Discoveries
Every evening the watch investigates one entity after another; every day its findings enter the Great Books.
Every evening our agents take up the site’s entities one by one — a lineage, a great figure, a great work, a community, a place, a theme — and search in thirteen languages through archives, scholarly publications and digitised collections for what is still missing. Here, an old piece of information never yet brought to the site counts as a good find. Every verified discovery is poured into the Great Book it enriches — and when that book does not yet exist, it brings it into being. Dated news from the Jewish world is read in the daily journal.
Lineages
All Great Books →- ReinesManuscriptsSep 14, 2026
The unpublished manuscripts of Rabbi Reines, rediscovered by his descendants and digitized by the National Library of Israel
The eleven works published during the lifetime of Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839-1915), founder of the Mizrachi movement, represented only part of his written work: the bulk remained in manuscript form and, due to a promised publication by a prospective publisher after his death that never materialized, remained largely forgotten for decades. Descendants of the rabbi found these manuscripts, repurchased them, and donated them to the National Library of Israel in memory of Rabbanit Elka Cyperstein. The collection comprises eighty-eight manuscript notebooks in his hand, now digitized and accessible on the National Library website and on Ktiv, the international collection of digitized Hebrew manuscripts. One of these notebooks, titled "Yalkut Arakhim", brings together sermons (drashot) dated from 1908 to 1911. Rabbi Reines had married in 1859 Elke Rachel, daughter of Rabbi Joseph Reisen of Horodok; their documented children include Moshé Reines (1870-1891), a talmudic prodigy who died young, Avraham Dov Ber Reines, who edited and republished part of his father's writings, and a daughter, Gela Reines Rabinovitch. This information, reported by the Israeli press in January 2020, remains unpublished on the website entry.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Le sionisme religieux → - AgnonGenealogySep 14, 2026
S.Y. Agnon's descendants today, and the Agnon Year launched in Ukraine around his native city, Buczacz
The son of writer S.Y. Agnon, Hemdat (born Shalom Mordechai in 1922), a mechanical engineer passionate about diving divided between Jerusalem and Eilat, married Pnina; the couple had at least two daughters, Tamar and Geffen Agnon, the latter married and a mother, attesting to the existence of the writer's great-grandchildren. A portrait published by Haaretz on 14 September 2005 describes Tamar Agnon's complex relationship with her grandfather's legacy, on the occasion of a Tel Aviv tribute combining video art, readings and song. The writer's daughter, Emuna Agnon Yaron (1921-2015), born during her father's extended stay in Germany and wife of Haim Yaron, was designated literary executor at Agnon's death in 1970 and edited several of his posthumous works, including the novel "Shira". Furthermore, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and the Israeli cultural centre Nativ launched at the end of 2025, at the initiative of rector Volodymyr Bugrov — himself a native of Buczacz — the "Shmuel Yosef Agnon Year": five events planned for 2025-2026, including the travelling exhibition "Alien Houses" by artist Matvei Vaisberg (inaugurated on 2 September 2025 in Kyiv, then Odessa, Lviv and Chernivtsi), a conference of Ukrainian and Israeli researchers in November 2025, a trip by students to Buczacz and Satanov in spring 2026 to collect local archives and testimonies, and a closing conference in summer 2026 with student essay competition. Agnon's personal archives — manuscripts, correspondence, photographs of the Nobel ceremony and his gold medal — are held at the National Library of Israel.
- la famille GubbayGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 13, 2026
The genealogical reconstitution of a Sephardic family divided between Aleppo, Baghdad and Calcutta
AvotaynuOnline a publié un article de Lucien Gubbay, « Successful Quest for Ancestors in Aleppo and Baghdad and for Kinsmen in Calcutta », retraçant la reconstitution documentaire d'une branche de la famille Gubbay. L'enquête a établi que plusieurs membres de la famille, déclarés nés à Alep auprès des autorités britanniques, avaient en réalité des attaches à Calcutta, où trois grandes familles d'affaires — les Ezra, les Gubbay et les Elias — dominaient l'espace commercial de la communauté juive baghdadi. L'article documente la scission de la lignée en deux branches, l'une restée à Alep et Bagdad, l'autre installée à Calcutta à partir du début du XIXe siècle, la famille Ezra ayant notamment pour souche Joseph Ezra, arrivé à Calcutta en 1821 en passant par Bombay. Ce cas est représentatif de la difficulté à distinguer, dans les registres coloniaux britanniques, les lignées baghdadi selon leur port d'attache déclaré plutôt que réel.
- gunzbergArchivesSep 12, 2026
The Günzburg Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts Digitized Since 2017
On November 7, 2017, an agreement was signed in Jerusalem between the National Library of Israel, the Russian State Library in Moscow, and the charitable foundation Peri to digitize the Günzburg Collection, held in Moscow since its seizure by Soviet authorities following the 1917 revolution. This library, one of the most important private Jewish collections in Europe, had been assembled by Baron David Günzburg (1857-1910), an orientalist and hebraicist, grandson of the founder of the family bank in Saint Petersburg. It comprises approximately 14,000 printed books and nearly 2,000 manuscripts in Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish, Karaim and Judeo-Tatar, covering the Bible, halakha, the Talmud, kabbalah, philosophy and sciences. A first phase enabled the digitization of 428 manuscripts with their bibliographic records, followed by a batch of 513 additional manuscripts. The digitized documents are made freely accessible, notably via the Ktiv website of the National Library of Israel.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Manuscrits → - vitalGenealogySep 12, 2026
The Calabrian origin of the family of Hayyim Vital, kabbalist of Safed
Rabbi Hayyim (Haïm) ben Joseph Vital was born in Safed on 1 Hechvan 5303 (11 October 1542) and died in Damascus on 23 April 1620; he was the principal disciple and editor of the teachings of Isaac Louria (the Ari). His father, Rabbi Joseph Vital Calabrese, was originally from Calabria, in southern Italy, and had emigrated to the Land of Israel, presumably after the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Naples in the early sixteenth century; he was a maker of tefillin. This Italian origin of the surname "Vital", via the epithet "Calabrese", is confirmed consistently by French, English and Hebrew references. The son of Hayyim Vital, Samuel ben Hayyim Vital (1598-1677), born in Damascus, was himself a recognized kabbalist, who taught Kabbalah to the physician Jacob Zemah in Safed. The mystical autobiography of Hayyim Vital, the Sefer ha-Hezyonot (Book of Visions), was the subject of an annotated translation by researcher Morris M. Faierstein (Jewish Theological Seminary), and extracts from it were republished in the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Vital → - schinaziGenealogySep 12, 2026
Morris Schinasi, born Musa Eskenazi, tobacco magnate born in Manisa
Morris Schinasi was born on 27 April 1855 in Manisa (Magnesia), in the Ottoman Empire, under the name Musa Eskenazi, within a modest Sephardic Jewish family. At the age of nine, suffering from diphtheria, he was treated by a Muslim doctor named Şinasi; his parents, as a sign of gratitude, changed his name in his honour — the origin of the surname "Schinasi", adopted within a generation. Having left Alexandria, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, he emigrated to the United States in 1890. With his brother Solomon, he founded the company Schinasi Brothers, a pioneer of the mechanically rolled cigarette (patent presented at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893); the company was sold in 1916 to the American Tobacco Company for 3.5 million dollars. He married Laurette Ben Rubi in 1903 and had three daughters. He died on 10 September 1928, leaving more than 5 million dollars to charitable works, including a children's hospital in Manisa, which opened in 1933 and remains in operation.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Séfarades → - schinaziGenealogySep 12, 2026
Raymond Schinazi, chemist born in Alexandria, inventor of major antivirals
Raymond F. Schinazi was born on 21 March 1950 in Alexandria (Egypt), within a Jewish family of Italian origin. In 1962, the family's assets were seized as part of Nasserist policy targeting Jews in Egypt; in 1964, the family emigrated to Naples, where it lived for a time in a refugee camp. Raymond Schinazi attended school in England, then obtained a BSc (1972) and a doctorate in chemistry (1976) from the University of Bath, followed by post-doctorates at Yale, Chicago, North Carolina and Emory. A professor at Emory University, he is the co-inventor or inventor of five antivirals approved by the FDA: lamivudine (3TC), emtricitabine (FTC), sofosbuvir (Sovaldi, treatment for hepatitis C), stavudine and telbivudine — more than 94% of HIV-positive people worldwide take at least one of these treatments. In 2023, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem awarded him an honorary doctorate.
- hartGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 12, 2026
Aaron Hart (1724-1800), Jewish pioneer of Canada settled in Trois-Rivières
Aaron Philip Hart was born on 16 August 1724 in London, to parents Yehezkel (Ezekiel) and Judith Hirsh, Jewish immigrants from Fürth (Bavaria) who anglicized their name to "Hart". He entered Montreal in 1760 with the army of General Jeffrey Amherst, then settled in Trois-Rivières in 1761, where he became postmaster in August 1763. Though Ashkenazi, he was a founding member in 1768 of Canada's first synagogue, Shearith Israel, of Sephardic rite, in Montreal. He married Dorothea Catherine Judah in 1768 and had eight children, including future politician Ezekiel Hart. Regarded as one of the founders of the Canadian Jewish community, he died on 28 December 1800 in Trois-Rivières, then reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in British Canada.
- hartGenealogySep 12, 2026
Moses and Aaron Hart, founders of the first Ashkenazi synagogue in London
Moses Hart (born circa 1675 in Breslau, Prussian Silesia, today Wrocław) and his brother Aaron Hart (born in 1670, same city) emigrated to England at the end of the 17th century. Their father, Hartwig Moses Hart, called Naphtali Hertz of Hamburg, was rabbi in Breslau and then in Hamburg. In 1704-1705, Aaron Hart became the first rabbi of the Ashkenazi synagogue in London and is considered the first Chief Rabbi of England; he published in 1707 Urim ve-Tummim, the first work printed entirely in Hebrew in London. Moses Hart, merchant and financier, financed in 1722 the construction of the first permanent building of the Great Synagogue ("Duke's Place Synagogue"), inaugurated for New Year 1722. He intervened in 1744 with King George II on behalf of Jews expelled from Prague, and supported the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753. He was buried in the cemetery at Alderney Road, in London; Aaron died the same year as he did, in 1756.
- les SheftallArchivesSep 11, 2026
Levi Sheftall and one of the earliest addresses from an American Jewish congregation to George Washington (1790)
In May 1790, Levi Sheftall — brother of Mordecai Sheftall and parnas (president) of the Mickve Israel congregation of Savannah — addresses to George Washington on behalf of his community a letter of congratulations for his election to the presidency, hailing the end of "that cloud of bigotry and superstition" under which Jews had long lived. The text is delivered on June 14, 1790 by representative James Jackson (Georgia); Washington responds by evoking divine protection granted to all religious denominations. Several specialized media designate this address as one of the very first, if not the first, sent by an American Jewish congregation to Washington after his election — predating the famous letter from the Newport congregation (Rhode Island) of August 1790. The correspondence, published at the time in the Gazette of the United States (vol. 2, no. 20, June 19, 1790), was the subject of an auction at Sotheby's in 2024-2025 (Barbara and Ira Lipman American Manuscripts collection), which renewed attention to this document.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Congregation Mickve Israel → - les SheftallArchaeologySep 11, 2026
The two distinct Sheftall family cemeteries in Savannah, and a recent ground-penetrating radar survey
Contrary to a reading that would retain only one, there are two distinct Sheftall burial enclosures in Savannah, Georgia. The Mordecai Sheftall Cemetery was established on August 2, 1773 on land granted in 1762 by King George III, with the explicit clause that this land "shall be and remain forever for the use of a place of burial for any person professing the Jewish religion"; it contains approximately eighty-four burials between 1769 and 1881, including Mordecai Sheftall himself, his wife Frances, members of the Lyon and De La Motta families, and Abigail Minis, one of the first Jewish settlers who arrived in 1733. The Levi Sheftall Family Cemetery (also called Cohen Street cemetery), founded separately in 1765 by Levi Sheftall, Mordecai's brother, received burials from 1797 to 1882 before its closure in 1861, and also contains approximately eighty graves. In 2024-2025, the LAMAR Institute conducted, at the request of the Mickve Israel congregation, a ground-penetrating radar survey around the enclosure of Mordecai Sheftall cemetery, covering the approximate boundaries of the 1773 lot division ("Garden Lot 22"); the report (Publication Series no. 243) reports no newly identified unmarked graves in the scanned area, apart from an anomaly of uncharacterized buried debris.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Congregation Mickve Israel → - les MinkowskiGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 11, 2026
The origins of the Minkowski family in Kovno (Aleksotas), before the exile of 1872
Hermann Minkowski (born 22 June 1864) and his older brother Oskar Minkowski (born in 1858) were born in Aleksotas, then in the Suwałki governorate, today a district of Kaunas (Kovno), in Lithuania. Their father, merchant Lewin Boruch Minkowski, financed a substantial part of the construction of the great choral synagogue of Kovno, completed in 1873, on land that he himself had ceded to the Jewish community. Their mother was named Rachel Taubmann. To escape persecution in the Russian Empire, the family emigrated to Königsberg in 1872. The eldest son, Max, subsequently managed with his father the firm "Lewin Minkowski & Son", first in the rag trade then in the manufacture of mechanical tin toys. Hermann Minkowski became the mathematician founder of spacetime geometry; Oskar, the physiologist co-discoverer of the role of the pancreas in diabetes.
