’s first Jewish woman to be ennobled and had thus been allowed to use the predicate Budai (or Buday; “of Buda”) before her name; hence he is also known as Leó Budai-Goldberger. As the second-born son, Goldberger did not at first intend to continue the tradition of working in his family’s factory. But after the early death of his older brother in 1913 and a long period of recession, he took over the management enterprise from his father. At the time, the factory, with headquarters in Óbuda, concentrated on manufacturing cotton fabrics.

imgDesc: Workers in Leó Goldberger’s textile factory, Budapest, 1920. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of George Pick)

text: Budapest

text: Hungary


title: Godiner, Shmuel-Nisn

abstract: (1892 [or 1893]–1942), Yiddish writer. Born in Telekhan, Belarus, in 1908 Shmuel-Nisn Godiner moved to Warsaw, where he was employed as a metalworker. Self-taught, he could read Russian, Polish, and German, and joined the circle of Jewish culture enthusiasts lead by Y. L. Peretz, who encouraged him to write in Yiddish. Drafted to the Russian army in 1912, Godiner was wounded during World War I and taken prisoner by the Austrians, but managed to escape.

text: Belarus

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Moscow

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Der Nister

text: Der shtrom

text: Shklov

text: Russia

text: Ukraine


title: About this Article (Historiography)

abstract: To survey trends and motifs in the historiography of the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, this entry includes four articles. Following a general overview, which focuses on scholarship in Poland and Russia, are separate articles on the Bohemian lands and Hungary. The last article treats historical writings by Orthodox Jews.

imgDesc: Jewish historians in the office of the Jewish Section at an international historical congress, Warsaw, 1933: (left to right) Ignacy Schiper, Abraham Duker, Emanuel Ringelblum, Raphael Mahler, Salo W. Baron, Me’ir Halevi, Majer Bałaban, M. Stein, and an unidentified participant. (YIVO)


title: Tuwim, Julian

abstract: (1894–1953), poet, satirist, translator, and editor. Born in Łódź into an assimilated family, Julian Tuwim was the grandson of Leon Krukowski, the publisher of Dziennik Łódzki. In 1916, Tuwim moved to Warsaw, where he studied law and philosophy. One of the most popular Polish interwar poets, he belonged both to the innovative group Skamander, which helped revitalize Polish poetry after 1918, and to the prestigious literary circle around the journal Wiadomości Literackie. Successfully combining intellectual and popular literature, Tuwim excelled in several fields: he was an outstanding lyricist and political satirist, and he also wrote poetry for children, texts of songs, operetta librettos, theater adaptations, and texts for cabaret. After World War II, which he spent in exile in the United States, he returned to Poland in 1946.

imgDesc: Rachel Holzer in Julian Tuwim's Meshugene Zashke (Crazy Zashke) from the revue Tate, du lakhst (Daddy, You're Laughing),  at the Nowości Theater, Warsaw, 1938. Photograph by Leo Forbert.

text: Łódź

text: Warsaw

text: Wiadomości Literackie

text: Poland

text: children’s literature

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: assimilation

text: antisemitism

text: Marek Turkow

text: Orthodoxy

text: Łódź

text: Holocaust


title: Me’ir ha-Levi Rotenberg of Apt

abstract: (1760–1827/31?), Hasidic leader. In his youth, Me’ir ha-Levi Rotenberg studied under the rabbis Yitsḥak Avraham Aba ha-Kohen Katz and Aryeh-Yehudah Leib Te’omim, all the while living in poverty. He was nominated in 1809 to serve as a rabbi in Apt (Opatów) and, in 1815, in Stavnits (Stopnica). In 1816, his son Yisra’el was elected to the Stopnica rabbinate, and Me’ir returned to Opatów.

text: Opatów

text: Hasidism

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Pshiskhe (Przysucha) Hasidism

text: Elimelekh of Lizhensk

text: Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe

text: Warsaw

text: Poland

text: Lwów

text: Lublin

text: Radomsk


title: Komlós, Aladár

abstract: (1892–1980), writer, poet, literary historian, high-school teacher, and university professor. A member of the second generation of the preeminent literary journal Nyugat (West), Aladár Komlós was among Hungary’s most important literary historians. Both his regular work as critic and his collections of essays, Új magyar líra (New Hungarian Poetry; 1928) and Írók és elvek (Writers and Principles; 1937), were of seminal importance in setting critical standards for Hungarian poetry. His historical study A magyar líra Petőfitől Adyig (Hungarian Poetry from Petőfi to Ady; 1959) is still the primary monograph of that era.

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Károly Pap

text: Imre Ámos

text: Péter Újvári

text: Holocaust

text: József Kiss

text: Hungarian literature


title: Opinia

abstract: Polish Jewish weekly (1933–1939) devoted to political, social, and literary issues. Published by the Alt-Naj Cooperative Publishing House, Opinia: Tygodnik żydowski polityczno-społeczny i literacki (Opinion: Political, Social and Literary Jewish Weekly) was associated with the daily Haynt and was ideologically close to Zionism. Its editorial board consisted of Moyshe Kleinbaum, Abraham Insler, Bronisław Sztraubaum, and Roman Brandstaetter; its editors in chief were Mosheh Indelman (1933) and Sztraubaum (1934). Opinia’s first issue appeared on 5 February 1933 in Warsaw. In 1935, the journal moved its operations to Lwów, where it was published until 1939 as Nasza Opinia under the editorship of Naftali Hauser. In all, 198 issues were published, with circulation reaching 25,000 copies.

text: Haynt

text: Zionism

text: Moyshe Kleinbaum

text: Roman Brandstaetter

text: Warsaw

text: Lwów

text: Majer Bałaban

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Apolinary Hartglas

text: Mark Arnshteyn

text: Matthias (Mateusz) Mieses

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Emil Sommerstein

text: Edmund Stein

text: Ozjasz Thon

text: Regina Lilientalowa

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Kraków

text: Maurycy Szymel

text: Poland

text: Shmuel Niger

text: Ignacy Schiper

text: Rokhl Oyerbakh

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: David Frishman

text: Sholem Asch

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: Itsik Manger

text: Michał Weichert

text: rabbinic literature

text: Bruno Schulz

text: Leo Belmont


title: Dickstein, Samuel

abstract: (1851–1939), mathematician, pedagogue, and historian of science. One of the leading intellectuals in Congress Poland, Samuel Dickstein was born in Warsaw and was an activist in the assimilationist movement. From 1884 to 1918 he served on the executive committee of the Warsaw Jewish Community, responsible mainly for issues related to Jewish schools.

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: assimilation

text: Orthodox

text: Ger Hasidism

text: Mathias Bersohn

text: Natanson family

text: Szymon


title: Finland

abstract: An independent state in Scandinavia since 1917, Finland was under Swedish rule until 1809, during which time Jews were banned from living there. When Finland became a grand duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809, Jews who had served in the Russian army and been stationed in Finnish territory were allowed to settle with their families in the place of their service. Thus a small Jewish community was established in Finland, consisting in 1870 of about 400 Jews originating from areas that today are part of Russia and Lithuania. The means by which they could earn a living in Finland were severely restricted. Starting in 1872 the Finnish Diet discussed the legal status of Jews several times.

imgDesc: The commercial area known as the Jewish Market, Helsinki, ca. 1900. Photograph by Leo Lubinsky. (YIVO)

text: Russian Empire

text: Lithuania

text: Soviet Union

text: assimilation

text: Maccabi

text: Orthodox

text: Antisemitism

text: Zionism


title: Chernivtsi

abstract: City in southwestern Ukraine, lying on the Prut River. Chernivtsi (Rom., Cernăuți; Ger., Czernowitz; Yid., Tshernovits) is the current capital of the Chernivtsi region. The presence of Jews there was first mentioned in 1408. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the number of Jewish inhabitants increased significantly. During this period the Jews mainly spoke Yiddish and were active as traders. The kahal (community), led by an elected judge and a rabbi, enjoyed limited autonomy and the right to its own jurisdictions.

imgDesc: Reform Synagogue, Czernowitz, ca. 1915. Construction was completed in 1878; the synagogue was destroyed by German and Romanian forces in 1941. (YIVO)

text: Ukraine

text: kahal

text: Ḥayim Tyrer

text: Hasidism

text: reform

text: assimilation

text: Orthodox

text: Zionism

text: Czernowitz Conference

text: Galicia

text: Romania

text: Ukraine

text: Poland

text: Bessarabia

text: ghettos

text: Transnistria

text: USSR

text: Eliezer Shteynbarg

glossary: kahal Talmud


title: Vámbéry, Ármin

abstract: (1832–1913), explorer, ethnographer, diplomat, and spy. Born Hermann Wamberger (Bamberger) in Szenthyörgy, Ármin Vámbéry attended heder and yeshiva as well as the Protestant elementary school in Dunaszerdahely from age eight. He was a tailor’s apprentice for a short time. Due to a dislocated hip, his left leg was paralyzed when he was a small child; he used crutches and later a walking stick for the rest of his life. He never completed high school.

imgDesc: Engraving depicting Ármin Vámbéry on one of his expeditions to Central Asia. From Central-asien (Central Asia), by Friedrich von Hellwald (Leipzig: Spamer, 1874). (General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

text: heder

text: yeshiva

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Zionist

glossary: heder yeshiva


title: Eynhorn, Dovid

abstract: (1886–1973), poet and publicist. Dovid Eynhorn was born in Karelitsh and educated in Wołkowysk (now Volkovysk, Belarus) in part by his father Binyomin, a military physician who had “returned to the faith” and become a government-appointed rabbi. In his younger years, Eynhorn wrote in Hebrew. His first Yiddish poems were published mainly in the Bundist press. The failure of the 1905 Revolution was a pivotal point in his life, since he came to perceive literature as a reply to politics.

