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.
An Old Song
Where pain weeps, it is the Jew who weeps.
Where a bullet is fired, it is the Jew who falls.
—Why is the dog barking near the fence?
—Someone threw a rock at him, at the Jew’s dog.
We…
Conversation with Piotr Rawicz
Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky is without question the most forceful of recent novels written about the fate of Jews in Nazi Europe. There has been rare critical unanimity in this respect. To find…
A Soviet Shtetl
Like every shtetl Medzibosz has a main street, and side streets and back streets. Nowadays the old hunched little huts have mostly vanished, and there are new houses in their place—not everywhere.
Thi…
Voices in the Darkness
No one paid any attention to Aronek. He took a piece of bread from the cupboard, chose the largest carrot, and went to the neighbors.
At the widow Gitel’s it was warm and clean. From the ceiling hung…
Mixed Marriage
Shortly before Paris was occupied, Maurice had me return to my native Morocco.
My parents—my dear parents whom I loved so much and whom I never saw again—were, alas, dead. The other members of the…
Temptation
Nathan, the shoemaker from Porisov, a small Jewish village in Poland, came home one evening shortly before his departure for Colombia with a Torah scroll under his arm. With a slight shiver, he lay…
I Did Not Interview the Dead
A few days before the surrender of Germany, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, sent out a call to American newspaper editors which may be…
Of Change and Adaptation in Judaism
Midrash [ . . . ] is not mere reference to the past: it is the enlistment of the past in the service of the present. Even more specifically, it is a reinsertion into the present of the original divine…
A Child of the Century
The Readers Digest Magazine broke the American silence attending the massacre of the Jews in February, 1943. It printed my article called “Remember Us,” based on Dr. [Hayim] Greenberg’s data. Reading…
A Memorial Synagogue
The Painter had a different personality. A tiny Polish Jew, he was famous as a creator of wonderful whimsical animals. He said:
“For my part I wanted to use stained glass. But the architect says we…
Eli, the Fanatic
Inside the house they took their seats. Though it was lighter than a few evenings before, a bulb or two would have helped. Eli had to hold his briefcase towards the window for the last gleamings. He…
Sefer kise Shelomoh (Solomon’s Throne)
When our teacher Rabbi Solomon, who was a rabbi here in Aleppo, passed away without any male children, the rabbis [of the city] consulted among themselves, and with the elders of the people and the…