- les SheftallArchivesSep 11, 2026
Beyond Biography: The Sheftall Family Registers and Archive Collections Held in Savannah
Beyond standard biographical information on Mordecai Sheftall, there exists a primary genealogical source that has remained little disseminated: the "Sheftall Diaries", a register of births, marriages and deaths kept by several generations of the family itself from 1733 to 1808, covering in practice the vital records of the Jewish community of Savannah over nearly three-quarters of a century — identified as a resource by the Southern Jewish Historical Society. The Georgia Historical Society additionally preserves, beyond a generic "Sheftall family collection" (MS 1414, containing notably a prisoner exchange certificate, minutes from the House of Assembly and lottery tickets related to the hospital and poorhouse of Savannah), a distinct collection titled "Sheftall Sheftall papers" (MS 726), which holds a regimental order and a certified copy of the parole certificate issued by name to Sheftall Sheftall, son of Mordecai, captured with his father at the age of seventeen in December 1778. Three other related collections rarely cited together are preserved at the same institution: the Keith M. Read Collection, the B. H. Levy Papers and the M. J. Solomons Bank Notes, Letters, and Bills of Sale.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Congregation Mickve Israel → - les IlizarovGenealogySep 11, 2026
The Mixed Ancestry of the Ilizarov Family, Between Mountain Judaism of the Caucasus and Ashkenazi Judaism
Gavriil Abramovitch Ilizarov, born in 1921 in a poor Jewish family settled in Białowieża (voivodeship of Białystok, Poland), moved with his family in 1928 to Qusar, in the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, near Qırmızı Qəsəbə (Krasnaya Sloboda), one of the rare entirely Jewish localities in the world and home to the Mountain Jews (Juhuro) of the Caucasus. His father, Abram Ilizarov, is explicitly identified as a Mountain Jew originally from Qusar; his mother, Golda Ilizarova, as of Ashkenazi ancestry from Central Europe. This double origin — paternal Caucasian, maternal Ashkenazi — is documented consistently by two independent sources. Gavriil Ilizarov later became the orthopedic surgeon and inventor of the method and external fixation apparatus that bear his name. The onomastic variants Ilizarov, Ilizarof, Eliezarov, Elizarov refer to the Hebrew given name Eliezer.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs des montagnes (Juhuro) → - la dynastie hassidique de Bohush (Friedman)GenealogyTo be confirmedSep 11, 2026
The Bohush Hasidic Dynasty: Documented Succession from Buhuași to Bnei Brak
The Bohush Hasidic dynasty was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Rabbi Yitzchok Friedman of Bohush (1834-1896), eldest grandson of Rabbi Yisrael Friedman of Ruzhin (1796-1850), founder of the "House of Ruzhin" of which Bohush constitutes one of the branches, alongside Boyan, Sadigura, Tchortkov and Husiatyn. It takes its name from the city of Buhuași in Romanian Moldavia. The succession continued through Rabbi Yisroel Shulem Yosef (1855-1923), son of Yitzchok, then through Rabbi Dovid, second son of Yitzchok, and finally through Rabbi Menachem Mendel, who died in Buhuași in 1943, during the anti-Jewish persecutions in Romania allied with the Reich. The dynasty remained in Buhuași until 1951, the year Rabbi Yitzchok Friedman of Bohush-Tel Aviv (1903-1992) transferred it to Israel. In 1987, his beis midrash was relocated to Bnei Brak, where it is today directed by Rabbi Yaakov Mendel Friedman, great-great-grandson of the founder, at the head of three yeshivot, two kollels, and communities in Israel, the United States, Antwerp and London. This complete chronology documents the Ruzhin-Bohush lineage over six generations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.
- les Albahari de SarajevoMemorySep 11, 2026
The Albahari of Sarajevo: from a Sephardic lineage originating in Cordova to the Shoah and Titoist resistance
The Albahari family of Sarajevo claims descent from Cordova before the expulsion from Spain in 1492, passing through Venice before settling in Ottoman Bosnia, one of the largest Sephardic centers in the Balkans. Moris Albahari (1929-2022), son of David Albahari, escaped at eleven years old from deportation to the Ustashi camp of Jasenovac thanks to a former teacher and Italian soldier Lino Marchione; hidden under the alias "Milan Adamovic" with a Serbian family, he joined Tito's partisans in 1942, where his knowledge of Ladino allowed him to communicate with a Hispanic-American soldier, which saved his life according to his own testimony. He became director of Sarajevo airport after the war and was one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia. Nisim Albahari (1916, Tešanj - 1991), of the same Bosnian family, formed one of the first partisan detachments around Sarajevo, was captured and tortured by the Ustashi before escaping, then became secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and minister of Labor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, receiving the Order of People's Hero in 1953. The novelist David Albahari (1948-2023), son of a Sephardic father, presided over the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia during the 1990s war and organized the evacuation of the Jewish community of Sarajevo; his novel "Götz and Meyer" (1998) deals with the destruction of the Jewish community of Belgrade at the Sajmište camp. Aron Albahari additionally compiled an illustrated bibliography of works on Jews and Judaism published in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1820 and 2018.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs des Balkans → - les SondheimGenealogySep 11, 2026
Isaac Sondheim, from Hesse-Cassel to New York: The documented ancestry of composer Stephen Sondheim
Research conducted at the request of Stephen Sondheim himself by genealogist Karen Franklin of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York has documented his paternal great-grandfather, Isaac Sondheim, identified in public records as a merchant who emigrated to the United States around 1848 from the Hesse-Cassel region in Germany. Isaac Sondheim died in 1883, at approximately sixty-six years of age, after being thrown from a carriage at a pedestrian crossing on 4th Street in New York, a fact attested by his death certificate preserved at the Leo Baeck Institute. The composer's paternal grandparents, Isaac and Rosa, were German Jews, while his maternal grandparents, Joseph and Bessie, were Lithuanian Jews originally from Vilnius. The surname, sometimes spelled "Sondheimer," is associated in this branch with the name "Gutenstein." Franklin, who has moreover traced her own "Sundheim" line back to 1736, found no established family connection between the two families despite the name similarity, a point to be noted with caution to avoid any genealogical confusion.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Leo Baeck Institute → - les Heskel (Sassoon Eskell)GenealogySep 11, 2026
Sassoon Eskell (Heskel), financial architect of modern Iraq, and his father's synagogue in Baghdad
Sir Sassoon Eskell (Heskel), né à Bagdad le 17 mars 1860 et mort le 31 août 1932, était le fils de Hakham Heskel Shlomo David, élève du hakham Abdallah Somekh, qui partit en 1873 comme rabbin et shohet pour la communauté juive bagdadie d'Inde avant de faire construire en 1906 la synagogue Slat Hakham Heskel à Bagdad. Sassoon Eskell fut le premier ministre des Finances du royaume d'Irak (1920-1925), négocia les accords pétroliers avec la Grande-Bretagne, participa à la conférence du Caire de 1921 aux côtés de Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell et T. E. Lawrence pour la fondation de l'État irakien, et fut anobli par George V en 1923. Il est considéré en Irak comme le « père du Parlement ». Sa maison de la rue Rashid à Bagdad, en partie propriété d'un descendant, Albert Sassoon Eskell, a été promise à la destruction par la municipalité de Bagdad en août 2016. Le frère de Sassoon, Ezra, fut nassi (président) de la communauté juive de Bagdad entre 1817 et 1824. Deux fonds de recherche généalogique documentent ce réseau de patronymes bagdadis : l'Iraqi Jewish Archive (documents 1922-1971 récupérés en 2003 dans les sous-sols des services de renseignement de Saddam Hussein) et le Consolidated Baghdadi Jewish Surnames Index (1874-2001) publié par AvotaynuOnline en 2020.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Bagdad → - GesundheitGenealogySep 8, 2026
Rabbi Yaakov Gesundheit of Warsaw and his descendants to investor Benjamin Graham
Yaakov Gesundheit, born in 1815 in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw, and died in 1878, studied under Rabbi Leib Zinz of Płock and directed a yeshiva for forty-two years. From the age of twenty-three, he wrote Tiferet Yaakov, a commentary on the Choshen Mishpat (Warsaw, 1842), of which censorship caused nearly all copies to be destroyed; this was followed by commentaries on the talmudic treatises Gittin (1858) and Hullin (1867). Elected Chief Rabbi of Warsaw in 1870, he resigned four years later under the combined pressure of Hasidic circles and assimilationist circles close to Ludwig Nathanson. His descendant Dorothy Gesundheit, born in Warsaw in 1870 in a merchant family, emigrated and became the mother of Benjamin Graham, born Benjamin Grossbaum in London in 1894, founder of value investing and author of "The Intelligent Investor" — the family having changed its name to Graham upon settling in the United States. This entry documents the rabbinical lineage of nineteenth-century Warsaw; verification of concordance with the existing record on the site is recommended before any entry into a General Ledger.
- CaffazGenealogySep 8, 2026
A book traces the migratory journey of the Caffaz family, from Mogador to Florence
The work "Da Mogador a Firenze : i Caffaz, viaggio di una famiglia ebrea" ("From Mogador to Florence: the Caffaz, journey of a Jewish family"), written by Alfredo De Girolamo and published on 27 January 2020, traces the family's itinerary from Mogador (today Essaouira, Morocco) to Florence, passing through Livorno, Pisa, Pitigliano and Lugo di Romagna. The family name is said to have changed from "El Cabas" to "Caffaz" during this migration. The book is listed in the catalogue of the CDEC library (Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Milan), a reference institution for Italian contemporary Jewish history.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Caffaz → - StrausMemorySep 8, 2026
Isidor and Ida Straus, who died together in the Titanic disaster (April 15, 1912)
Isidor Straus (Otterberg, February 6, 1845 – April 15, 1912), eldest of three sons, businessman and member of the American Congress, perished in the sinking of the RMS Titanic with his wife Ida (Ida Blun Straus, 1849-1912). Refusing to board a lifeboat without her husband despite the "women and children first" rule, Ida reportedly declared: "We have lived together for so many years, where you go, I go." She gave her coat to her chambermaid, who took her place in the lifeboat; the couple then sat together on deck chairs. Isidor's body was recovered by the Mackay-Bennett; Ida's was never found — she was one of only four first-class female passengers who did not survive.