imgDesc: Letter from Israel Joshua Singer to Dovid Eynhorn, 1927. From Israel Joshua Singer in Warsaw to Dovid Eynhorn in Paris (?), 8 November 1927. Singer has just completed a novel and when he has written something shorter, he will send it to Eynhorn for publication. He refers to a literary journal that Eynhorn and Lyakhover want to get off the ground in Warsaw and says that, in his opinion, it will not succeed unless the editorial board is based in Warsaw. Lyakhover will not be able to edit it from afar. Though the honoraria the journal will offer will be attractive to out-of-work Jewish writers in Warsaw and there is a need for a new journal of Yiddish literature, the venture has little chance of succeeding and will require a great deal of capital. Yiddish. RG 277, David Einhorn Papers, F20. (YIVO)

text: Belarus

text: Yiddish literature

text: Kletskin

text: Vilna

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Bund

text: Radom

text: Warsaw

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Hasidism

text: Melech Ravitch

text: Russia

text: communism

text: assimilation


title: Schulman, El‘azar

abstract: (1837–1904), Hebrew short-story writer, journalist, and Yiddish researcher. El‘azar Schulman was born in the district town of Kretinge, in the Kovno province of Lithuania. In 1867, he published a two-part novel, Ha-‘Ovdim veha-nidaḥim (The Lost and the Lonesome), in imitation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. When the book received negative reviews, Schulman destroyed most of the printed copies.

text: Lithuania

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Russia

text: El‘azar Brodskii

text: Kiev

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Ha-Asif

text: Ha-Zeman

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Melits

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Haskalah


title: Esterke

abstract: Heroine of a Polish and Jewish folk legend about a Jewish woman’s relationship with Casimir the Great, King of Poland (r. 1310–1370). According to the chronicle of Jan Długosz (1415–1480), Esterke was Casimir’s mistress who persuaded him to invite Jews to Poland; he also granted them extensive privileges. The story claims that the couple had four children, two boys raised as Christians and two girls raised as Jews. In 1334, Casimir did, in fact, extend privileges that had been first granted by Bolesław of Kalisz.

text: Poland

text: Kalisz

text: David Gans

text: Radom

text: Lublin

text: purim-shpil

text: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon


title: Gottlieb, Maurycy

abstract: (1856–1879), artist. Among the founders of modern Jewish art, Maurycy Gottlieb is prized in Poland as one of the most talented students of the great national artist Jan Matejko. Born in Drohobycz, Galicia (mod. Drogobych, Ukraine), Gottlieb was sent by his father to a German-language elementary school and to the Polish high school in his native city. Throughout his life German was Gottlieb’s chief language. His Jewish education was not extensive, though he attended heder.

imgDesc: Jews Praying in the Synagogue on the Day of Atonement. Maurycy Gottlieb, 1878. Oil on canvas. Tel Aviv Museum of Art. (Gift of Sidney Lamon. Tel Aviv Museum of Art)

text: Poland

text: Galicia

text: Drogobych

text: Ukraine

text: heder

text: Kraków


title: Rebetsin

abstract: The Yiddish term rebetsin was the most prestigious title available to Jewish women. Its simplest definition is the wife of a rabbi, though the term also connotes a pious woman, a woman with good lineage, or a woman learned in religious matters. In Eastern Europe, rebetsins developed reputations for piety, scrupulous observance, religious leadership, and concern for the poor. Just as their rabbi husbands often emerged as community leaders, so too did rabbinic wives serve as important figures in the towns and villages of the region.

imgDesc: Nekhame Zlate Golezynski, wife of Rabbi Peysekh; he was head of the Łomża yeshiva, Łomża, Poland, 1923. (YIVO)

text: piety

text: Sabbath

text: holiday observances

text: tkhines

text: Yisra’el of Kozhenits

text: Lubavitch

text: Hasidim

text: Russia

text: Ḥayim of Volozhin

text: Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin

text: Volozhin yeshiva

text: yeshiva

text: shtetl

text: Yitsḥak Rubinstein

text: Vilna

text: Chaim Grade


title: Beilis, Mendel

abstract: (1874–1934), chief protagonist of the 1911–1913 Kiev blood libel case, referred to as the Beilis Affair. Little is known about Mendel Beilis beyond the fact of his association with the case. Raised in a village, he served in the Russian military and settled in Kiev around 1897. Though he was thrust into the limelight after he was indicted for the ritual murder of 12-year-old Andrei Iushchinskii, Beilis himself did not feature centrally in the affair.

imgDesc: “Mendel Beilis.” Postcard commemorating the blood libel trial of Mendel Beilis, ca. 1911. Artwork by Mitchell Loeb. The Yiddish verse reads: “Oh! This is the martyred Jew / Now his name is known around the world / He languished for years in prison / In the dark land of pogroms . . .” (YIVO)

text: blood libel

text: Kiev

text: Iakov Maze

text: Moscow

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Russia


title: Rubinshteyn, Ruvn

abstract: (1891–1967), jurist, journalist, and public figure. Ruvn Rubinshteyn had a traditional religious education and graduated from the Kagan Jewish Secondary School in Vilna. In 1910, he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he graduated from the law faculty of Saint Petersburg University and also attended the Jewish seminars for oriental studies of Baron David Gintsburg. In 1913 he joined the Organization of Zionist Student Youth He-Ḥaver. From August 1917 to February 1918 he edited Evreiskii student (Jewish Student), and from January to August 1918, the Zionist daily Unzer togblat (Our Daily Newspaper). For a time, Rubinshetyn served as secretary to Moisei Aizenshtadt, the Saint Petersburg crown rabbi.

text: Vilna

text: Saint Petersburg

text: David Gintsburg

text: crown rabbi

text: Zionist

text: Russia

text: Moscow

text: Kovno

text: Di idishe shtime

text: Lithuania

text: General Zionists

text: Poland


title: Kipnis, Itsik

abstract: (1896–1974), Yiddish fiction writer. Itsik Kipnis was born into a family of craftsmen in Sloveshne, Ukraine. As a child, he studied at heder and with private teachers; he later worked with his father as a tanner. In 1920, Kipnis went to study in Kiev, where he met Dovid Hofshteyn, who became his literary mentor. Kipnis’s first publications were children’s literature and a book of poems titled Oksn (Oxen; 1923) that celebrated modern, urban existence with an optimistic tone and minimalist poetic language. However, his real entry into the world of Soviet Yiddish literature was his first book of fiction, Khadoshim un teg: A khronik (Months and Days: A Chronicle), which was published with an introduction by Yitskhok Nusinov (1926).

imgDesc: O-A, by Itsik Kipnis. (Minsk: Tsenterfarlag, 1929). Illustration by Zfania-Gedali Kipnis. The work includes two stories for older children. (Hillel Kazovsky)

text: Ukraine

text: heder

text: Kiev

text: Dovid Hofshteyn

text: children’s literature

text: Yiddish literature

text: Yitskhok Nusinov

text: shtetl

text: pogroms

text: Soviet Union

text: Holocaust

text: Warsaw

text: Eynikayt


title: Revisionist Zionists

abstract: Political party, also known in Hebrew as Berit ha-Zohar; formally called the Union of Zionist Revisionists. The inaugural conference of the Revisionist Zionist party took place in Paris in April 1925, headed by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Though most of the delegates were local Zionists of Russian extraction who had been involved in Jabotinsky’s struggle to set up a Jewish Legion during World War I, a minority came from other countries.

imgDesc: A meeting of Revisionist Zionists, Kaunas, ca. 1930s. Photograph by A. Bajer. (YIVO)

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky

text: Zionists

text: Land of Israel

text: Riga

text: Latvia

text: Yosef Trumpeldor

text: Betar

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Warsaw

text: Romania

text: Czernowitz

text: ghetto

text: Białystok

text: Vilna


title: Fejér, Lipót

abstract: (1880–1959), mathematician. Lipót Fejér was born in Pécs, Hungary. Though he had difficulty with mathematics in elementary school, Fejér excelled at this subject in high school. In particular, he mastered problems presented in the monthly journal Középiskolai Matematikai Lapok (Mathematical Journal for Secondary Schools), established in 1893 by Dániel Arany to advance the teaching of mathematics in general and to nurture talented high school students. This journal, thought to be the first of its kind in the world, had a major impact on Hungary’s contributions to mathematics.

text: Hungary

text: Budapest

text: Cluj

text: Transylvania

text: Romania


title: Boskovice

abstract: Town in Moravia in today’s Czech Republic. Boskovice (Ger., Boskowitz) is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Moravia; a Hebrew tombstone from 1069 and a court document dated 1243 attest to the early presence of Jews. The Jewish cemetery dates to at least the sixteenth century. Boskovice’s first synagogue was built in 1698 and was followed by a second synagogue in the next century. A third synagogue, financed by the Löw-Beer family, was built in 1884.

text: Czech Republic

text: Moravia

text: Brno

text: Familiants Laws

text: trade

text: crafts

text: industry

text: Holocaust

text: yeshiva

text: Mikulov

text: Prague

text: Franz Kafka


title: Zbąszyń

abstract: Town 70 kilometers west of Poznań, on the Polish–German border of 1919–1939; population (1938) 5,400, including 360 Germans and 52 Jews. From November 1938 to August 1939 Zbąszyń housed a transit camp for Jews expelled from Germany during the so-called Polenaktion (27–29 October 1938).

