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.
Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaust
There was a rumpled old Polish man who boarded in the apartment of our building’s superintendent. With baggy pants, fraying suspenders, a wrinkled hat, and a wooden cane, he looked like the lovable…
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
Sally and her friends were in the playhouse in Sally’s backyard. It wasn’t a baby kind of playhouse for dolls. It was a big sturdy house that her father and Douglas had built. It was painted white…
Seated Male Figure
This is a modern artist’s illustration of a painting of a seated male in profile, perhaps an enthroned dignitary. The painting was made on a potsherd from Ramat Rahel. It measures around 5 × 3 inches…
Cosmetic Implements
These cosmetic implements from Gibeon include a limestone bowl decorated with small, incised circles and two bronze spatulas. Tweezers for plucking hairs have also been found.
Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic
[…] That we in Israel are in need of a dose of Jewish soul—that this, as much as sheer survival, with which it is in no small way connected, is a pressing issue of our existence—I readily concede. But…
Holiness of the People
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them:
You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.
You shall each revere his mother and his…
How to Draw Guidance from a Heritage: Jewish Approaches to Mortal Choices
The progress made by medical science over the last half century has been astounding. In the area of therapeutic medicine alone, developments have been nothing short of miraculous. […] Life-support…
Psalm 6
For the leader; with instrumental music on the sheminith. A psalm of David.
O Lord, do not punish me in anger, do not chastise me in fury.
Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I languish; heal me, O Lord…
He Cast a Look and Went Mad
He Cast a Look and Went Mad depicts traditional East European Jews in some sort of religious setting. It invokes in its title the classic talmudic legend of the sage who “looked and was injured” when…
Mortality
Though Jacob Steinhardt came to be best known for his woodcuts depicting biblical and Jewish subjects, this print, made during World War I, evokes the horrors he witnessed on the battlefield. Much of…
An Order Concerning Rations
To Elyashib: And now, give to the Kittim 1 bath and 3 hin of wine and write the date. And from the surplus of the best flour you shall load 1 kor (?) to make bread for them. From the wine of the…
Imprisonment of Jewish Leaders
[To my brother PN, your brother Islah.
It is well for me here]. May the gods seek after your welfare at all times. And now, . . . PN son of PN went to Syene and did/made . . . .
Behold, these are the…