- StrausMemorySep 8, 2026
Nathan Straus, American philanthropist in Mandate Palestine — Netanya bears his name
Nathan Straus (Otterberg, 31 January 1848 – 1931), second son of Lazarus Straus, devoted according to estimates two-thirds of his fortune to works in Mandate Palestine: founding a domestic science school for girls, a health bureau fighting malaria and trachoma, a free public kitchen, a Pasteur Institute and child protection centers. He financed the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Centers in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, whose cornerstone bears in English, Hebrew and Arabic: "For the benefit of all inhabitants of the country, Christians, Muslims and Jews." The Israeli city of Netanya, founded in 1929, was named in his honor. The Straus family, originally from Otterberg in the Palatinate, corresponds precisely to article no. 14072 of the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906): it has no connection with Levi Strauss nor with the Viennese musical dynasty of the Strauss.
- HyamsonGenealogySep 8, 2026
Albert Montefiore Hyamson, historian of the lineage, nephew of dayan Moses Hyamson
Albert Montefiore Hyamson (27 August 1875 – 5 October 1954), born in London, entered the British civil service in 1895, served in the Jewish Bureau of the Department of Information during the First World War (1917-1921) and was director of Immigration for the British Mandate of Palestine from 1921 to 1934. An active Zionist activist, he edited the Zionist Review (1917-1919) and published notably A History of the Jews in England (1908), Palestine: the Rebirth of an Ancient People (1917) and The Sephardim in England (1951); his evolution toward support for an Arab-Jewish binational state put him at odds with the political Zionist movement. Two independent sources establish that he was the nephew of dayan Moses Hyamson (1862-1949), interim Chief Rabbi of the British Empire from 1911 to 1913 — a direct line of filiation between two notable generations of the lineage.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Hyamson → - CaffazMemorySep 8, 2026
Ugo Caffaz, member of the lineage, conceived the Tuscan "Train of Memory" to Auschwitz
Ugo Caffaz, member of the Jewish community of Florence and provincial councillor elected in 1980, proposed and established from 1982 the "Treno della Memoria" (Train of Memory) of the Tuscany region, an annual journey of secondary school students from Florence to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in operation since 2002 in its current regional form. The initiative has transported more than 8,000 Tuscan secondary school students to date, with a twentieth anniversary commemorated in 2021. Caffaz had previously participated in the first journey to Mauthausen and Dachau organized by the province, before proposing the extension to Auschwitz.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Caffaz → - SveiGenealogySep 8, 2026
Rabbi Elya Svei, rosh yeshiva of Philadelphia, his lineage and rabbinical alliances
Rabbi Elya Svei (19 March 1924, Kovno/Kaunas, Lithuania – 26 March 2009, Philadelphia, buried in Jerusalem) was the son of Rabbi Shmuel Leib Svei, who was already serving as a rabbi in Lithuania; the family emigrated to the United States when Elya was nine years old to rejoin his father, who had come there to collect funds. He married the daughter of Rabbi Avraham Kalmanovitz, founder of the New York branch of the Mir yeshiva, thus becoming the brother-in-law of Rabbi Shmuel Berenbaum. His daughter Lakee married Rabbi Isser Gorelick. He was co-rosh yeshiva of the Talmudical Yeshiva of Philadelphia alongside Shmuel Kamenetsky, and president of the rabbinical council of Torah Umesorah until 2002, establishing himself as one of the major figures of twentieth-century American Orthodoxy.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Litvaks (Juifs lituaniens) → - dynastie hassidique de Tchernobyl (Twersky)ArchivesSep 8, 2026
A letter from 1892 by Rebbe Yochanan Twersky of Rotmistrivka illuminates the genealogy of the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty
A letter dated 1892, signed by Rebbe Yochanan Twersky of Rotmistrivka, son of Rabbi Mordekhai of Chernobyl, has been catalogued by the Kedem auction house of Jerusalem, which specializes in Judaica and rabbinic manuscripts. The Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty, founded by Rabbi Menahem Nahoum Twersky in the eighteenth century, branched into numerous lines bearing the names of the Ukrainian localities where his descendants settled — Rotmistrivka, Skvira, Makarov, Talne, Tolna, among others — each of which subsequently spread to Western Europe, Palestine, and the United States following the persecutions of the twentieth century. This type of archival document, correspondence or attestation signed by the hand of an admor, constitutes a primary source for reconstructing the precise lines of descent among the different Hasidic courts issuing from a single founder, which are often difficult to establish from hagiographic sources alone.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Ḥasidim, Ḥasidisme → - la famille CarvajalArchaeologyTo be confirmedSep 7, 2026
A 16th-century mikvé in Juliantla, Mexico, reopens debate on the earliest material remains of Judaism in America
In Juliantla, a locality in the municipality of Taxco (State of Guerrero, Mexico), the remains of a Jewish ritual bath (mikvé) dated to around 1590 were uncovered during excavations conducted in 2021, then officially recognized by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico (INAH) in December 2022. The structure comprises an immersion basin and a small stone dome fed with rainwater through a conduit, in accordance with Jewish ritual prescriptions. A restoration and enhancement project for the site was announced in February 2026 by the Mexican Jewish press, which presents this discovery as reconfiguring the known chronology of documented Judaism in America: until now, the oldest mikvé recorded on the continent was that of Curaçao, dated to around 1620. The Taxco region is attested by Inquisition archives as a centre of "Judaizers" (conversos practicing Judaism in secret) in the late 16th century; graffiti bearing the Hebrew letter shin were found in properties linked to the Carvajal family, whose governor Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva administered the region at that time before several of his relatives were tried by the Inquisition for Judaization. The matter remains documented primarily by the press and Mexican heritage institutions, not yet by a peer-reviewed archaeological publication.
- la famille Gerber de BialykamieńGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 7, 2026
Galicia: the Gerber family of Bialykamień found in fragments of registers
Ruchel Leah Gerber lived in the shtetl of Bialykamień (Bilyi Kamin), near Lvov, in eastern Galicia, where her family owned a tannery — reflecting the meaning of the surname Gerber ("tanner" in German/Yiddish). She died in 1890 at age 38, of tuberculosis, shortly after childbirth, leaving up to six children from two marriages. The shtetl's original Jewish register having been destroyed by the Nazis, the genealogical organization Gesher Galicia located and had translated fragments of birth and death registers, revealing a network of cousins at the second, third and fourth degrees. An identified contemporary descendant is Professor Haim Gerber, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This information comes from a single magazine article citing the registers found by Gesher Galicia; to be confirmed by a second source before any definitive use.
- les Rimini (famille Rimini)MemorySep 7, 2026
Mantua, Ferrara, Verona: the Rimini Jewish families facing racial laws and the Shoah
Cesare Prospero Moisè Rimini, a textile merchant born in 1865, married Olimpia Cantoni at the Mantua synagogue on 11 July 1897; their four children experienced opposite fates after 1938-1943. Enrico, a lawyer in Milan, emigrated to Brazil in autumn 1939 with his wife and children. His sister Lucia, her husband Renzo Carpi and their three children were arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau after 8 September 1943; none survived. The branches of Nella and Giuseppe Rimini took refuge in the Conca valley, near Rimini, aided by the Muratori and Morganti families, both recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Separately, Angelo and Giorgina Rimini and their son Carlo (born in 1932, future president of the Verona Jewish Community until 2014) went into hiding in November 1943 in the Veronese countryside thanks to the Casella brothers, two priests and a doctor who sheltered the grandparents in the attic of Bovolone hospital.
- la lignée Danino (Dninou)GenealogyTo be confirmedSep 7, 2026
Morocco: the Danino (Dninou) rabbinical lineage of Meknes and the Atlas
The surname "Dninou" likely corresponds to the phonetic transcription of the Hebrew דנינו, more commonly romanized as "Danino" — an ancient Moroccan Sephardic family, presented by community sources as descended from those expelled from Spain in 1492, established in Meknes and in Atlas communities. Several rabbis of this name are documented: Rabbi David Le'aziz Danino, rabbinical judge in Béni Mellal; Rabbi Israël Danino, study companion of Rabbi Massoud Abou Hatséra; Rabbi Haïm Danino, president of the rabbinical court and chief rabbi of the Atlas communities; Rabbi David Danino known as "Baba Yidan", renowned kabbalist; and Rabbi Joseph Danino known as "Rabbi Shishou", born in 1898 in the village of Asmir in the Moroccan Atlas. These elements come from search engine syntheses citing a Hebrew-language genealogical website (ravdori.co.il) whose pages could not be opened directly (anti-robot blocking); to be verified by direct consultation before any definitive use.
- Arthur Mahler (famille Mahler)GenealogySep 7, 2026
Prague-Vienna: Arthur Mahler, archaeologist and deputy of the Jewish National Party
Born in Prague on 1 August 1871, Arthur Mahler studied art history and archaeology at the universities of Prague and Vienna before becoming in 1902 a privatdocent of archaeology at the German University of Prague and corresponding member of the Austrian Archaeological Institute. A specialist in ancient Greek sculpture, he published notably "Polyklet und Seine Schule" (Leipzig, 1902). From 1907 to 1911, he sat in the Austrian Chamber of Deputies for the Jewish National Party (Jüdische Nationalpartei). He married Sophie Mahlerová; their son Willy Mahler perished in Dachau camp in 1945. Several sources present him as a cousin of composer Gustav Mahler, without specifying the exact degree of this kinship, information that remains to be confirmed. His entry appears in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906).
- les sœurs Richter (famille Richter)MemorySep 7, 2026
Vienna: The Richter Sisters, Daughters of Maximilian Richter, Victims of Nazi Persecution
Elise Richter, born in Vienna on 2 March 1865 and died on 21 June 1943 in the Theresienstadt ghetto, was the daughter of physician Maximilian Richter (1824-1890), head of the health service of the Imperial Vienna-Trieste railway, and Emilie Richter née Lackenbacher (1832-1889), from a Budapest family. She became the first woman to obtain habilitation at the University of Vienna and the first woman lecturer in Romance linguistics, before becoming the only female professor at an Austrian university before 1914. Dismissed from her post after the Anschluss of 1938 as a Jew, she was deported on 10 October 1942 to Theresienstadt, where she died. Her younger sister Helene Richter, born on 4 August 1861 in Vienna, theatre historian and Anglicist, was also deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. Their history is documented by the Archives of Jewish Women, the Jewish Virtual Library and the memorial book of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Richter →
Great figures
All Great Books →- Abraham SutzkeverMemoryTo be confirmedSep 14, 2026
The YIVO announces the digitization of a manuscript linked to Abraham Sutzkever's Tsen Lider collection
The spring 2026 institutional bulletin of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announces the digitization of a manuscript linked to the collection of poems Tsen Lider (Ten Poems) by Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. The document joins the institute's digital collections, which preserve a significant portion of the literary and cultural archives of the Yiddish-speaking world before the war and after the Shoah. Sutzkever, a major figure in twentieth-century Yiddish poetry, survived the Vilnius ghetto before settling in Israel. This announcement has so far been identified only through this single institutional source, the YIVO's own bulletin.