imgDesc: Refugees at an entrance to a stable set up as an emergency shelter, Zbąszyń, Poland, ca. 1938. (YIVO)

text: Poznań

text: Joint Distribution Committee

text: Emanuel Ringelblum

text: Poland


title: Sommerstein, Emil

abstract: (1883–1957), Polish Zionist leader. Born near Tarnopol, Sommerstein studied law at Lwów University and established a legal practice. Active in Zionist student organizations, he became president of the Zionist Federation of East Galicia after World War I. In 1922 he was elected to the Polish Sejm (the lower house of parliament), serving until 1927 and again from 1929 through 1939.

imgDesc: Delegates at a Zionist convention, London, 1945. (Front row, from left) Yitsḥak Zuckerman, Ḥaykah Grossman, Emil Sommerstein, Leib Salpeter, [?] Meler. (Back row, left to right) Abba Hillel Silver, Mosheh Kleinbaum-Sneh, Yitsḥak Grünbaum, Unidentified. (Middle row) Mosheh Sharett, Naḥum Goldmann. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Zionist

text: Tarnopol

text: Lwów

text: Galicia

text: Leon Reich

text: Poland

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: communism

text: Central Committee of Polish Jews

text: Holocaust

text: Soviet Union


title: Bacher, Vilmos

abstract: (1850–1913), Talmudic scholar, orientalist, and rector of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. A descendant of the eighteenth-century German rabbi Ya’ir Ḥayim Bacharach, and a son of Hebrew poet Simon Bacher (Bacharach), Vilmos (Wilhelm) Bacher was born in Liptószentmiklós (now Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia), a region in which traditional rabbinic culture was relatively open to secular ideas.

text: Seminary

text: Budapest

text: Simon Bacher

text: Slovakia

text: Breslau

text: Budapest

text: Ignác Goldziher

text: Hungary

text: Magyar Zsidó Szemle


title: Szabolcsi, Miksa

abstract: (1857–1915), journalist and editor. Born Miksa Weinstein in [Nyír] Tura, Szabolcsi studied at yeshivas in Kemecse, Újfehértó, Érmihályfalva, Püspökladány, and Vác. Later he was a private tutor for children of prominent Jewish families (including Mór Wahrmann and Ignác Einhorn) and in 1877 he enrolled in the newly founded Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary. He left the seminary after one semester, however, and became a journalist. Szabolcsi first wrote for Debreczeni Ellenőr, where he covered the Tiszaeszlár blood libel trial (1882–1883) and received much acclaim. The proceedings had a major influence on his career. Szabolcsi wrote in Hungarian, Hebrew, and German.

text: Mór Wahrmann

text: Ignác Einhorn

text: Seminary

text: Hungary

text: Tiszaeszlár blood libel

text: Orthodoxy

text: antisemitism

text: Zionist


title: ‘Ivri, Ha-

abstract: (Also ‘Ivri anokhi), weekly Hebrew publication, issued between 1865 and 1890. In order to avoid the difficulty of obtaining a license for a weekly publication, the editors employed the common tactic of alternating the title each week between Ha-‘Ivri (The Hebrew) and ‘Ivri anokhi (I Am a Hebrew) as if they were two different biweeklies, which would not face the same licensing restrictions. The journal appeared in 26 annual volumes, and was published mainly in Lwów. Volumes 3 through 6 were published in Brody.

text: Lwów

text: Brody

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: Russia

text: Ha-Melits

text: Orthodoxy

text: Haskalah

text: Ha-Magid

text: Warsaw

text: David Frishman

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Land of Israel

text: Zionist

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Mordekhai David Brandstetter

text: Ayzik Meyer Dik

text: Shelomoh Mandelkern

text: David Frishman

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr


title: Becal

abstract: (More fully, Jakub Becal, son of Natan; Heb., Ya‘akov Betsal’el ben Natan), factor of Polish King Jan III Sobieski (1629–1696). Probably hailing from Ruthenia, Jakub Becal is said to have lost his father in the Khmel’nyt’skyi uprising, though in court files from 1676 Becal’s home is given as Dybów near Toruń.

text: Lwów

text: Zhovkva

text: ḥazakah

text: kahal

text: lessees

text: servants

text: Lublin


title: Birobidzhaner Shtern

abstract: Yiddish-language social and political newspaper established in 30 October 1930 in the future city of Birobidzhan. When Birobidzhan was formally declared a Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) in 1934, the approximate circulation of Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan Star) was 500 copies. These numbers rose to 1,500 in 1939, but fell to less than 1,000 in 1950. In 1970 circulation numbered 12,000 (according to official data), and in 1991, after the newspaper’s partial shift to Russian (in September 1990), the maximum totals were 4,000.

text: Birobidzhan

text: USSR

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

text: Moscow

text: Khayim Beider

text: Arn Vergelis

text: Emmanuil Kazakevich

text: Yoysef Kerler

text: Yisroel Emyot


title: Alexander, Bernát

abstract: (1850–1927), philosopher, aesthetician, literary scholar, and educator. Bernát Alexander completed his high school studies at the Royal Catholic Gymnasium in Pest, Hungary, where he befriended József Bánóczi, with whom he later collaborated on scholarly projects. Alexander’s parents wanted him to become a physician; he himself briefly considered a rabbinical career before choosing to become an educator.

text: Hungary

text: József Bánóczi

text: Budapest

text: Múlt és Jövő


title: Natonek, Yosef

abstract: (1813–1892), rabbi and early Zionist. Yosef Natonek attended yeshiva in Komárom with Pinḥas Leib Frieden, in Nikolsburg with Neḥemyah Naḥum Trebitsch until 1835, and in Ungvár for the year 1836. Although he never studied at the yeshiva of Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer) as is often stated, he did apparently obtain ordination in Pressburg. He turned to trade and during the revolution of 1848–1849 supplied livestock to the Austrians and then to the Hungarian forces at the fortress of Komárom, where he settled in 1849. Later, he was issued a certificate of good conduct addressed to the Austrian authorities stating that during the revolution he had not “budged a hairsbreadth” from the path of loyalty.

text: Zionist

text: yeshiva

text: Nikolsburg

text: Neḥemyah Naḥum Trebitsch

text: Mosheh Sofer

text: Pressburg

text: trade

text: Hungary

text: Ben Chananja

text: Leopold Löw

text: Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer

text: Leopold Kompert

text: Budapest

text: Orthodox

text: Hungary

glossary: yeshiva Yishuv Neolog Talmud


title: Agnon, Shemu’el Yosef

abstract: (1888–1970), Hebrew writer; Nobel laureate in literature. Shemu’el Yosef Agnon (formerly Czaczkes) was born in Buczacz, a small town in eastern Galicia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule. He left his hometown permanently when he was 20, but Buczacz and Galicia had a place in his literary work for the rest of his life. “Although forty years had passed since Dr. Langsam had left his birthplace, he still talked about it all the time,” says Agnon, as if describing himself but referring to one of the characters in his novel Sipur pashut (A Simple Story; 1935).

imgDesc: Shemu’el Yosef Agnon, Lwów, ca. 1908. ARC. 4° 1270. (Agnon Archive, The Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem)

text: Buczacz

text: Galicia

text: heder

text: kloyz

text: bet midrash

text: Hebrew literature

text: prose

text: poetry

text: Lwów

text: Gershom Bader

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Zionism

text: Kraków

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: prose

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Warsaw

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Hasidism

text: Misnagdim

text: Poland

text: Avraham Yosef Stybel

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Franz Kafka

text: Holocaust

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

glossary: heder rebbe Yishuv Misnagdim Diaspora


title: Mandel’shtam Osip Emil’evich

abstract: (1891–1938), Russian poet, prose writer, and literary essayist. Most of Osip Mandel’shtam’s new writings went unpublished in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era (1929–1953) and were almost unknown to generations of Russian readers until the mid-1960s. Mandel’shtam (also spelled Mandelstam) grew up in Saint Petersburg in a middle-class Jewish household. His father, a native of Riga, had abandoned rabbinical training for a secular education in Germany; Mandel’shtam’s mother, Flora Werblowsky, was a cultivated member of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia of Vilna.

text: Soviet Union

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Riga

text: Vilna

text: Russia

text: Finland

text: conversion

text: Moscow

text: antisemitism

text: Russian literary criticism and scholarship

text: Nadezhda

text: Russia

text: Nadezhda Mandel’shtam


title: Rabinovich, Osip Aronovich

abstract: (1817–1869), writer and editor. Osip Rabinovich, who came from a Russified family, studied at Kharkov University before becoming a notary in Odessa. In the latter city, he published a Russian translation of a Hebrew poem (1847), as well as articles in which he alternately criticized Jewish traditionalism and Russian society for its prejudices about Jews.

text: Kharkov

text: Odessa

text: Russian Empire

text: Pale of Settlement

text: Razsvet

text: Sholem Aleichem


title: Soviet Yiddish-Language Schools

abstract: During World War I, politically progressive elements among Polish Jewish refugees in Russia, together with local leaders, established a number of schools in which Yiddish was the language of instruction. In 1914, Russian law, which had previously prohibited Yiddish-language schools, was changed to legalize such institutions. The number of schools increased rapidly, and textbooks and pedagogical manuals began to appear.

