Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Eternal Wanderers
At first Eternal Wanderers seems like an abstract assemblage of colorful shapes. A closer look, however, reveals a group of people, young and old, with mask-like faces, teetering on tilting ground…
Costume Design for Dovid Bergelson’s The Deaf One
In the wake of the Russian Revolution and the lifting of restrictions on Jewish publishing, Jewish theater companies revolutionized theater and scene design and experimented with modernist approaches…
Sports in Israel: Discus Thrower
This photograph of a discus thrower refers to the Zionist idea of “muscular Judaism,” in which the “new” Jew would celebrate and cultivate the body, sports, and physical fitness. When Grschebina…
Father and Sons
Yosl Bergner was only twenty-one years old and living in Australia when he painted this bleak picture. Many of his paintings were drawn from memories of his childhood in Warsaw but he also portrayed…
Illustration to Y. L. Peretz’s A gilgul fun a nigun
Arthur Kolnik dedicated his illustrations of Y. L. Peretz’s story, “A gilgl fun a nign” (The Transmigration of a Melody), to his brother, who, along with his family, was murdered in the Holocaust…
Dancers Resting
The female figure, especially dancers, were a favorite subject for Moses Soyer. He was especially inspired by Edgar Degas and Honoré Daumier, whose paintings he had the opportunity to examine…
Portrait of Leo Lehmann
Leo Lehmann (1782–1859) was the father of the popular portrait artist Rudolf Lehmann. Here he depicts his father, a painter and printmaker (and his son’s first art teacher) at work, with the tools of…
Ghetto and Emancipation
The history of the Jews in the last century and a half has turned about one central fact: that of Emancipation. But what has Emancipation really meant to the Jew? The generally accepted view has it…
In Praise of the Hebraists in America
Like a sparse string of lights, scattered but connected
belonging to a strange and darkly snowy train station
that suddenly pops up among the winter fields,
forgotten somewhere between New York and…
A Cityful of Jews
The man was a ferment of intelligence and emotion. He could not grow accustomed to the conventional life of the common herd. He thought differently from all the others and disliked collective thinking…
How We Found the Manuscripts of the Martyred Writers
A people that forgets its dead is condemned to decay—Jules Guesde
We will never forget our dead. They still live among us and in our thoughts.
For that reason, immediately after the Liberation, we…
A Memorial and a Witness
Pinkes Varshe is a memorial erected by the immigrants from Warsaw in Argentina in honor of those generations of Warsaw Jews who, with their lives and struggles, with their heroism and spirituality…