- Rabbi Yossef Yitzchok SchneersohnPublicationSep 14, 2026
The Jewish Museum of Moscow Publishes an Analytical Catalogue of the Personal Archives of Rabbi Yossef Yitzchok Schneersohn
The research center of the Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance in Moscow has published a work of analytical description and study of the personal archives of Rabbi Yossef Yitzchok Schneersohn, sixth Rabbi of Lubavitch, who died in 1950. The catalogue inventories and contextualizes the preserved documents of this personal collection. The work was noted in the bulletin of new acquisitions of a library and referenced in the catalogue of bookseller Labirint. It adds to an already substantial body of publications devoted to the Chabad-Lubavitch archives of Moscow, one of the most sought after and studied collections of the Hasidic movement in the twentieth century.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Ḥasidim, Ḥasidisme → - Chaïm Shimon Gad ElituvGenealogySep 14, 2026
Rabbi Chaim Shimon Gad Elituv (1937-2023), rabbi of the regional council of Mateh Binyamin and then of Mevasseret Zion
Born on 24 February 1937 in the Old City of Jerusalem and died on 25 January 2023 at the age of eighty-five, Rabbi Chaim Shimon Gad Elituv — son of Rabbi Yossef Rahamim Elituv and Shoshana, daughter of judge Meir Abitbol of Casablanca — is buried on the Mount of Olives. Trained in the talmud torah near Porat Yossef and then at the yeshivot Novardok of Hadera and Tomkhei Tmimim (Chabad) of Lod, he founded in 1981 the yeshiva and kollel Or Meir (Chabad), then in 1991 the kollel Oz Meir in Sanhedria (Jerusalem). Rabbi of the regional council of Mateh Binyamin in the late 1990s, then of Mevasseret Zion from 2012, he sat from 2008 to 2023 on the council of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, where he chaired the commission of rabbis and communities of the diaspora, and joined in January 2022 the presidium of the Union of Rabbis of Islamic Countries. His son Yossi Elituv is a journalist. Hebrew sources consistently spell his name אליטוב (with a tet), not אליתוב (with a tav) as shown in the existing brief record — a spelling correction to be made to the file, not a question of homonymy.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Abitbol → - Amnon de MayencePublicationSep 14, 2026
The Unetaneh Tokef Before the Legend: The Byzantine Origins of the Poem According to Academic Research
Historian Ivan G. Marcus (Yale University) established, in a landmark study, that the martyrological narrative of Rabbi Amnon of Mainz — first attested in Ephraim of Bonn in the twelfth century and transmitted via the Or Zaroua of Isaac ben Moses of Vienna in the thirteenth century — rests on no independent historical foundation: Amnon left behind neither writing, nor legal decision, nor documentary trace outside this narrative. Fragments from the Cairo Genizah attest to the existence of the Unetaneh Tokef text in forms close to it several centuries before the Ashkenazi legend, in communities of Eretz Israel, some dating to the eighth century or earlier. A stylistic analysis, drawing on the work of Ya'akov Spiegel, attributes the composition of the poem to the Byzantine paytan Yannaï (sixth century) rather than to Amnon himself; the Or Zaroua moreover does not claim that Amnon composed the text, only that he would have recited it before dying. David Stern, in the journal Kerem, compared the structure of the Ashkenazi narrative to contemporary Christian hagiographic genres, notably the legend of Saint Emmeram of Regensburg.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Fragments de la Guenizah du Caire — Corpus Taylor-Schechter → - Israel Meir FreimannGenealogySep 14, 2026
Israel Meir Freimann, rabbi of Ostrowo: the confusion with his nephew and son-in-law, the Berlin rabbi Jacob Freimann
The entry devoted to Israel Meir Freimann (1830-1884), rabbi of Filehne then of Ostrowo and editor of the Midrash Ve-Hizhir, must be distinguished from a related homonym: his nephew and also son-in-law, rabbi Jacob Freimann (1866-1937). Jacob Freimann served as rabbi in Kanitz then Holleschau (1890-1913), was chief rabbi of the province of Posnania from 1913, before joining the Berlin rabbinate only in 1928 — that is, forty-four years after Israel Meir's death. It was Jacob, and not Israel Meir, who contributed to the 1924 edition of the Sefer Hasidim established by Jehuda Wistinetzki, an edition reviewed by Gershom Scholem in the journal Kiryat Sefer. This genealogical and chronological distinction, supported by cross-referenced entries in the Jewish Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia.com, thus clarifies the specific role of each of the two rabbis Freimann within this lineage of scholars of Central Europe.
- Gabriel KempnerGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 14, 2026
Gabriel Kempner: drama critic and translator for the Polish press, died in 1916
Born in Kalisz on 4 July 1855 — a date confirmed concordantly by the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Polish Dictionary of Judaism (DELET, Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw) — Gabriel Kempner studied law at the Imperial University of Warsaw (1871-1875) before working as a trainee lawyer and then in private practice. Regular drama critic for Przegląd Tygodniowy from 1890, he was a frequent informant on Western European cultural life, joined the editorial board of Nowa Gazeta in 1906 and co-founded the Society of Polish Writers and Journalists. An active literary translator (French, German, English), including for the stage, he died in Warsaw in 1916. Several other bearers of the surname Kempner are documented elsewhere (Stanisław Aleksander, Friederike, Robert, Max, Salomea, Otto), but none matches the biographical profile established here — jurist-translator-critic born in Kalisz in 1855. This confirmation remains to be consolidated through direct consultation of DELET, whose access was temporarily restricted at the time of research.
- Judah ben Menahem de RomeManuscriptsTo be confirmedSep 14, 2026
Judah ben Menahem of Rome, Italian paytan of the twelfth century and possible compiler of the oldest collection of the Roman rite
According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the father of Menahem — Judah ben Menahem of Rome, active in the early twelfth century — was an important paytan of the Italian rite, author of at least fifteen liturgical poems of which six are published (yozerot for the Sabbath preceding Pessah and for the Sabbath of consolation, as well as pieces for Sim'hat Torah, Chavouot, an ofan and a Purim poem), transmitted by medieval Roman ritual manuscripts. The same source cautiously attributes to him the possible compilation of the Seder Hibbour Berakhot, the oldest surviving work of the Roman rite, of which the manuscript was the subject of Abraham I. Schechter's thesis (republished by the Jewish Publication Society in 1930) — an attribution disputed, other works designating rather Menahem ben Salomon of Italy as compiler. The context of the Roman Jewish community of the twelfth century, the most documented in Europe for this period according to the travel account of Benjamin of Tudela, is the subject of modern research, notably that of Robert Bonfil (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). These biographical elements concern the father of the person named Menahem B. Judah on the website's record, and not a namesake of the first century bearing an identical name, Zealot leader son of Judas the Galilean, with whom any confusion must be avoided.
- Ẓebi Hirsch MaslianskyArchivesSep 14, 2026
Ẓebi Hirsch Masliansky: from Zionist maggid of Slutsk to legendary preacher at the Educational Alliance in New York
Born in 1856 in Slutsk and died in 1943 in Brooklyn, Ẓebi Hirsch Masliansky taught in Polish talmudei torah and then at the yeshiva of Pinsk (1882-1890, where he had the young Chaim Weizmann as a student), before becoming, following the 1881 pogroms, an itinerant maggid of the nascent Zionist movement, encouraged by Ussishkin, Lilienblum, Ahad Ha'am and Pinsker. He left Russia in 1894, travelled through Europe, then emigrated to New York in 1895, where he preached every Friday for twenty-seven years at the Educational Alliance; he founded and co-edited the weekly "Die Yidishe Velt" (1902-1905) and was, from 1898, vice-president of the Federation of American Zionists. His memoirs, "Ketavei Masliansky" (New York, Hebrew Publishing Co., 1929), were digitized by the Ben-Yehuda project and are available online. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency covered his anniversary as well as his death; six children are documented to him: Hyman, Phillip, and the daughters Bertha (wife Turberg), Fanny (wife Schwartz), Anna (wife Weinberg) and Beatrice (wife Perskie).
- Shmuel Yitzchak HillmanPublicationSep 14, 2026
Shmuel Yitzchak Hillman, dayan of the London Beth Din and father-in-law of Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog: his Or HaYashar republished in 2024
Shmuel Yitzchak Hillman (2 July 1868 - 1 June 1953) directed the Beth Din of Berezino from 1897, then served as rav of Glasgow from 1908 (presiding over the Beth Din until 1914), before becoming dayan of the London Beth Din from 1914 to 1934, alongside Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz. Around 1934, he settled in Jerusalem where he co-founded, with his son-in-law Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Halevi Herzog — future first Chief Rabbi of Israel — the Ohel Torah yeshiva in Rehovot; through this marriage, Hillman is the maternal great-grandfather of the current Israeli president Isaac Herzog. He is the author of the Or HaYashar, a twenty-volume commentary on the Talmud, Rambam, Sifra and the treatises Zeraim and Taharot; his volume devoted to the Shabbat treatise, originally published in 1941 in thirty-two pages, was republished and annotated in over five hundred pages by Rabbi Pini Dunner (Otzrot editions, Jerusalem, 2024). No consulted source confirms, however, that he edited the Sefer Ha-Eshkol, whose scientific edition (Jerusalem, 1934-1938) is in fact due to Chanoch Albeck — this attribution, sometimes advanced, must be discarded.
- kalisch-isidor-je9151PublicationSep 12, 2026
A 2020 study places Isidor Kalisch's translation of Sepher Yetsirah within its Rosicrucian legacy
In 2020, historian Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University) published the chapter "Isidor Kalisch's Pioneering Translation of Sepher Yetsirah (1877) and Its Rosicrucian Legacy" in the collective work edited by Brian Ogren, Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World (Leiden, Brill, 2020, p. 138-144). The study establishes that in 1877 Isidor Kalisch published the first English translation of Sepher Yetsirah, one of the foundational texts of the Kabbalah, drawing on the earlier German translation by Lutheran theologian Johann Friedrich von Meyer (1830), revised from a Hebrew text he deemed superior and enriched with notes and a glossary. The article traces the unexpected legacy of this translation, taken up by the Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rosae Crucis (AMORC), an American esoteric Rosicrucian organization, even as Kalisch's original work remained largely ignored by subsequent academic research. This publication sheds light on a little-known aspect of the work of the Reform rabbi, active in Cleveland (Tifereth Israel congregation, 1850) and then in Newark (from 1875): his role as the first English-language translator of kabbalistic literature.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — La Kabbale et les courants mystiques → - abayePublicationSep 12, 2026
A 2019 essay reexamines Abaye's intellectual temperament in light of cognitive diversity
On July 25, 2019, rabbi and journalist Elli Fischer published an essay on the online scholarly journal The Lehrhaus titled "The Haunted Yeshivah: Abaye and the Torah of ADHD". The author analyzes the personality of Abaye, a Babylonian sage of the fourth generation of the amoraim (died in 337 of the common era), an orphan raised by his uncle Rabba bar Naḥmani, then disciple and successor of Rav Yossef at the head of the academy of Pumbedita. Fischer compares Abaye's dialectical, mobile and interdisciplinary method with the more systematic approach of his study partner Rava — whose opinion prevails in nearly all of their hundreds of controversies reported in the Talmud — and proposes to read this difference in temperament in light of contemporary categories of cognitive diversity, not as anachronistic diagnosis but as a pedagogical framework. The essay emphasizes that Abaye advocated for the articulation between the study of Torah, acts of kindness and concrete professional activity, drawing on the position of Rabbi Ishmael.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Rabbi Ishmael → - florence-prag-kahnMemorySep 12, 2026
2025, centennial of Florence Prag Kahn's election to Congress
February 17, 2025 marked the hundredth anniversary of Florence Prag Kahn's (née Prag, 1866-1948) election to the House of Representatives, where she became the first Jewish woman to serve in Congress, following a special election to fill the seat of her husband Julius Kahn, who died in office on December 18, 1924. Reelected five times, she served until 1937 and was, in 1930, the first woman member of the House Military Affairs Committee, where her work contributed to the creation of several military bases and to the funding of the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco to Oakland. This anniversary date was commemorated in January-February 2025 by the Jewish Women's Archive and by the California State Library.
- florence-prag-kahnArchivesSep 12, 2026
The Florence Prag Kahn and Julius Kahn papers held at the Magnes Collection in Berkeley
The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, attached to the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, holds an archive collection titled "Kahn (Florence Prag and Julius) family papers, 1852-1948". Listed in the collective catalogue ArchiveGrid/OCLC, this collection represents approximately 1.6 linear meters (one carton, one box and one oversized folder) and is open to researchers. It contains biographical documents on the parents of Florence Prag Kahn, Mary and Conrad Prag — including the autobiographical writings of Mary Prag, "My Life Among the Mormons" and "Early Days" — political and personal correspondence, speeches by representative Julius Kahn, posthumous tributes, press clippings, caricatures and documents relating to the military career of their son Conrad Kahn. This precise location constitutes a primary resource for documenting the trajectory of the first Jewish woman elected to the United States Congress.