imgDesc: “The Old School Turned Out Slaves. The Soviet School Prepares Healthy, Skilled People, Builders of the Socialist Order. The Heder Leads to Store, Synagogue, Hatred between Peoples. The Soviet School Leads to Factory, Land, Cooperation between Peoples.” Yiddish poster. Printed in USSR, ca. 1920s. (The Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California)

text: Russia

text: February Revolution

text: Ukraine

text: Kultur-lige

text: Soviet

text: Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs

text: Evsektsiia

text: Belorussia

text: Iurii Larin

text: Yiddish literature

text: shtetls

text: Lithuania

text: Vilnius

text: Kaunas

text: antisemitic

text: Birobidzhan


title: Singer, Bernard

abstract: (1893–1966), Polish journalist and parliamentary correspondent. Bernard Singer (who reversed the letters of his name to form the pseudonym Regnis) came from a middle-class, Polonized family and graduated in 1910 from the Kronenberg Commercial High School in Warsaw. He then studied Polish literature and history at the Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych (Society of Academic Courses) and the Wolna Wszechnica Polska (Free Polish University) in Warsaw.

text: Warsaw

text: Folkist Party

text: Łódź

text: Zionist

text: antisemitism

text: Haynt

text: Nasz Przegląd

text: Vilna

text: Latvia

text: Poland


title: Brainin, Re’uven

abstract: (1862–1939), Hebrew critic, biographer, short-story writer, and feuilletonist. Born in Liady, Mohilev province, Re’uven Brainin was part of a learned Jewish family, and he first intensely followed the route of traditional text study. At age 17, however, he was profoundly influenced by Haskalah texts, including Avraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tsiyon (The Love of Zion).

imgDesc: Author Re’uven Brainin in a portrait from the frontispiece of Shriften (Writings), a collection of his works (Warsaw: Ferlag Hashakhar, 1910). (YIVO)

text: Haskalah

text: Avraham Mapu

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Ha-Shaḥar

text: Nathan Birnbaum

text: Sha’ul Yisra’el Hurwitz

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Haskalah

text: Yehudah Leib Gordon

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Mark Antokol’skii

text: Sha’ul Tchernichowsky

text: Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf

text: Ahad Ha-Am

text: Birobidzhan

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

glossary: Haskalah Gaon


title: Blecher, M.

abstract: (1909–1938), writer. Max Blecher (he signed his works “M. Blecher”) was born in Botoşani, Romania, and spent his childhood and adolescence in Roman, where his family settled, and where there was a large Jewish community. The son of Lazăr Blecher, a businessman who owned a china shop, he attended high school in Roman and was an active member of the Maccabi Zionist association.

text: Botoşani

text: Romania

text: Roman

text: Maccabi

text: Braşov

text: shtetl

text: Kishinev

text: Bucharest


title: Bin

abstract: Jewish youth movement that functioned between 1927 and 1937, mainly in the Vilna district and the city of Vilna. Bin (Bee), whose name derives from the original intention of shaping the movement as a structured hierarchical system similar to that of a beehive, was a movement for children and young people (ages 8 to 17). The movement also included a level of senior members, who served primarily as leaders. Its founders were Yiddishist culture activists whose political tendencies were Folkist-socialist; Max Weinreich, who headed the movement, had the most profound impact on its character. Throughout its existence, the movement had a total membership of several thousand.

imgDesc: Members of the Bin (Bee) Jewish youth movement with founder and leader Max Weinreich (in white shirt and white tie), physician Tsemaḥ Szabad (center, with cane), and other adults, Vilna, before 1935. (YIVO)

text: youth movement

text: Vilna

text: Folkist

text: Max Weinreich

text: sport

text: YIVO

text: Poland

text: Birobidzhan

text: USSR


title: Gruzenberg, Oskar Osipovich

abstract: (1866–1940), lawyer, communal advocate, and chief counsel of Mendel Beilis. Born in Ekaterinoslav, in 1876 Gruzenberg moved with his family to Kiev, where he attended a Russian gymnasium. Upon earning a law degree from Saint Vladimir University in 1889, Gruzenberg moved to Saint Petersburg to begin his profession. Despite his talents, he remained an apprentice lawyer until 1905 because of a government decree that admitted non-Christians to the bar only by personal authorization from the minister of justice.

imgDesc: Commemorative postcard celebrating the role played by lawyer Oskar Osipovich Gruzenberg (right) and Rabbi Iakov Maze (left) in the acquittal of Mendel Beilis, a Jew accused of murdering a Christian boy in Kiev in 1911 for ritual purposes. Postcard printed by H. Goldberg, ca. 1920. (YIVO)

text: Mendel Beilis

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Kiev

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Leon Trotsky

text: pogroms

text: Kishinev

text: Minsk

text: blood libel trials

text: Vilna

text: Mendel Beilis

text: Razsvet

text: Russia

text: Voskhod

text: Odessa

text: Riga


title: Epstein Family

abstract: Bankers and industrialists in Warsaw. Jakub Epstein (1771–1843) was a merchant, Polish army officer, and Freemason. His sons Josef (1795–1876), Adam (1799–1870), Jan (1805–1885), and Herman (1806–1867) all played leading roles in the economic and social life of the Polish Kingdom. Herman’s sons Mikołaj (1831–1902) and Mieczysław (1833–1914) continued in these roles as well.

text: Bankers

text: industrialists

text: Warsaw

text: philanthropy

text: religious reform

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Lemberg

text: Kronenberg


title: Hajós, Alfréd

abstract: (1878–1955), Olympic champion and architect. Alfréd Hajós (born in Budapest as Arnold Guttmann) came from a working-class Hungarian Jewish family; in his youth he converted to Christianity. The word first summarizes and characterizes Hajós’s athletic career. He won the 100-meter and 1,200-meter swimming championships in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. With this achievement he was not only Hungary’s first Olympic champion, but also the first in the world, as swimming had not been part of the ancient Olympic Games. From 1898 to 1904, he was also on the team that won the first Hungarian soccer championship. Although he stopped competing in 1904, he remained active in the sporting world, and led the Hungarian Soccer Association in 1905 and 1906.

imgDesc: Alfréd Hajós at the first modern Olympic Games, Athens, 1896. (IOC/Olympic Museum Collection)

text: Budapest

text: Hungary

text: Cluj

text: Romania

text: Debrecen

text: Slovakia

text: sport


title: Kohn, Abraham

abstract: (1807–1848), rabbi and preacher. Born in Zalužani, Bohemia, Abraham Kohn completed his secondary and religious schooling; he later took courses in philosophy at the University of Prague. Ordained as a rabbi in 1832 by Shemu’el Landau and the two Bohemian district rabbis, in 1833 he was appointed rabbi of Hohenems, a town in which many of the Jews were already progressive in their outlook. Kohn established an artisans’ society and invested his efforts in youth education. During his tenure, the synagogue established a choir, but his attempts to abolish the custom of selling Torah honors on the Sabbath were unsuccessful.

text: Bohemia

text: Prague

text: Sabbath

text: religious reform

text: Wrocław

text: Lemberg

text: rabbinate

text: Galicia


title: Shtern

abstract: The Workers’ Society for Physical Education “Shtern” traced its roots to a sports group known as Spartakus, which was established in Warsaw by the Labor Zionist youth organization Yugnt in 1920. In 1923, Spartakus united with a group known as Gwiazda (Star), composed of middle-school students; this new entity then began to refer to itself as the Shtern (Star) Workers’ Sport Club. The club’s formation in the Polish capital provided impetus for the establishment of similar groups elsewhere in the country. A Shtern group formed in Łódź around 1925, and in Kraków in 1928. In 1937—when there were 190 branches of Maccabi and 107 branches of Morgnshtern (the Bundist movement for physical education) in Poland—the Shtern movement was made up of 44 local organizations.

imgDesc: “First Shtern assembly in Poland, Warsaw, 31 May–2 June 1933.” Polish/Yiddish poster. Printed by Wzorowa, Warsaw, 1933. (YIVO)

text: sports

text: Warsaw

text: Yugnt

text: Łódź

text: Kraków

text: Maccabi

text: Morgnshtern

text: Poland

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Zionism

text: Stanisław (Shepsel) Rotholc

text: Brest


title: Shemu’el ben Yisakhar Ber Segal

abstract: (d. ca. 1817), Hebrew printer of kabbalistic, Hasidic, halakhic, and ethical works. Shemu’el ben Yisakhar Ber Segal was a major Hebrew-language printer in Poland–Russia at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In the third and final volume of his edition of the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides (Berdichev, 1817), which appeared shortly before Segal’s death, prominent rabbis testified that he had trained generations of printers and was “the father of all printing craftsmen.” He carried out his career in six cities, sometimes in several at the same time.

text: Poland

text: Russia

text: Brody

text: Hasidic movement

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye

text: Dov Ber

text: Shklov

text: Ostróg

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

text: Berdiche

text: approbations

text: Levi Yitsḥak

text: Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim of Sudilkov

text: Tuviah Feder

glossary:
Torah
Maimonides
Magid
Zohar
Mishnah
Talmud
Gemara
Kabbalah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
maskil


title: Vendrof, Zalmen

abstract: (1877–1971), Yiddish writer. Born in Slutsk, Belorussia, into a family of a ritual slaughterer, Zalmen Vendrof (commonly rendered Zalman Wendroff) received a traditional Talmudic education and studied with private teachers, but ultimately failed his secondary school examinations. From the age of 16, he lived in Łódź, where he worked at a factory. From the early 1900s, Vendrof traveled the world, trying different jobs such as peddling, teaching, and typesetting. His peripatetic youth included a stint in England (1901–1905), a brief spell in Moscow as an English teacher (1905), and another period as a Yiddish journalist in America. In London, he became a friend of anarchist leader Rudolf Rocker and wrote for anarchist Yiddish periodicals.

