Toybe Pan

Toybe Pan is known for her tekhine, a supplicatory liturgical poem in Yiddish, written during a catastrophic outbreak of plague in Prague in 1679/80. Calling on God to stop the devastation, the tekhine was published twice under slightly varying titles, initially, most likely, during the epidemic. The author identifies herself, in its concluding stanza, as Toybe, wife of Jacob Pan, daughter of Leib Pitzker. She was one of a growing number of female Yiddish authors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who built, in part, on the legacy of predecessors like Rivke Tiktiner.