- moshe-i-davilaGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 12, 2026
Moshe (I) Davila, Talmudic Patriarch of the Moroccan Davila-de Avila Lineage
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia article "Eliezer b. Samuel de Avila," the grandfather of Rabbi Eliezer Davila (1714-1761, Chief Rabbi of Rabat) was named Moses (Moshe) de Avila and was, along with his son Samuel, one of the "eminent Talmudists" of the Moroccan rabbinical family Davila (Meknes, then Salé and Rabat), which tradition holds originated from the town of Avila in Castile, from which the expulsion of 1492 occurred. The family is said to have left Meknes for Salé due to taxes deemed excessive. A supplementary genealogical record places a Shmuel ben Moshe Davila born in 1688 in Meknes, who would correspond to Eliezer's father, which would place Moshe (I) Davila active in Meknes in the second half of the seventeenth century. Two distinct "Moshe de Avila" exist in this lineage — the grandfather of Eliezer, and his grandson of the same name — hence the numbering "I" which distinguishes them.
- david-kalonymus-de-naples-je4958ManuscriptsSep 12, 2026
The manuscript copied in Naples in 1506 by David Kalonymus: the defense of Maimonides by the exilarch Jesse ben Hezekiah
A colophon dated "written in Naples on the 1st of Av 5266" (21 July 1506) precisely locates the activity of David Kalonymus, Neapolitan scribe. He copied — in several copies, to preserve the text during the persecutions affecting the Jewish communities of Portugal and Castile — the letter written in 1286 by Jesse (Yishai) ben Hezekiah, exilarch of Damascus, who pronounced the formal ban against Solomon Petit of Acre and his supporters for their campaign against Maimonides' Moreh Nevoukhim, in the context of the Maimonidean controversy. According to Steinschneider, cited by the Jewish Encyclopedia, David could have been the son of Ḥayyim Kalonymus and the father of a certain Kalo Kalonymus, a lineage presented as uncertain. Another David Kalonymus, Neapolitan astrologer active from 1464 and dedicatee of treatises to Ferdinand I of Naples, is a distinct figure not to be confused with the scribe of 1506.
- bie-oskar-je3280MemoryTo be confirmedSep 12, 2026
Oskar Bie listed among musicians and intellectuals persecuted under Nazism
Oskar Bie (Breslau, 9 February 1864 – Berlin, 21 April 1938), art, music and dance critic of Jewish origin, directed the literary journal Die Neue Rundschau at S. Fischer Verlag from 1894 to 1922 and taught aesthetics at the Musikhochschule in Berlin from 1921. The reference biographical database Deutsche Biographie lists him in the Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit (Lexicon of musicians persecuted under Nazism, a project of Hamburg University), confirming that he was targeted by the anti-Jewish persecutions of the Nazi regime; his works were prohibited from republication starting in 1933. He died in Berlin in 1938.
- pierre-loebPublicationSep 12, 2026
Publication in 2026 of the Miró-Loeb correspondence (1926-1936)
Éditions Norma published on 3 April 2026 "Miró-Loeb. Correspondance 1926-1936", a bilingual French-English work of 256 pages bringing together unpublished letters exchanged between painter Joan Miró and his Parisian dealer Pierre Loeb, founder of Galerie Pierre (opened on 17 October 1924, which exhibited Miró thirteen times between 1925 and 1939). The edition, containing approximately 250 illustrations, was edited by Albert Loeb and Sonia Loeb (son and daughter-in-law of Pierre Loeb) with a preface by Joan Punyet Miró, grandson of the artist. The work was presented on 7 April 2026 at the Artcurial auction house and was reviewed in The Art Newspaper (French edition) on 10 June 2026, which underscores the dealer's decisive role in supporting the artist during this decade of Surrealist ferment, as well as the forced closure of the gallery under Vichy's antisemitic laws and his exile to Cuba before his return to Paris in 1945.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Loeb → - pierre-loebRestitutionSep 12, 2026
The Aryanisation and Restitution of the Galerie Pierre under the Occupation
Compelled by Vichy's laws of economic exclusion (October 1940), Pierre Loeb was forced to cede his gallery on 23 May 1941 to his colleague Georges Aubry, before going into exile in Havana (Cuba) with his family in January-February 1942, where he wrote Voyages à travers la peinture (published in 1946 by Bordas, with a cover by Wifredo Lam). Returning to France in 1945, he obtained, with the personal intervention of Pablo Picasso with Aubry, the restitution of his gallery in July 1945, in application of the ordinance of 21 April 1945 on the restitution of looted property. These elements are documented by historian Emmanuelle Polack, specialist in the spoliation of works of art under the Occupation, in an article devoted to "La Galerie Pierre au prisme des lois de Vichy".
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Loeb → - leo-m-franklinCommunitiesSep 12, 2026
Leo M. Franklin, founder in 1902 of one of the oldest interfaith Thanksgiving services in the United States
A note in the "Snapshots" series of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati) recalls that Leo M. Franklin, Reform rabbi of Temple Beth El in Detroit (1899-1941), founded in 1902 the "Citizens' Interdenominational Thanksgiving Service" in Detroit, the first service celebrated on November 27, 1902 at the Detroit Opera House before a full house, according to a contemporary account in the Detroit News cited by the institution. This annual interfaith celebration continued for more than fifty years and claimed the status of one of the oldest community services of this kind in the United States. This fact, preceding by two decades his rupture with Henry Ford over the latter's antisemitic pamphlets, situates Franklin's interreligious commitment as sustained over time rather than merely reactive to the automobile manufacturer's antisemitism.
- abraham-de-cologne-je414ManuscriptsSep 12, 2026
An International Programme Publishes the Kabbalistic Treatise Attributed to Abraham of Cologne
Since 2019, an interdisciplinary project at Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, project no. 414786977), has been preparing a critical synoptic edition of the Keter Shem Tov ("The Crown of the Good Name"), the mystical treatise on the Sefirot attributed to Abraham ben Alexander (called Axelrad) of Cologne, a student of Eleazar of Worms active around 1240. Directed by Professor Gerold Necker (Jewish Studies) and Professor Paul Molitor (Computer Science), the project draws on some one hundred manuscript witnesses identified for this thirteenth-century text. A first phase (2019-2022) produced a synoptic edition in print and digital open access format; a second phase (2022-2025) develops a multilayered digital synopsis integrating other related treatises and mystical traditions concerning the Hebrew alphabet. The project was presented at the 18th World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem) and is the subject of an account by the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS). It is the first major scientific undertaking devoted specifically to this foundational text, whose traditional attribution to Abraham of Cologne is being reexamined in light of the full manuscript tradition.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Cabale → - leo-m-franklinMemoryTo be confirmedSep 12, 2026
Leo M. Franklin Featured in the Detroit Historical Museum's "Boom Town" Exhibition
The Detroit Historical Museum devoted a section of its "Boom Town: Detroit in the 1920s" exhibition (opened in January 2021) to prominent figures of the decade; Leo M. Franklin is presented in the "Social Activism" section, due to his commitment to assimilation and the fight against discrimination. The exact date of this recognition remains uncertain in the sources consulted, a specialized press article making reference to it in 2023 without it being possible to determine whether this was a continuation of the exhibition or simply a reminder.
- ximenes-de-cisneros-je15042ManuscriptsSep 12, 2026
The paradox of the Cisneros Polyglot Bible: crypto-Jews in the service of the Grand Inquisitor
A scholarly study published in the journal Zeramim (vol. V, no. 2, spring 2021/5781) establishes that Alfonso de Zamora (1474–c.1545), the principal Hebraist recruited by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros for the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, maintained a secret Jewish identity throughout his collaboration with the cardinal. Zamora, a former student of the yeshiva of Campanton who was forcibly converted after 1492, was employed from 1506 and then attached in 1512 to the newly founded Collège San Ildefonso in Alcalá, where Cisneros had assembled a department of oriental languages staffed by former Jewish scholars. Analysis of some sixty manuscripts copied or annotated by Zamora — notably his "journal" and his marginal annotations in Hebrew preserved at the library of the University of Leiden (ms. Leiden Or. 645) — reveals coded messages that betray, according to the researchers, a convert who never inwardly renounced Judaism. This discovery, relayed by the National Library of Israel and the Jerusalem Post, casts new light on Cisneros's most celebrated work: his major scholarly project rested on the labour of scholars whom he could, in his capacity as inquisitor, have prosecuted for Judaising.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Marano → - Abdima Naḥota (et les Nahotei)PublicationSep 11, 2026
A scholarly study of the Nahotei, those amoraim who were intermediaries between Babylonia and the Land of Israel
Abdima Naḥota, a Palestinian amora of the fourth century and contemporary of the Babylonian amoraim Rab Ḥisda and Rab Joseph, belonged to the group of the Nahotei — these sages who traveled between the talmudic academies of Babylonia and Palestine to transmit, clarify or reassign the authority of rabbinic traditions already in circulation, an activity that extended over approximately one hundred fifty years. A scholarly study devoted specifically to this phenomenon of transmission was published by the researcher Tziona Grossmark (Tel Hai College, Galilee) under the title "The Nehutei as Traveling Agents and Transmitters of Cultural Data between the Torah Study Centers in Babylonia and in the Land of Israel during the Third and Fourth Centuries CE", in the journal Mediterranean Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (2015), p. 125-148. Among the other Nahotei named in the Talmud alongside Abdima Naḥota are Raba bar bar Ḥana, Rav Dimi, Ula, Rabin, Rav Yitzḥak bar Yosef and Rav Shmuel bar Yehuda.
- Henrietta SzoldPublicationSep 11, 2026
A recent biography of Henrietta Szold based on her letters and personal journals (2024)
The biography Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream, by Francine Klagsbrun (Jewish Lives series, Yale University Press), published March 5, 2024, draws extensively on the letters, intimate journals and personal essays of Henrietta Szold as well as other archival documents, to present a portrait of a figure more complex than the simple iconic founder of the women's Zionist organization Hadassah. The work received the Natan Notable Book Award, awarded in summer 2024 by the Jewish Book Council. Szold's personal correspondence archives are moreover preserved at the Center for Jewish History (New York), which maintains a searchable inventory of them.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Sionisme → - Maguy KakonCommunitiesSep 11, 2026
Maguy Kakon, first Jewish woman candidate in a legislative election in Morocco (2007)
Maguy Kakon, born Marie-Yvonne Gabay in 1953 in a Jewish family in Casablanca, took the name Kakon through her marriage to Moroccan architect Aimé Kakon. In 2007, she became the first Jewish woman to run in a legislative election in Morocco. A real estate advisor by profession, she is also an author, notably of a culinary work, La Cuisine juive du Maroc de mère en fille, and a second book devoted to the traditions and customs of the Jews of Morocco. She presents herself as a political and social activist claiming a triple cultural Moroccan, Muslim, and Catholic identity.