imgDesc: Postcard from Zalmen Vendrof to Lazar Kahan, 1913. From Zalmen Vendrof in Warsaw to Lazar Kahan in Łódź, 29 December, 1913. He agrees with Kahan that a performance is possible but, candidly speaking, it will be impossible to find an appropriate writer in Warsaw: they are all either incapable of reading in front of an audience or are unpresentable in other ways. A singer, and maybe a spoken word performer (deklamator) would be better options, along with Vendrof and Menakhem Kipnis. Yiddish. Yiddish, Polish, and Russian letterhead: Haynt, Warsaw, Chłodna 8. RG 422, Lazar Kahan Papers, F Vendrof. (YIVO)

text: Slutsk

text: Łódź

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: Warsaw

text: Haynt

text: prose

text: Vilna

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Zionist

text: Habimah

text: Moyshe Litvakov

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sovetish heymland

text: Stanisław Wygodzki


title: Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen

abstract: (ca. 1621–ca. 1662), author of Sifte Kohen (1646–1647); an important and influential halakhic authority known as Shakh. Shabetai was born in Amstibovo, Lithuania, to a well-known rabbinical family. His father and grandfather served as rabbis in important communities; his father-in-law was a wealthy grandson of Mosheh Isserles. Though he quotes his father, and less frequently his teachers—Yehoshu‘a Heshel ben Yosef of Kraków and Yehoshu‘a Heshel ben Ya‘akov of Lublin—it appears that most of his scholarship was independently acquired.

text: Lithuania

text: Mosheh Isserles

text: Yehoshu‘a Heshel ben Yosef

text: Kraków

text: Lublin

text: pogroms

text: Nemirov

text: Vilna

text: Mosheh Lima

text: Moravia

text: David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
Shulḥan ‘arukh


title: Feitelson, Menaḥem Mendel

abstract: (1870–1912), Hebrew literary critic. Born in a village in Crimea, Menaḥem Feitelson received a traditional and secular education from his father, a maskil who worked as a melamed. In 1884, while still an adolescent, Feitelson published articles and impressions in the local press. He then turned to literary criticism as the main focus of his writings. Feitelson’s most significant early essays were about Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh; 1891) and Ben-Avigdor (Avraham Leib Shalkovich; 1893). In 1891, he issued his only published book, a booklet titled Meḥkarim be-divre yeme Yisra’el (Studies on Jewish History). At various points he lived in Melitopol, Ukraine, as well as in Galicia and Austria.

text: Hebrew literary critic

text: Crimea

text: Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh

text: Avraham Leib Shalkovich

text: Ukraine

text: Galicia

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Perets Smolenskin

text: Mendele Moykher-Sforim

text: Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Sholem Asch

text: Dovid Pinski

text: Hersh Dovid Nomberg

text: Warsaw

text: Odessa

text: Fishel Lachower

text: Pale of Settlement

glossary:
maskil
melamed
Pale of Settlement


title: Sokolow, Naḥum

abstract: (1859–1936), journalist, writer, and Zionist leader. Born in Wyszogród, Poland, Naḥum Sokolow grew up in the town of Płock. He received a comprehensive Jewish education as well as a thoroughly secular one largely as a result of his own efforts. By 1874, he had published his first articles in the Hebrew press. After his marriage in 1876, Sokolow settled in the town of Maków, and that same year published articles on scientific subjects in the newspaper Ha-Tsefirah.

imgDesc: Naḥum Sokolow, Warsaw, ca. 1890. (YIVO)

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: Ha-Melits

text: Warsaw

text: Land of Israel

text: Ha-Asif

text: Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski

text: Izraelita

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Chaim Weizmann

glossary:
Tsadik
“Uganda” debate


title: Handelsman, Marceli

abstract: (1882–1945), historian. Coming from a Polonized Jewish family, Marceli Handelsman married the daughter of Józef Kernbaum, a well-known Warsaw Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. Handelsman’s own paternal uncle had been the commander of the insurgents in the Gostynin district during the 1863 uprising.

text: Warsaw

text: Revolution of 1905

text: Poland

text: Emanuel Ringelblum


title: Health and Healing

abstract: The approach of the East European Jewish population to health care made no distinction between what would now be considered “scientific” medicine and “folk” medicine. This openness to combining folk remedies and magical cures with modern medical techniques was typical of Hasidim and Misnagdim alike, of both the learned and the illiterate. From the late seventeenth century on, physicians with “Western” training together with health care reformers emerging from the developing Jewish bourgeoisie attempted to reshape the popular attitude toward health care.

imgDesc: Two visiting nurses from the school of nursing at the Jewish hospital, knocking on the door of an outpatient, Warsaw, 1939. (YIVO)

text: Misnagdim

text: Poland

text: amulets

text: magic

text: ba‘ale shem

text: Hasidism

text: charity

text: Russia

text: Daugavpils

text: Latvia

text: Uman

text: Ukraine

text: Haskalah

text: Odessa

text: Saint Petersburg

text: OZE

text: TOZ

text: Poland

glossary: Misnagdim Kabbalah rebbe tsadik Haskalah

subconcepts: Professionalization and Nationalization of Jewish Medicine


title: Weiner, Richard

abstract: (1884–1937), Czech poet, prose writer, and journalist. Weiner’s parents ran a distillery and confectionary in southern Bohemia; Richard, the oldest of five children, studied chemistry and was expected to take over the family business. At the age of 27, however, he abandoned this promising career to devote himself to writing; in 1912 he moved to Paris, where he would launch his journalistic career, and soon published two volumes of poetry.

text: Bohemia

text: Jiří Orten


title: Kreizer, Iakov Grigor’evich

abstract: (1905–1969), army general. Iakov Kreizer was born in Voronezh, the son of a petty trader. He completed a road construction course and for a while worked as a foreman. In 1921, Kreizer joined the Soviet army and fought against antigovernment military insurgents. After completing his studies at the Voronezh Infantry School, he was appointed platoon commander of a unit in the Moscow garrison. Kreizer joined the Communist Party in 1925. Over a period of slightly more than 13 prewar years, he followed a steady course that led him from platoon commander to commander of the Moscow Proletarian Division.

text: Moscow

text: Communist Party

text: Crimea

text: Belorussia

text: Lithuania

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: USSR


title: Labor Camps

abstract: Installations established by the Nazi regime during World War II for exploiting forced laborers, including Jews. Forced laborers worked in hundreds of camps that were built individually or in clusters, usually situated next to concentration camps. Such was the case in Auschwitz, Stutthof, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, and Mauthausen. SS leader Heinrich Himmler was determined to concentrate Jews in closed camps in order to exploit the Jewish labor potential. An increasing dearth of available working hands prompted Hitler to decree in November 1941 that every person in occupied Europe could be subject to labor service.

text: killing centers

text: Hungary


title: Gordonia

abstract: A Zionist youth movement, Gordonia was established in 1923 in Galicia. By 1925, local youth organizations merged to form a regional movement. From the time of its founding, its acknowledged leader and ideologue was Pinḥas Lubianniker (Lavon; 1904–1976), who established Gordonia after he left Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa‘ir in disagreement with its ideological developments.

imgDesc: Members of Gordonia saying farewell to a comrade, Jakov Miler, at the railroad station, upon his departure to Palestine, Kaunas, 1938. As the Hebrew inscription notes, the photograph was taken “on the seventh day of Adar, on Thursday morning, 9:40 am.” Photograph by Judelio Milero. (The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum/Israel)

text: Zionist

text: youth movement

text: Galicia

text: Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa‘ir

text: Aharon David Gordon

text: land of Israel

text: Poland

text: Bucovina

text: Romania

text: He-Ḥaluts

text: Galicia

text: Hit’aḥadut


title: Vilenkin, Leyzer

abstract: (1894–1985), Yiddish linguist. Born in Horodok, Belorussia, into a poor family, Leyzer Vilenkin worked in Kharkov from 1912. In 1917 he moved to Petrograd, where he studied pedagogy, literature, and linguistics at several institutions, including Leningrad (previously Petrograd) University from 1921 to 1925. Simultaneously between 1923 and 1927, he taught at an orphanage and a secondary school. Vilenkin was a research student at the Leningrad Institute for Literature and Languages of the East and West from 1926 to 1929. Subsequently, from 1929 to 1931 he worked at the Yiddish Institute of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences.

text: Belorussia

text: Kharkov

text: Petrograd

text: Mordkhe Veynger

text: Minsk

text: Pale of Jewish Settlement

text: Ukraine

text: Moscow

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Leningrad

text: Sovetish heymland


title: Szép, Ernő

abstract: (1884–1953), poet, novelist, playwright, and journalist. In a letter written to fellow writer Gyula Krúdy, the young Ernő Szép lamented: “Why did I have to be poor and Jewish?” The son of a schoolteacher and one of nine children, Szép was born in the multiethnic town of Huszt in the Subcarpathian region, now part of Ukraine, which had a sizable, mostly Orthodox Jewish population. Szép was one of a number of Hungarians of humble Jewish origin who by the early years of the twentieth century had established themselves as poets, journalists, and artists in the burgeoning capital city of Budapest.