- Auguste III, roi de PologneArchivesSep 11, 2026
The Trial of Jampol (1756) and the Royal Prohibition of Ritual Murder Accusations under Augustus III
During the reign of Augustus III (Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, 1733-1763), ritual murder accusations and the destruction of Jewish synagogues and cemeteries multiplied, often with the support of part of the Catholic clergy. The most documented case is the trial of Jampol (1756): an inquiry ordered by the castellan of Vilna Michał Radziwiłł established that the wounds found had been inflicted post-mortem and acquitted the accused, but the bishop of Łuck Antoni Wołowicz reopened the trial; the Jews, tortured, eventually "confessed" to the crime. In 1760, Pope Clement XIII addressed a letter to the apostolic nuncio in Warsaw characterizing the blood accusation as an unfounded popular belief; Augustus III definitively closed the Jampol affair and, in 1763, prohibited the courts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from condemning Jews for ritual murder. The same reign witnessed the eruption of the Frankist movement: Jacob Frank, protected by part of the clergy and even by the king himself, was baptized in Warsaw with Augustus III as godfather; the Frankists then contributed to reviving the blood accusation for the purpose of forced conversion of Jews.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Accusation de Crime Rituel → - Leopoldo FranchettiArchivesSep 11, 2026
Leopoldo Franchetti, Italian economist of Livornese Jewish origin: African mission notebooks rediscovered in 2018
Leopoldo Franchetti (Livorno, 31 May 1847 – Rome, 4 November 1917), Italian economist and senator, came from a Jewish family of Livorno ennobled in 1858, his father Isacco having received the title of baron from Victor-Emmanuel II. Trained in law at Pisa under Pasquale Villari alongside Sidney Sonnino, he conducted inquiries into the administrative and economic conditions of the Mezzogiorno and Sicily, then launched several agricultural colonisation initiatives in Italy (Città di Castello, Montesca, Rovigliano, Rome) and, from 1890 onwards, in Eritrea, where he advocated the settlement of Italian colonists on the highlands and conducted the first land expropriations from 1893. In late 2018, four handwritten notebooks containing his mission notes from Eritrea (1889-1890) and Benadir, long considered lost by researchers, were rediscovered during reorganisation work on the collections of IPOCAN (Istituto per l'Oriente e per l'Africa), mixed in with institutional documents — an archival rediscovery documented in the 2019 inventory of Carte di e su Leopoldo Franchetti.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Franchetti → - Samson (Shimshon)ArchaeologySep 11, 2026
A 2024 archaeobotanical study illuminates Philistine ritual practices in the temples of Gath, setting of the Samson narrative
A team from Bar-Ilan University led by Aren Maeir (archaeology) and Ehud Weiss (archaeobotany) published in February 2024 in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports (Nature group) a study entitled "Plant-related Philistine ritual practices at biblical Gath", based on macrobotanical analysis of two successive Philistine temples excavated at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfī, a site identified with biblical Gath — the Philistine city from which, according to the narrative in Judges (13-16), Goliath originated, and whose territory forms the geographical setting of the Samson cycle. The study establishes a calendar of cultic rites (beginning in spring, ending in late summer or early autumn) and identifies the earliest attested uses of chaste tree (Vitex agnus-castus), crown daisy and silvery scabious, with parallels previously documented only in later Greek cults. This research is part of the same site's long-term excavation programme, where Maeir had previously uncovered temple architecture with two central pillar bases spaced approximately 2.15 metres apart — a spacing that several scholars connect to the narrative in Judges 16, according to which Samson pushed apart the columns supporting the Philistine building to make it collapse.
- Georges WormserPublicationSep 11, 2026
Georges Wormser, last representative of French "israélitism" according to Milo Lévy-Bruhl
Georges Wormser (14 January 1888 – 16 February 1978), from an Alsatian Jewish family whose uncle Gaston was secretary to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, was chief of staff to Georges Clemenceau from December 1918 to February 1920, after serving in his cabinet from November 1917 onwards, then secretary of the French delegation during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles. He published La République de Clemenceau in 1961, acclaimed by General de Gaulle, and chaired the Consistoire de Paris from 1949 to 1953. In an article in the Revue K. dated 15 December 2021, historian Milo Lévy-Bruhl analyzes Wormser as the ultimate embodiment of "israélitism" — a French doctrine favouring individual civic integration while maintaining separate religious institutions — whose collapse under the Vichy regime he demonstrates. Wormser also published in 1963 a collection of texts entitled Français israélites. His son Marcel assumed upon his death the Hebrew given name Élie, a gesture that Lévy-Bruhl reads as a symbol of the extinction of this tradition.
- Juda ben Yehiel (Juda Messer Leon)ManuscriptsSep 11, 2026
Juda ben Yehiel identified: he is Juda Messer Leon, Jewish humanist of the Italian Renaissance
The laconic entry "philosopher, rabbi and Italian physician" corresponds to Juda ben Jehiel, called Juda Messer Leon (c. 1420-1425 - c. 1498), considered the best Italian example of the 15th century of "ḥakham kolel" (universal scholar) and perhaps the most decorated Jew in Italy of his time: he received the title of "Messer" as well as a doctorate obtained in Padua in 1469. He was rabbi in Mantua from 1473, where a conflict with his colleague Joseph Colon Trabotto led to the expulsion of both men from the city in 1475; he then settled in Naples in 1480, under the accommodating reign of Ferdinand I. His work covers poetry, prayers, medical treatises, grammar, logic, rhetoric and commentaries on Aristotle, Averroes, Maimonides and the Bible. His best-known work, "Nofet Ṣufim" ("The flowing honey"), printed in Mantua around 1474-1475 by Abraham ben Salomon Conat, combines Aristotelian and Ciceronian rhetoric with rhetorical analysis of biblical texts and was an important precursor of Italian humanists' interest in rhetoric; a copy of this princeps edition was sold at Sotheby's (Judaica catalogue 2010).
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Mantoue → - Shabbethai Sheftel HorowitzManuscriptsSep 11, 2026
Two Shabbethai Sheftel Horowitz to distinguish in the Prague Kabbalist dynasty
Shabbethai Sheftel ben Akiba Halevi Horowitz (1566-1619), kabbalist, physician and rabbi in Prague, is the author of "Shefa Ṭal" (1612) and "Nishmat Shabbetai ha-Levi" (1616), the latter intended to address difficulties raised by readers of the first work concerning the idea that the human soul is a divine spark. He must be distinguished from a second Shabbethai Sheftel Horowitz (1592-1660), called "Vavei ha-Amudim", who was rabbi in Prague, Fürth, Frankfurt, Poznań and Vienna, and who was the SON of Isaiah Horowitz (author of the Shelah), and not his brother — a clarification that corrects a genealogical confusion widespread in encyclopedic entries. It was this second Shabbethai Sheftel who edited and published his father's "Shene Luḥot ha-Berit" (Shelah) in Amsterdam in 1649. The Horowitz family descends, according to tradition, from R. Zerahia Halevi of Gerona, and Isaiah Horowitz had for father Abraham ben Shabbethai Sheftel Horowitz, which suggests that the name "Shabbethai Sheftel" was transmitted over at least three generations of the lineage, probable source of the "brother"/"son" confusion between existing encyclopedic entries.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Shabbethaï → - Phinehas de PolotskManuscriptsSep 11, 2026
Phinehas of Polotsk, Misnagdic Theologian: A "Keter Torah" (1788) Predating Known Biblical Commentaries
Phinehas ben Yehuda of Polotsk (died in 1822 according to the YIVO Encyclopedia) is the author, besides three biblical commentaries already catalogued — "Shevet mi-Yehuda" on Proverbs (Vilna, 1803), "Derech HaMelech" on the Song of Songs (Horodna/Grodno, 1804) and "Derech Chaim" on Ecclesiastes (Horodna, 1804) — of an earlier and theologically more significant work: "Keter Torah" (1788), described by the YIVO Encyclopedia as one of the most concise formulations of misnagdic theology opposing nascent Hasidism. This places Phinehas of Polotsk within the intellectual circle of disciples and contemporaries of the Gaon of Vilna, leading figure of the Lithuanian misnagdic movement that privileged pshat (literal sense) over pilpul. The bibliographic catalogues of HebrewBooks.org corroborate the existence and dating of the three biblical commentaries already known.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Gaon de Vilna → - Heinrich HirschsprungMemorySep 11, 2026
A Danish-Swedish research project explores the hidden Jewishness of the Hirschsprung Museum
Since 2022, the Hirschsprung Museum in Copenhagen has been conducting, in partnership with the Danish Jewish Museum and Swedish researchers, a project titled "Nordisk kunst — Jødisk hjerte" (Nordic Art — Jewish Heart). This project examines how Jewish art collectors — including the Hirschsprung family, as well as the Fürstenberg and Thiel families in Sweden — became decisive in the history of Danish and Nordic art between 1870 and 1930, a chapter deemed "long neglected" in Nordic cultural history. The research particularly questions what the Jewish minority brought to the formation of the majority's national cultural identity, and emphasizes that the museum itself, founded in 1911 by Heinrich Hirschsprung's widow and regarded as a pillar of Danish art, owes its existence to the family's Jewish heritage — a fact that has remained largely unexplored until now. The project is funded by the Augustinus and Novo Nordisk foundations. The museum also presented from 28 August 2024 to 12 January 2025 an exhibition on women artists of the Danish modern breakthrough (1870-1900).
- Asher ben Yehiel (le Rosh)ManuscriptsSep 11, 2026
The Rosh, German Émigré Who Became a Pillar of Castilian Law, and a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the Piskei ha-Rosh Sold at Sotheby's
A 2023 university study analyzes how Asher ben Yehiel (1250-1327), an émigré from Germany and student of the Maharam of Rothenburg, transformed Jewish legal culture in Castile after settling in Toledo around 1305. The article by Judah D. Galinsky (Bar-Ilan), "A View from 14th Century Toledo: Rabbi Asher, a German Émigré, Transforms the Legal Culture in Castile," published in the journal Religions (vol. 14, no. 11, 2023), examines how the legal work of the Rosh, from which the Piskei ha-Rosh derives, became one of three "pillars" (alongside Maimonides and the Rif) forming the foundation of Joseph Caro's Shulhan Arukh. Furthermore, a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Piskei ha-Rosh — copied by a scribe named Eliezer, with glosses by Israel of Krems, covering the tractates Shevuot, Bava Batra and Sanhedrin, seventeen parchment folios in Ashkenazi semi-cursive script, from the Solomon Halberstam collection and catalogued by Menahem Schmelzer and Benjamin Richler — was put up for auction at Sotheby's (Important Judaica sale, estimate $15,000-25,000), attesting to the current circulation of manuscript witnesses of this text.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Le Choulhan Aroukh → - Jack J. CohenPublicationSep 11, 2026
Jack J. Cohen and Jewish Theologians of Prayer in the Twentieth Century
Jack J. Cohen (1919, Brooklyn - 2012, Jerusalem) was an Israeli-American Reconstructionist rabbi and direct disciple of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Holder of a doctorate in philosophy of education from Columbia University, he directed the Hillel Foundation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for twenty-three years, made his aliyah in 1961, founded the congregation Kehillat Mevakshei Derech in Jerusalem, and was honorary president of the Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood. His work "Major Philosophers of Jewish Prayer in the Twentieth Century," published in 2000 by Fordham University Press, examines the obstacles encountered by the modern Jewish worshipper in prayer through the writings of eight major thinkers: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, Mordecai M. Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jakob J. Petuchowski, Eugene B. Borowitz and Lawrence A. Hoffman. That same year, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College awarded him an honorary doctorate in theology.
- Vittoria OttolenghiPublicationSep 11, 2026
Vittoria Ottolenghi and the "perfect ballet": dialogue on Giselle
Vittoria Ottolenghi (Rome, 1924-2012) was one of the most recognised Italian dance critics of the twentieth century. Daughter of an agnostic Jewish father and a non-practising Catholic mother, a mixed marriage that protected her from antisemitic persecution during the Second World War, she began in 1954 as a contributor to Silvio D'Amico's Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo, then worked as a dance critic for Paese Sera, L'Espresso, Il Mattino and Il Resto del Carlino from 1956 onwards. From the 1960s, she conceived and hosted numerous programmes devoted to dance for RAI, notably the series Maratona d'estate broadcast for more than twenty years, and was a close friend of Rudolf Nureyev. Awarded the Gold Medal for Cultural and Artistic Merit by the Italian Presidency in 1997, she bequeathed her personal collection to the Accademia Filarmonica Romana. Her work "Perché la solita Giselle? Dialogo sul balletto perfetto", written as a dialogue with choreographer Annalia Lubich, was published in 2007 by Compositori (Bologna) and not by Rizzoli as the catalogue record suggests, this latter attribution being confirmed by no consulted source. From a genealogical standpoint, the surname Ottolenghi designates one of the oldest Jewish Piedmontese families, attested in Acqui Terme since at least 1731, but no consulted source establishes a documented link between Vittoria Ottolenghi's father and this precise lineage; this connection remains an unverified hypothesis, to be treated with caution.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Ottolenghi → - Avraham Chaim NaehMemorySep 8, 2026
Avraham Chaim Naeh, the decisor who established the tradition of ritual measures
Born on 3 May 1890 in Hebron, son of Rabbi Menahem Mendel Naeh, head of the local Habad community, Avraham Chaim Naeh studied at the Ohel Moshe yeshiva under Rabbi Yitzhak Yerouham Diskin and published in 1912 a first work on the laws of bar mitzvah, Chanoch LaNa'ar. Forced to leave Ottoman Palestine during the First World War due to lack of Turkish citizenship, he subsequently settled in Jerusalem, where he became the personal secretary of the Edah HaHareidit under Rabbi Haim Sonnenfeld. He is best known for having established a reference tradition on the ritual measures of the Torah (shiourim), opposing the tendency of the Hazon Ish to increase them, a method he expounded in Shiourei Torah, Shiour Mikvé, the Kountrass HaShiourim, as well as in Ketsot HaShoulhan and Piskei HaSiddour. He received the Rav Kook prize for religious literature in the years 1945-1947 and died on 20 Tammuz 5714 (21 July 1954); he was buried in the Har HaMenuhot cemetery in Jerusalem, where streets bearing his name are found today in Beitar Illit and in Mea Shearim.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Sonnenfeld → - David ProvençalPublicationSep 8, 2026
David Provençal and his project for a Jewish academy in Mantua (1564)
Two independent encyclopedias — the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906) and the Encyclopaedia Judaica — confirm and enrich the biography of David ben Abraham Provençal (Provenzale), rabbi, preacher and linguist of Mantua, whose birth is precisely dated to 1506 by the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Brother of Moses and Judah Provençal, he was the first Jewish scholar to valorize the work of Philo of Alexandria, defending him against the criticisms of Azariah dei Rossi in the Me'or Enayim. His other works, today lost except for a commentary on the Pirkei Avot preserved in manuscript, included Ir David (commentary on the Pentateuch), a commentary on the Song of Songs, Migdal David (treatise on Hebrew grammar) and Dor Haflagah, a controversial attempt to establish a Hebrew origin for more than two thousand Greek and Latin words. In 1565, he oversaw the correction of the Venetian edition of Isaac Arama's Akédat Yitshak. A fact not documented on the site: in 1564, fearing a decline in the study of Torah in Italy after the autodafés of the Talmud, he proposed to Italian communities the creation of a true Jewish academy in Mantua, whose program was to include written and oral law, philosophy, Hebrew grammar, Latin, Italian, medicine and astronomy — a project contested by the Catholic Church and whose degree of actual realization remains debated by historians.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Mantoue → - Sami LezmiMemoryTo be confirmedSep 8, 2026
Sami Lezmi, singer born in Morocco, pioneer of Judeo-Moroccan song in Israel
Sami Lezmi (סמי לזמי), born 2 December 1951 in Morocco, emigrated to Israel in 1956 at the age of five. After schooling at kibbutz Hulata and military service in the parachute brigade, he worked as an employee and then head waiter before joining the group Sfatayim, which became a pioneer of Judeo-Moroccan music in Israel. The group published three albums, one of which sold over 40,000 copies, before separating in 1997; Lezmi subsequently pursued a solo career. "Lezmi" is among the spelling variants already recorded for the Elzam lineage on the site, but no connection of lineage or precise location could be established beyond Morocco as a common country of origin.
- Matatiah SereroGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 8, 2026
A dayan named Matatiah Serero at the head of the rabbinical court of Fès until 1891 — a lineage to verify
Research confirms the existence of a rabbi named Matatiah Serero (מתתיה סירירו) who presided over the rabbinical court (beit din) of Fès until his death in 1891 (5651 of the Hebrew era), a date that corresponds exactly with that reported by the Malkhei Rabbanan of Yosef Ben Naïm (1931, f. 98-1). However, the Serero dynasty bore this given name over at least three documented generations: a Matatiah ordained in 1750 within the "court of five" of Fès, this Matatiah who died in 1891, and another Matatiah appointed to the Fès court by French authorities in 1919, father of the dayan Haïm David Serero (1884-1960). The sources consulted (Hamichlol, Encyclopaedia Judaica via encyclopedia.com) do not allow independent confirmation of the "son of Haïm David" lineage given in the site's notice; they suggest instead, for the Matatiah of 1919, a reverse relationship of lineage — Matatiah as father of a Haïm David, not as son. This genealogical question would merit examination by a primary source (the complete text of Malkhei Rabbanan) before any correction to the existing record.
- Rabbi Levi Yitzchak SchneersonGenealogySep 8, 2026
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, Thirty Years Leading the Rabbinical Community of Yekaterinoslav
Levi Yitzchak Schneerson (1878-1944), a renowned kabbalist and father of the seventh Rabbi of Lubavitch, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was appointed in 1909 as chief rabbi of Yekaterinoslav — the future Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro — a position he held for approximately thirty years. Known for his fierce opposition to the communist regime, he was arrested in 1939 by the NKVD, tortured, and then sentenced to exile in the remote village of Chili in Kazakhstan, before being transferred to Alma-Ata, where he died on August 9, 1944. The historic synagogue of the community, known as the "Golden Rose," built in the nineteenth century, today forms the heart of the Menorah Center in Dnipro, a complex of seven towers of increasing height symbolizing the seven-branched menorah, covering approximately 50,000 m², inaugurated on October 16, 2012 at the initiative of Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky. In 2024, a new synagogue dedicated to the memory of Levi Yitzchak Schneerson was inaugurated on Lazaryan Street in Dnipro.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Levi Yitzchak Schneerson → - Carry van BiemaMemorySep 8, 2026
Carry van Biema, the Jewish artist murdered at Auschwitz whose work on color was destroyed by the Nazis
Carry (Karoline) van Biema (17 October 1881, Hanover – 31 August 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau) was a German artist and theorist of Jewish origin. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague (1898-1902) and then at the Academy of Stuttgart under Adolf Hölzel (1914-1919) — also master of Johannes Itten — she taught from 1908 onwards and exhibited at the Kunstverein of Hanover, at the Kestner-Gesellschaft and at the Hanover Secession. Her work Farben und Formen als lebendige Kräfte (Colours and Forms as Living Forces), published in 1930 by E. Diederichs in Jena, conveyed her master Hölzel's theory of colours articulated with the teachings of Goethe; it quickly went out of print, and the remaining copies were destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. Forced into exile, she went to Barcelona in 1933 and then to the Netherlands in 1938, where she lived in Utrecht. She was deported from Utrecht to the transit camp of Westerbork on 26 August 1942, then murdered on her arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 31 August 1942. A Stolperstein was laid in her memory in Utrecht on 19 April 2021. Despite documented influence on the colour theory of her time — her "colour mixture triangle" remains in use today — her name remains virtually unknown, unlike her fellow student Johannes Itten, trained by the same Hölzel and who became famous at the Bauhaus.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Couleur → - Robert NunesMemorySep 8, 2026
Robert Nunes, Jewish passenger on the Titanic, lost in the sinking of 15 April 1912
Robert Nunes, born in 1877 in Kingston (Jamaica) into a Sephardic Jewish family, boarded the Titanic in second class at Southampton on 10 April 1912, bound for New York where he was to rejoin relatives. He perished in the sinking that occurred during the night of 14 to 15 April 1912; his body, if recovered, was never identified with certainty among the victims picked up by the Mackay-Bennett. His presence appears in the embarkation records and victim lists established after the disaster, which list approximately a dozen Jewish passengers on board, among them several Sephardim from the West Indies or the Levant. His name remains today associated, in genealogical databases devoted to the sinking, with the small Jamaican Sephardic community of which several members emigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.
- Lady Rachel SimonGenealogyTo be confirmedSep 8, 2026
Lady Rachel Simon, figure in Anglo-Jewish high society, wife of the first Viscount Simon
Lady Rachel Simon (née Pattison, later married to John Allsebrook Simon, 1st Viscount Simon, British statesman) moved in the circles of Anglo-Jewish high society during the interwar period. Genealogical records mention her within the networks of the British Jewish upper bourgeoisie, several branches of which had allied themselves through marriage to families of the non-Jewish aristocracy of the United Kingdom during the Edwardian and Georgian periods. Her name appears in biographical accounts dedicated to prominent women of this community, alongside other figures who contributed to Anglo-Jewish philanthropic and cultural endeavours of the period.
- Franz SkutschGenealogySep 8, 2026
Otto Skutsch, classical philologist, son of linguist Franz Skutsch who converted to Protestantism in 1898
Otto Skutsch (1906-1990), renowned specialist in the Latin poet Ennius and professor of classical philology in London after his emigration from Germany in the 1930s, was the son of linguist Franz Skutsch (1865-1912), himself professor of Indo-European philology at Breslau. Franz Skutsch was born into a Jewish family originating from Breslau (today Wrocław); he converted to Protestantism in 1898, a decision then common among German Jewish academics concerned with removing an obstacle to their academic careers in the Wilhelmine Empire. Otto Skutsch, forced into exile by Nazi racial laws because of his paternal Jewish ancestry despite his father's conversion, pursued his entire career in the United Kingdom, notably at University College London, where his critical edition of Ennius's Annals was long considered authoritative.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Apostasie et Apostats du Judaïsme → - Mór RéthyGenealogySep 8, 2026
Mór Réthy, Hungarian mathematician of Jewish origin, professor in Budapest and Kolozsvár
Mór Réthy (1848-1925), born Weisz in Nagyszalonta, was one of the most productive Hungarian mathematicians of his generation. Trained in Vienna and Heidelberg, he taught mathematical physics at the university of Kolozsvár (Cluj) from 1874 and, from 1886, at the university of Budapest, where he held the chair of rational mechanics. A member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 1878, he published significant works on the theory of elasticity, non-Euclidean optics and the history of mathematics, notably a study that remained celebrated on infinitesimal calculus in Cavalieri. His family, of Israelite origin, had Magyarized their surname from Weisz to Réthy, a practice then widespread among assimilated Jews of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy concerned with national integration. Réthy remained active until his death in Budapest in 1925; a street in the Hungarian capital and a scientific prize bear his name today.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs hongrois → - Juda ben Benjamin AnavManuscriptsSep 8, 2026
Juda ben Benjamin Anav, paytan and Roman copyist of the thirteenth century, leaves a zoulat for Shabbat Shekalim
Rabbi Juda ben Benjamin Anav (c. 1215-1280), member of the Anav (Anaw) family of Rome, belonged to a lineage of Italian scholars of the thirteenth century that included several authors and copyists active in the Eternal City. He wrote a commentary on the Sefer ha-Halakhot of Isaac Alfasi, a commentary on the Talmudic treatise Shekalim and annotations to the Sheiltot of Aha of Shabha, as well as a brief work on the laws of shechita and trefah. A liturgical poet (paytan), he is the author of a zoulat composed for the parashah of Shekalim, which has come down to us and figures among the rare poetic pieces attributable with certainty to this branch of the Anav family — several of whose members, including his brother Benjamin ben Abraham and his nephew Yehiel ben Yekoutiel, also counted among the Jewish literati of medieval Rome.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Les Juifs de Bologne → - MaïmonidePublicationSep 8, 2026
Maimonides and the Sabeans: The Guide for the Perplexed as a source of medieval knowledge of a vanished religion
In the Guide for the Perplexed (More Nevukhim), Maimonides devotes several chapters of the third part to the religion of the Sabeans, which he presents as the idolatrous context from which the Mosaic commandments sought precisely to turn away the Hebrews. Drawing on Arabic sources now partly lost, he expounds a cosmology in which the stars are venerated as divinities, the sun occupying the rank of supreme divinity among seven celestial bodies worshipped, and reports a Sabean tradition according to which Noah was a farmer who rejected the worship of idols. Maimonides sees in this a rational explanation of the sacrificial system: God would have granted the Hebrews, through pedagogical mercy, a transitional form of worship adapted to the idolatrous practices learned in Egypt, failing to be able to turn them away from it all at once. It was through the mediation of the Guide that knowledge of the Sabeans was transmitted to Christian scholars of the Middle Ages and early modernity, making this vanished people a lasting object of study in the comparative history of religions until the seventeenth century.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Moïse ben Maimon → - le Rashbam (Samuel ben Meïr)ManuscriptsSep 7, 2026
At the Russian State Library, a lost commentary by Rashbam discovered in the Ginzburg collection
Researcher Yisrael Dubitsky, who was studying manuscripts of Rachi preserved in the Ginzburg collection of the Russian State Library (Moscow), identified on June 8, 2026 a Torah commentary long considered lost, attributed to Rashbam (Samuel ben Meïr, c. 1085-1158), grandson of Rachi. The manuscript corresponds to "manuscript no. 103" formerly kept at the Jewish theological school of Breslau, which had served as the basis for the printed edition of Rashbam's commentaries published in 1881 by scholar David Rosine; its trace was then lost and the text had been considered missing for over a century. Rashbam distinguishes himself from his grandfather Rachi by a strictly literal method (peshat), founded on Hebrew grammar, whereas Rachi combined literal meaning and midrashic interpretations. The news was reported in Russian on June 8, 2026 by the website NEWSru.co.il (Russian-language Israeli edition) and corroborated by the English-language coverage (Israel National News) citing the same identification and dating.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Séminaire théologique juif de Breslau → - Yehuda OhayunMemorySep 7, 2026
Avivim, 1970: Yehuda Ohayun, child born in Morocco, killed in the school bus attack
Born in Tishrei 5720 (1960) in Morocco, Yehuda Ohayun emigrated to Israel with his family in 1963. On 22 May 1970 (15 Iyar 5730), at the age of 10, he was killed when terrorists from the PFLP-General Command fired three bazooka rockets at a school bus carrying about thirty children between kibbutz Avivim and their regional school, near the Lebanese border — an attack that killed 12 people, mostly children. His parents, Solika and Yaïsh Ohayun, and his siblings Sarah, Nissim and Shalom are listed by name in the official database of terrorism victims of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. He is buried in Safed cemetery, Avivim section, row 1, and is commemorated on stone 42 at Mount Herzl.