text: Subcarpathian

text: Ukraine

text: Budapest

text: Hungary


title: Karni, Yehudah

abstract: (1884–1949), Hebrew poet. Yehudah Karni was born in Pinsk and received a Hebrew and general education. At the age of 13 he published his first poem, “Gemul ha-meshorer” (The Poet’s Recompense; 1897) in Ha-Tsefirah and continued to write poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish for the organs of the Zionist socialist Po‘ale Tsiyon movement. His true “arrival” as a poet came when his piece “Yesh na‘arah temimah” (There Is an Innocent Young Girl) was published by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik in Ha-Shiloaḥ in 1909.

text: Pinsk

text: Ha-Tsefirah

text: poetry

text: Zionist

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Vilna

text: Odessa

text: Alter Druyanow

text: USSR

text: Ya‘akov Fichmann

text: Ya‘akov Cahan

text: Zalman Shneour

text: Ya‘akov Steinberg

text: Yitsḥak Katzenelson

text: David Shimonovitz


title: Rabinowicz, Oskar K.

abstract: (1902–1969), educator, journalist, and Zionist politician. Oskar Rabinowicz was born in Aspern, Austria, but was raised in Boskovice, Moravia. His father, a Hebrew teacher and cantor, had grown up in the household of the Sadegora rebbe but gave his son a secular education.

text: Zionist

text: Boskovice

text: Brno

text: Prague

text: Naḥum Sokolow

text: Max Hickl

text: Selbstwehr

text: Zionist Revisionism

text: Vladimir Jabotinsky


title: Berlewi, Henryk

abstract: (1894–1967), painter, graphic designer, typographer, and critic. Henryk Berlewi was a leading figure among constructivist artists in Poland in the 1920s. Though his fame rests on his posters, book jackets, and page designs in Yiddish and Hebrew, he is also known for his advanced constructivist paintings, drawings, and especially his cutting-edge graphic designs based on his theory of Mechano-faktura. He published studies on art in Yiddish, Polish, and German.

imgDesc: Portrait of Uri Tsevi Grinberg. Henryk Berlewi, Warsaw, 1922. The drawing appeared in Grinberg’s book of poetry, Mefisto (Warsaw: Farlag “Literatur-fond” baym Fareyn fun Yidishe literatn un zshurnalistn in Varshe, 1922). (Joe Fishstein Yiddish Poetry Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library)

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Aleksander Wat

text: Yung-yidish

text: Dybbuk

text: Khalyastre

text: Perets Markish

text: Uri Tsevi Grinberg

text: El Lissitzky


title: Hartglas, Apolinary

abstract: (1883–1953), Zionist, attorney, and Polish parliament deputy. Born in Biała Podlaska, Apolinary Hartglas came from an assimilated Jewish family. From 1892 to 1900, he attended a Russian high school and subsequently studied law at the Russian University in Warsaw, graduating in 1904. While a student he joined the rapidly growing Zionist movement in the Polish Kingdom, editing, with Yitsḥak Grünbaum, the first Zionist journals there: Głos Żydowski (Jewish Voice) and Życie Żydowskie (Jewish Life).

text: Zionist

text: Warsaw

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: Poland

text: Haynt


title: Câmpulung Moldovenesc

abstract: Town in northeastern Romania, situated in southern Bucovina, currently in the county of Suceava. The early Jews who lived there—mainly small tradesmen but also farmers—were first mentioned in 1684. Following the occupation of Bucovina by the Austrian army in 1774, there were 46 Jews recorded as residing in Câmpulung; however, measures implemented by the authorities to prevent Galician Jews from settling there led to the banishment of eight Jewish families from Câmpulung in 1781.

imgDesc: The Great Synagogue, Câmpulung Moldovenesc, 2006. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber. (Courtesy of the photographer)

text: Romania

text: Bucovina

text: Suceava

text: Zionist movement

text: Transnistria

text: ghettos

text: Cernăuți


title: Schick, Barukh ben Ya‘akov

abstract: (1744–1808), rabbinic scholar of mathematics and natural sciences, popularly known as Reb Barukh of Shklov. Schick was the son of the rabbi of Shklov and the nephew of Aryeh Leib Gintsburg of Minsk (author of the Sha’agat Aryeh), one of the foremost rabbinic authorities in eighteenth-century Poland–Lithuania. Schick moved to Minsk in 1760, received rabbinic ordination, and served as a dayan (rabbinic judge) and parnas (leader) of the Minsk kahal. In his youth, he pursued the study of science and Latin as well as Talmudic studies and Kabbalah.

text: Shklov

text: Aryeh Leib Gintsburg

text: Minsk

text: Poland–Lithuania

text: kahal

text: Haskalah

text: Gaon of Vilna

text: Vilna

text: Belorussia

text: Hasidic

text: Prague

text: Jeitteles family

text: Shklov

text: Saint Petersburg

glossary: kahal Kabbalah Zohar Maimonides Haskalah Gaon Torah


title: Shneur Zalman of Liady

abstract: (ca. 1745–1812), Hasidic leader and founder of Ḥabad Hasidism, the branch promulgated by the Lubavitch movment. Shneur Zalman was born in Liozno (Liazna, Belarus); when he was about 20, he was attracted to Hasidism. He joined the bet midrash of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, for a number of years, studied Kabbalah with him, and regarded him as his master. After the Magid’s death, Shneur Zalman became an associate of Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk, a senior colleague and teacher.

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

text: Hasidism

text: Lubavitch movment

text: Belarus

text: bet midrash

text: Dov Ber

text: Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk

text: Land of Israel

text: Avraham of Kalisk

text: Pale of Settlement

text: money

text: Misnagdim

text: Vilna

text: Gaon

text: Shklov

text: Passover

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Pinsk

text: Russia

text: Pale of Settlement

text: conversion

text: Shulḥan ‘arukh

glossary:
Ḥabad
Magid
Kabbalah
tsadik
rebbe
Pale of Settlement
Misnagdim
Gaon
Torah
Lurianic Kabbalah
Shulḥan ‘arukh
Zohar


title: Shlifer, Solomon Mikhailovich

abstract: (1890–1957), rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue. Born in Smila, Kiev province (now Smela, Cherkassy province), Solomon (Shelomoh) Shlifer worked as a rabbi in Aleksandria, later Aleksandrovka (Kherson province), from 1913 to 1922. He then moved to Moscow, where he became secretary to the city rabbinate and served as a dayan (rabbinic judge) until the Moscow rabbinic court was liquidated at the end of the 1920s. From then until 1943 Shlifer worked as a bookkeeper.

text: Moscow

text: Kiev

text: Shemaryahu Yosef Leib Medal’e

text: Soviet Union

text: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

text: Doctors’ Plot

text: Kol Ya‘akov Yeshiva

text: charity

text: Passover

glossary: Yeshiva mikveh Talmud Torah


title: Opatów

abstract: (Apt), a town between Kraków and Lublin in Małopolska (Little Poland) dating back to the twelfth century. In 1502, Opatów was sold by the Lubusz bishops to noble owners, who permitted Jewish residence from 1538. Eighty Jews paid a poll tax in 1578, making Opatów one of the largest Jewish communities in central Poland. In 1618, Jews owned 60 of the town’s 185 houses, and sources mention a Jewish school and hospital. A separate Jewish district had probably been established by that time.

imgDesc: Jewish boys selling pottery in the marketplace, Opatów, Poland, 1924. (Forward Association / YIVO)

text: Kraków

text: Lublin

text: Poland

text: kahal

text: Gdańsk

text: Prague

text: Warsaw

text: kloyz

text: Apter

text: Me’ir ha-Levi Rotenberg

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Tarbut

text: Po‘ale Tsiyon

text: Bund

text: Silesia

glossary:
Council of Four Lands
kahal


title: East Slavic Texts

abstract: Two groups of literary works were translated from Hebrew into East Slavic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first group, earlier and shorter than the other, consists mainly of historical accounts integrated into Russian compilations, that is, into universal chronicles called chronographs. Notable among these are excerpts from the tenth-century Hebrew Yosipon (an anonymous Hebrew chronicle based on the works of Josephus Flavius) in the Akademicheskii Khronograf (Academy Chronograph) describing, for example, Zerubbabel and King Darius, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem, the persecutions under Antiochus Epiphanes, and the Maccabean revolt. Also among these is a complete translation of a later reworking of the last part of the Yosipon, preserved in Hebrew in a single manuscript dated to 1462, recounting the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. In Slavic, the latter is titled Plenenie Ierusalima Tretee, Titovo (The Third Sacking of Jerusalem, by Titus) and is integrated into the second redaction of the Ellinskii i Rimskii Letopisec (Hellenic and Roman Chronicler). The Paleia Tolkovaia (Interpreted Palaea) includes a translation of the Zhitie i voskhod Moiseia (Chronicle of Moses Our Teacher).

text: Ukraine

text: Belarus

text: Vilnius

text: Judaizers

text: Moscow

text: Lithuania

text: magic

text: Kiev

text: Crimea

text: Judaizers

glossary: Talmud Maimonides

subconcepts: The Link between the Translations and the Muscovite Heresy

subconcepts: A Possible Motivation for the Translations


title: Possession and Exorcism

abstract: The concept of possession by and exorcism of deceased souls (dibukim; dybbuks) who inhabited the bodies of unwilling hosts is based on the kabbalistic concept of gilgul (transmigration), found in the Zohar and other medieval sources. ‘Ibur neshamah (soul impregnation) is a related concept also found in kabbalistic sources; it refers to the penetration of a kabbalist’s soul by the additional soul of an ancient sage who aids him in a spiritual quest. ‘Ibur neshamah was valued as a positive, highly prized form of possession.

text: Land of Israel

text: Hasidism

text: Prague

text: ba‘ale shem

text: Ba‘al Shem Tov

text: S. An-sk

text: The Dybbuk

text: cinema

glossary: Zohar tsadik


title: Lippe, Karpel

abstract: (Natan Petaḥyah ben Barukh Mosheh Lipa; 1830–1915), physician, writer, and Zionist activist. Karpel Lippe was born in Tyśmienica (near Stanisławów, Galicia) into a traditional family. Influenced by the ideas of the Haskalah, he stopped preparing for the rabbinate and decided to study medicine. Unable to complete his program, in 1860 he moved to Iaşi and worked as a secondary physician at the Israelite Hospital. He finally received his medical degree from the University of Erlangen in Germany, and practiced in Iaşi, where he helped the poor and was the first Romanian physician to give free consultations at designated hours.

text: Zionist

text: Stanisławów

text: Galicia

text: Haskalah

text: rabbinate

text: Iaşi

text: Ha-Magid

text: Lev Pinsker

text: antisemitism

text: assimilation

text: Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein

text: Katowice

text: Isaak Rülf

text: Iacob Isac Niemirower

text: Przemyśl

glossary:
Haskalah
Talmud
Yishuv
Ḥoveve Tsiyon


title: Bersohn, Mathias

abstract: (1824–1908), banker, art collector, and patron. Mathias Bersohn (Berson) managed a sugar refinery set up by his father, Me’ir Bersohn (1801–1873), and founded a private bank. As a young man, Bersohn began to invest in Polish art and Judaica, ultimately amassing one of the most important private collections of such objects. From the mid-1860s, he also began to collect Polish Jewish handicrafts.

text: Warsaw

text: synagogues

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Kraków


title: Kleinbaum, Moyshe

abstract: (1909–1972), Zionist leader and publicist. Moyshe Kleinbaum (Sneh) was born in Radzyn Podlaski, Poland, to a traditional Zionist family. In 1935, he graduated as a physician from the University of Warsaw. During his college years he had chaired the Warsaw Zionist youth organization Jardenia, while at the same time starting his career in journalism and public affairs. In 1931, he was appointed editor of Nowe Słowo, a Zionist daily, which was issued as a weekly under the title Opinia after 1933.

text: Zionist

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: Opinia

text: Yitsḥak Grünbaum

text: General Zionists

text: Haynt

text: Poland

text: Bund

text: Vilna


title: Pap, Károly

abstract: (1897–1945), Hungarian writer. The third child of Miksa Pollák (1868–1944), rabbi of Sopron, Károly Pap was 17 and attending high school when World War I broke out. He volunteered and served as an officer on the Italian front. His earliest drama, Leviát György (George Leviát), written in 1926 but first published only seven decades later, depicts the war as experienced by various types of assimilating Jews against the background of a hostile and prejudiced society.

text: Múlt és Jövő

text: József Patai

text: Aladár Komlós

text: assimilation

text: communism

text: Zionism

text: Hungary

text: Seminary

text: Hungarian literature

text: Budapest

text: labor camp


title: Radomsk Hasidic Dynasty

abstract: The Hasidic dynasty of Radomsk (Radomsko) dates from 1843, when the town’s communal rabbi, Shelomoh ha-Kohen Rabinowicz (Rabinovich; 1803–1866; appointed rabbi in 1834), began to conduct himself as a Hasidic rebbe. Rabinowicz had been trained in the more popular wing of Polish Hasidism, following those disciples of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the Seer of Lublin) who did not join the Pshiskhe–Kotsk school. These included Me’ir of Apt (Opatów; d. 1827/31) and Yisakhar Ber of Radeshits (Radoszyce; 1765–1843).

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

text: Hasidism

text: Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz

text: Lublin

text: Pshiskhe–Kotsk

text: Me’ir of Apt

text: Opatów

text: Łódź

text: Aleksander

text: Warsaw

glossary: rebbe Torah


title: Leśmian, Bolesław

abstract: (1877–1937), poet and essayist. The great-grandson of Antoni Eisenbaum, director of the Warsaw Rabbinical School, Leśmian (whose last name originally was Lesman) was baptized in 1887. He spent his youth in Ukraine where, in 1901, he earned a law degree from the University of Kiev. After returning to Warsaw, he was active in the city’s literary life, joining a circle of modernist writers gathered around the journal Chimera, co-funding and directing the innovative Artistic Theater, and traveling extensively in Europe. During the interwar period he worked as a notary in Hrubieszów and Zamość. In 1933, Leśmian was elected to the Polish Academy of Literature.

text: Antoni Eisenbaum

text: Warsaw

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Zamość

text: prose

text: Yiddish literature

text: mysticism


title: Bader, Gershom

abstract: (1868–1953), author, playwright, editor, and journalist in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Polish. Gershom Bader was born in Kraków and was a representative figure of the mid-nineteenth-century East European Haskalah. He was the son of a learned melamed (teacher), descendant of a line of prominent rabbis, and a scholar who wrote novels under a pseudonym.

text: Kraków

text: Haskalah

text: Sofer

text: Orthodox

text: Esriel Hildesheimer

text: Kolomyia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Land of Israel

text: Lemberg

text: Galicia

text: Poland

text: Ha-‘Ivri

text: newspapers and periodicals

glossary: Haskalah melamed


title: Jewish Confederation of Ukraine

abstract: Established in 1999, the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine (Evreiskaia konfederatsiia Ukrainy; EKU) is an association of national, regional, and local organizations with a focus on “philanthropy, the reconstruction of the Jewish national way of life, and the support of humanitarian values.” It was set up by four umbrella organizations: the Union of Jewish Religious Organizations of Ukraine (Ob”edinenie Iudeiskikh Religioznykh Organizatsii Ukrainy; OIROU), the Society for Jewish Culture / Jewish Council of Ukraine (Obshchestvo Evreiskoi Kultury / Evreiskii Sovet Ukrainy; ESU), the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities-VAAD of Ukraine (Assotsiatsiia Evreiskikh Organizatsii i Obshchin–VAAD Ukrainy; VAAD-AEOOU), and the Kiev City Jewish Community.

text: Ukraine

text: Kiev

text: Babi Yar


title: Daniel’, Iulii Markovich

abstract: (1925–1968), fiction writer, poet, translator, and Soviet dissident. Born in Moscow, Daniel’ went from school directly to the front lines of World War II, where he was wounded and demobilized. Upon his return, he graduated from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute and began publishing his poems and translations. Beginning in the 1950s, he smuggled his works to the West, where they were issued under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. In the fall of 1965, this activity led to his arrest, as well as to the arrest of his fellow writer Andrei Siniavskii, a non-Jew who had published abroad under the Jewish-sounding name Abram Terts. In February 1966, Daniel’ was sentenced to five years in labor camp, an experience reflected in his poetry. His works were not officially published in Russia until after his death.

text: Moscow

text: Russia

text: samizdat

text: pogroms

text: Aleksandr Ginzburg

text: samizdat


title: Trokenheim, Ya‘akov

abstract: (1888–1943), merchant; leader of the Warsaw kehilah and Agudas Yisroel; and member of the Polish Sejm and senate. Born in Warsaw to an affluent Hasidic family whose members were followers of the Gerer rebbe, Ya‘akov Trokenheim received a traditional education while also learning Russian and Polish. Following his marriage, he became involved in the textile trade and managed his family’s considerable real estate holdings, located in the center of Warsaw’s Jewish district.

text: Warsaw

text: Agudas Yisroel

text: Gerer rebbe

text: trade

text: Mojżesz Schorr

text: Zionists

text: Poland

text: Vilna

text: Soviet Union

text: Białystok

glossary: kehilah rebbe


title: Shapiro, Kalonymus Kalmish ben Elimelekh of Piaseczno

abstract: (1889–1943), Hasidic master and educational theorist; communal leader of special prominence during the Holocaust. Son of Elimelekh Shapiro of Grodzisk and a descendant of Yisra’el Hapstein (the Magid of Kozhenits [Pol., Kozienice]), Kalonymus Kalmish Shapiro was the rabbi of Piaseczno, a small town just outside Warsaw; he later moved his main residence to Warsaw.

text: Hasidic

text: Holocaust

text: Yisra’el Hapstein

text: Warsaw

text: yeshiva

text: Hillel Zeitlin


title: Aronsohn, Zalman Yitsḥak

abstract: (1878–1947), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Zalman Aronsohn, known by the pseudonym Anokhi (“I Am”), was born in Liady, Belorussia, where his father served as rabbi and head of a yeshiva. Anokhi studied at the Telz yeshiva and with a circle of Musar scholars in Minsk; he then lived for a period of time in Gomel, dedicating himself to secular studies and associating with Hillel Zeitlin, Uri Nisan Gnessin, and Yosef Ḥayim Brenner. Anokhi then moved to Odessa, where he was arrested and jailed for six months because of his involvement with a group of anarchists. Following his release, he left for Vilna before traveling around Europe, and even spent a year in Palestine (1910–1911).

imgDesc: Letter from Zalman Yitsḥak Aronsohn to Shmuel Niger, ca. 1913. From Zalman Yitsḥak Aronsohn (Anokhi) in Dubbeln (near Riga, Lat.) to Shmuel Niger in Vilna, ca. 1913, saying that he feels isolated, "far from the literary world." Aronsohn was completely preoccupied with the recent trial of Mendel Beilis. He couldn't sleep or work and wondered "what sort of world" he was in. But now he is back at work and hopes to be able to come to Vilna for a couple of days to show Niger what he is writing. He complains that he has not received recent issues of Di yudishe velt and Der pinkes. Yiddish. RG 360, Shmuel Niger Papers, F56. (YIVO)

text: yeshiva

text: Telz yeshiva

text: Musar

text: Minsk

text: Gomel

text: Zeitlin

text: Uri Nisan Gnessin

text: Yosef Ḥayim Brenner

text: Odessa

text: Vilna

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

text: Y. L. Peretz

text: Mordekhai Ze’ev Feierberg

text: Gershom Shofman

text: Moscow

text: prose

glossary: yeshiva Musar


title: Dickstein, Szymon

abstract: (1858–1884), early Polish socialist, writer, and editor. Szymon Dickstein, who used the pseudonym Jan Młot, was born in Warsaw to a lower middle-class Jewish family. In 1872, he completed gymnasium and then studied medicine at Warsaw University. Even as a university student, Dickstein took an active role in illegal socialist circles.

text: Warsaw

text: Russia

text: Bund


title: Vohryzek, Viktor

abstract: (1864–1918), physician, writer on ethics and sociology, journalist, translator, and a leading figure in the Czech Jewish Movement. After completing gymnasium, Viktor Vohryzek studied at the faculty of medicine at Prague University, where he was awarded his degree in 1887. In the course of his studies, he was active in Spolek Českých Akademiků Židů (Association of Czech Academic Jews). Following his studies, he moved to Vodňany, where he set up his own medical practice with a specialty in psychology.

text: Prague

text: Českožidovské listy

text: Eduard Lederer

text: assimilation

text: Czech lands

text: Orthodoxy

text: conversion


title: Belmont, Leo

abstract: (1865–1941), writer, poet, and translator. Leo Belmont (Leopold Blumental) graduated from the University of Warsaw and practiced law in Saint Petersburg and Warsaw. A well-known publicist before World War I, he was harassed by tsarist authorities for his radical views. He wrote for the Polish and Polish Jewish press, cooperated with the assimilationist weekly Izraelita, and edited the democratic weekly Wolne Słowo (Free Word; 1907–1913). He also wrote film reviews and screenplays. Belmont was a founder of the Polish Esperanto Society, and he translated extensively into that language and strove to popularize it.

text: Warsaw

text: Saint Petersburg

text: Izraelita

text: Salomon Maimon

text: assimilation

text: Zionism


title: Brandstaetter, Roman

abstract: (1906–1987), poet, playwright, prose writer, and translator. Roman Brandstaetter studied philosophy and Polish literature in Kraków, earning a doctorate for a thesis on Adam Mickiewicz in 1932. Two years of research in Paris (1929–1931) resulted in the publication of Legion żydowski Adama Mickiewicza (Adam Mickiewicz’s Jewish Legion; 1932). Initially, Brandstaetter actively participated in Polish literary life, publishing, among other things, literary guidelines for the generation of Polish poets entering the literary scene during the interwar period. In the early 1930s, however, he became more closely associated with Jewish national circles, joining the editorial board of Opinia, a Zionist weekly where he published his manifesto on Polish Jewish poetry.

text: Kraków

text: Opinia

text: Vilna

text: Poland

text: Zionism

text: Haskalah

text: Mordekhai Brandstetter


title: Tal’, Mikhail Nokhem’evich

abstract: (1936–1992), eighth world chess champion. Born in Riga, Mikhail Tal’ learned to play chess from his father, a physician, at the age of seven. A meeting with chess master Aleksandr Koblents (1916–1993) played a decisive role in his life. His brilliant career started when he was 21, when he won the first of his six USSR chess champion titles. Tal’ became the youngest world champion in chess history after winning the title from Mikhail Botvinnik in 1960; however, he lost the return match against Botvinnik the next year. Nevertheless, his legendary skill in creating elaborate strategic combinations granted Tal’ a unique place in the chess pantheon.

text: chess

text: Riga

text: USSR

text: Mikhail Botvinnik

text: Zionists

text: Ida Kaminska

text: Warsaw


title: Komoly, Ottó

abstract: (1892–1945), architect and Zionist leader. Ottó Komoly was born as Ottó (Nathan) Kohn into a middle-class family in Budapest. His father participated in the First Zionist World Congress in Basel in 1897, and Ottó followed his example by becoming a Zionist. Komoly served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Because he earned medals for bravery and was a reserve captain, he was exempted from discriminatory anti-Jewish laws. Komoly became deputy chairman of the Hungarian Zionist Association in 1940, and in 1941 was chairman of the organization. He wrote two books on Zionism: A zsidó nép jövője (The Future of the Jewish People; 1919), and Cionista életszemlélet (Zionist View of Life; 1942).

text: Zionist

text: Budapest

text: Holocaust

text: Hungary

text: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee


title: Újvári, Péter

abstract: (1869–1931), writer, journalist, and editor. With his multifaceted ties to the religious communities of Pozsony (Bratislava) and Galicia, and his isolated Jewish upbringing, Péter Újvári was fundamentally different from the assimilated Jews whose trials and tribulations are well recorded by Hungarian Jewish and even non-Jewish writers. Újvári was the first Hungarian Jewish writer who wanted to write specifically Jewish prose in Hungarian. While he had few admirers, those who did appreciate his work thought of him as the Hungarian Sholem Aleichem or Sholem Asch, or even as the Jewish equivalent of the great Hungarian writers Kálmán Mikszáth and Mór Jókai.

text: Bratislava

text: Galicia

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Sholem Asch

text: yeshiva

text: Miskolc

text: Hungary

text: assimilation

text: conversion

text: Cluj

text: Slovakia

text: Košice


title: Ámos, Imre

abstract: (1907–1945), painter. Imre Ámos’s birthplace, Nagykálló, was the first center of Hungarian Hasidism, and the memory and legend of its famous rabbi, Yitsḥak Isaak Taub and his remarkable song, “Szól a kakas már” (Hear the Sound of the Rooster), persist today. Because of his father’s early death, Ámos was raised by his maternal grandfather, the town’s melamed. He completed his studies at the School of the Arts in Budapest, and his initial experiments with style followed the decorative manner of the Nabi group.

text: Hasidism

text: Budapest

text: angels

text: Marc Chagall

text: Holocaust

text: Imre Kertész

glossary: melamed rebbe


title: Hostovský, Egon

abstract: (1908–1973), novelist. The youngest of eight children, Egon Hostovský was born in Hronov, a northeast Bohemian town of about 30,000 people, into a family that owned a small factory. He left university in 1930 to work as a journalist and editor at various publishing houses; he was also one of the editors of the Kalendář českožidovský (Czech Jewish Almanac) from 1931 to 1937. By his mid-twenties, he had already established himself as a major writer, and his Žhář (The Arsonist) won the state prize for literature in 1935.

text: Prague

text: Jindřich Kohn

text: memory


title: Rozental-Shnayderman, Ester

abstract: (1902–1989), Yiddish educator, journalist, and memoir writer. Ester Shnayderman (Shneyderman; Shneiderman; Rosenthal) was born in Częstochowa, Poland. After receiving a primary education at a Russian elementary school and passing external examinations for secondary education, she studied at Warsaw University and worked at the Central Yiddish School Organization (TSYSHO). In 1926, she was sent to the Soviet Union, where she soon began to work with Yoysef Liberberg, director of the Kiev-based Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (IJPC). Like many other activists in the left wing of the Labor Zionist movement, which had been her initial ideological affiliation, she joined the Communist Party. As a graduate student, she headed the Communist Party organization at the IJPC, later becoming a research fellow at the institute’s Pedagogical Section and also lecturing at the Kiev Pedagogical Institute.

text: memoir

text: Poland

text: Warsaw

text: TSYSHO

text: Soviet Union

text: Yoysef Liberberg

text: Kiev

text: Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture

text: Birobidzhan

text: Lithuania

text: Poland

text: Yiddish literature

text: Meir Wiener

text: Maks Erik

text: Nokhem Shtif

text: Elye Spivak


title: Lewinsky, Elḥanan Leib

abstract: (1857–1910), Hebrew writer. Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky was born in Podberez’ye (Pol., Podbrodzie; mod. Lith., Paberžė), on the outskirts of Vilna, though during his childhood his family moved to Gilwan in the Kovno region. He received an intensive Talmudic education under his father’s supervision, but at the same time was given the opportunity to read Haskalah literature in Hebrew. Lewinsky was especially impressed with the writings of Mosheh Leib Lilienblum and with the latter’s struggle against the Lithuanian rabbinate then taking place in the nearby town of Wilkomir (Ukmergė). As an adolescent, Lewinsky spent short periods of time studying in Wilkomir and Kovno, and from 1874 he taught in Vilna and in other towns in the provinces of Minsk, Chernigov, and Ekaterinoslav.

text: Vilna

text: Haskalah

text: Mosheh Leib Lilienblum

text: rabbinate

text: Kovno

text: Minsk

text: Ekaterinoslav

text: Kharkov

text: pogroms

text: Russia

text: Ḥibat Tsiyon

text: Zionist associations

text: Odessa

text: Ha-Melits

text: Sholem Aleichem

text: Yehoshu‘a Ravnitski

text: Yiddish literature

text: Hebrew literature

text: Ha-Shiloaḥ

glossary:
Haskalah
Ḥoveve Tsiyon