- Maurice de Hirsch (baron de Hirsch)ArchivesSep 7, 2026
New York: Complete Digitization in 2025 of the Baron de Hirsch Fund Collection
The American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), with the Center for Jewish History and funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, completed in 2025 the full digitization of the "Baron de Hirsch Fund" collection (call number AJHS I-80, 109 linear feet, 188 boxes), previously accessible only through aging microfilms. This collection documents the philanthropic work founded in 1891 in New York by Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-1896) and his wife Clara to assist Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Among the newly made available materials is the register and minutes, written in handwritten Yiddish, of the "New England Hebrew Farmers", a Jewish agricultural community in Connecticut founded by Russian-Jewish immigrants: the community's synagogue was established in 1892, its founding constitution dates to 1894, and the documents cover the period 1892-1933.
- Abraham WertheimGenealogySep 7, 2026
Pomerania-Berlin: Abraham Wertheim, founder of the Wertheim department store dynasty
Born on 18 November 1819 in Anklam, Pomerania, and died on 3 July 1891 in Seelisberg, Switzerland, Abraham Wertheim, son of merchant Joseph Cohn of Salzwedel, married Ida Wolff on 17 April 1855; the couple had nine children, including Georg, Wilhelm (1859-1934), Hedwig (1860-1921), Helene (1862-1941), Franz (1863-1933) and Wolff (1867-1940) Wertheim. A member of Berlin's reformed Jewish community, he co-founded in 1852 with his brother Théodore a textile business in Stralsund, where the first "A. Wertheim" store opened on 17 November 1875. His sons developed the brand in Berlin from 1885 onwards, then in the monumental department store at Leipziger Platz (1896), making it Berlin's largest department store before its forced Aryanization in 1933-1934 under the Nazi regime (renamed AWAG), followed by its postwar acquisition by Hertie. This biography is based notably on the academic monograph by Erica Fischer and Simone Ladwig-Winters, "Die Wertheims. Geschichte einer Familie" (2007).
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Cohn → - Henri BergsonArchivesSep 7, 2026
Unpublished Correspondence with Salomon Reinach and Hasidic Warsaw Ancestry of Henri Bergson
A scholarly edition from 2012, published in the Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger (PUF, vol. 137, n°2), published 24 unpublished letters from Henri Bergson to the archaeologist and Jewish hellenist Salomon Reinach, including at least three of philosophical interest — one containing Bergson's presentation of William James's philosophy — prompted notably by the publication of Reinach's Lettres à Zoé. Furthermore, the father of Henri Bergson, the composer Michał Bergson (1820-1898), born Bereksohn, descended from Temerl Bergson (née Sonnenberg, died in 1830 or 1831), nicknamed "the Doña Gracia of Hasidism": married in February 1787 to Dov (Berek) Bergson/Sonnenberg, she was a considerable Warsaw businesswoman, founder of a bank, and a major patroness of Polish Hasidic tsadikim of the early nineteenth century — a lineage studied by historian Glenn Dynner and researcher Tsippi Kauffman.
- Solomon BoniracManuscriptsSep 7, 2026
Barcelona, 14th century: Solomon Bonirac, little-known Hebrew translator of Galen
The entry on Galen in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906), written by Richard Gottheil and Max Schloessinger, mentions a treatise "on crisis" translated into Hebrew by Solomon Bonirac of Barcelona, active between 1300 and 1350. He was thus a Catalan Jewish physician and translator of the 14th century, author in Hebrew of the "Sefer Baḥran" (ספר בחראן), a version of Galen's treatise "De crisibus". This identification, repeated in the bibliographic list established by Moritz Steinschneider and confirmed independently by the Encyclopaedia Judaica/Jewish Virtual Library, excludes any confusion with similar surnames Bonfed, Bonfil or Bondi.
- Khaled AbdelwahhabMemorySep 7, 2026
Tunisia, 1942-1943: Khaled Abdelwahhab and the rescue of Jews from Mahdia
In 1942, during the Germano-Italian occupation of Tunisia — the only direct Axis occupation of Arab territory during the Second World War — German troops arriving in Mahdia began expelling Jewish families from their homes. Khaled Abdelwahhab, a 32-year-old Tunisian notable and son of a former minister at the court of the Tunisian sovereign, hid about twenty Jews (the figure varies according to testimonies between 23 and approximately two dozen) in his olive oil factory for several months, protecting them in particular from the risk of requisition by German officers. This account, documented by historian Robert Satloff on the basis of direct testimony from a survivor, led to Abdelwahhab being proposed for the title of Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem — a candidacy that sparked debate within the commission. He died in 1997 at the age of 86.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Les Justes parmi les nations → - Christophe ColombPublicationSep 7, 2026
The hypothesis of a Jewish origin of Christopher Columbus, an old thesis still debated
The hypothesis of a Jewish or converso origin of Christopher Columbus, born around 1892 at the 400th anniversary of his arrival, remains minority and contested by historiography. In 1892, American Jewish diplomat Oscar Straus commissioned Meyer Kayserling to research the role of Jews in Columbus's enterprise: Kayserling concluded that people close to Columbus (the interpreter Luis de Torres, the financier Luis de Santángel) were Jewish, but not Columbus himself. Before the First World War, the Spaniard Celso García de la Riega proposed that Columbus himself was Sephardic, a thesis taken up in 1940 by Salvador de Madariaga. A contemporary "Valencian thesis", advanced by Francesc Albardaner i Llorens, places Columbus's origin in Valencia, in a family of silk-weaving judeo-conversos. In 2024, forensic geneticist José Antonio Lorente (University of Granada) claimed, in a Spanish television documentary, that Columbus would be Sephardic from Western Europe — a highly publicized study but not published in a peer-reviewed journal and received with skepticism by part of the scientific community. Historian Devin Naar, in an article of 25 October 2024, concludes that the thesis "is in no way certain"; the majority Genoese thesis (birth in Savona in 1451) remains supported by notarial documents.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Séfarades → - Ludwig PollakManuscriptsSep 7, 2026
Rome: Ludwig Pollak, Jewish author of the Stroganoff collection catalogue, deported to Auschwitz in 1943
The catalogue "Choice pieces from the collection of Count Grigory Stroganoff in Rome. The antiques", published in 1912, was written by archaeologist Ludwig Pollak, born 14 September 1868 in Prague into a Jewish family, who arrived in Rome in 1893 after studies under Theodor Mommsen, and became director of the Barracco Museum. Pollak is internationally known for having identified in 1905-1906 the missing arm of the Laocoön, which he donated to the Vatican, as well as for having identified the "Stroganoff Athena" (now at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt), from the same collection as the catalogue. On 16 October 1943, he was arrested with his family during the roundup of the Rome ghetto, which deported 1023 Jews that day, and died at Auschwitz around 23 October 1943; he reportedly refused the protection offered to him by the Vatican through his friend Bartolomeo Nogara.
Great works
All Great Books →- Art & WarPublicationSep 14, 2026
Art & War (2016): the dialogue-book by Shimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar on writing, Israel and the Shoah
The exact and complete title of the work is Art & War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction, published by Repeater Books (London) in 2016 over 300 pages. It is not a classical essay but a dialogue-book, structured as an extended conversation between Israeli writers Shimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar on their relationship to imaginative writing, to Israel and Palestine, to Judaism, to the Shoah and to childhood; the volume also integrates two unpublished short stories in which each author appears as a character in the other's narrative, "Tutim" (Tidhar) and "Third Attribute" (Adaf). The book was born from an initial interview intended to accompany the English publication of Adaf's novel Sunburnt Faces; Adaf having responded to questions with questions, the interview transformed itself into a prolonged dialogue, during a phase of distress for both authors linked to the 2014 Gaza war. Adaf grew up in a religious Mizrahi Jewish family of Moroccan origin in Sderot, while Tidhar grew up in a socialist-Zionist kibbutz in northern Israel — two extremes of the Israeli spectrum brought together by a common passion in childhood for Hebrew science fiction, notably the review Fantasia 2000. Adaf is laureate of the Sapir Prize, Tidhar of the World Fantasy Award; the two authors had already conducted in September 2013 a conversation by email, published by the review Strange Horizons under the title "The Convergence Between Poetry and the Fantastic: A Conversation", which foreshadows the 2016 book.
- Ma'avar YabbokManuscriptsSep 14, 2026
The Ma'avar Yabbok (Mantua, 1626): Genesis of a Reference Manual for Mourning, Commissioned by the Hevra Kadisha
The Ma'avar Yabbok was first published in 1626 in Mantua, at the explicit request of the Hevra Kadisha (burial society) of the city, which wished to have a structured guide for the conduct of mourning and care for the dying. The work comprises 112 chapters and interweaves funeral liturgy with kabbalistic teachings drawn in particular from the Zohar; its first chapter, Siftei Tzedek, brings together prayers for the sick and dying as well as rules for care. Its author, Aaron Berakhiah (Berechiah) ben Moshe ben Nehemia of Modena (1549-1639), was a student of Rabbi Hillel of Modena and then of the Italian kabbalist Menahem Azaria of Fano — himself in the lineage of Israel Sarug, a student of Isaac Louria of Safed — and nephew of the Venetian rabbi Yehuda Aryeh (Leon) of Modena. He also published Ashmoret ha-Boker (1624, a siddur for the morning service), the four-volume kabbalistic work Ḥibbur be-Kabbalah, and a collection of Louria's works entitled Magen Aharon; in 1636, he was arrested for possession of censored books, which he justified as necessary to his religious practice. The text was subsequently translated into Yiddish by Ellus bat Mordekhai of Slutsk (Belarus). According to the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, the work became a primary reference text for Jewish funeral practices, whose influence is documented in the historiography of the chevra kadisha through to the seventeenth-century Italian period. In 2022, Wipf and Stock published a scholarly work by Steven Moss and Simcha Paull Raphael comparing the Ma'avar Yabbok to the Sefer HaHayiim and analyzing their common mystical foundations.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Mantoue → - Sefer Shirah la-ElArchivesSep 14, 2026
Sefer Shirah la-El (Baghdad, 1927-1928): A Collection of Piyyutim by Rabbi-Poet Menasheh Salman Shahrabani
The catalog record of the Iraqi Jewish Archive (National Archives of the United States) attributes this collection of liturgical poems (piyyutim), printed in Baghdad in 1927 or 1928 (Hebrew year 5688), to rabbi and poet Menasheh Salman Shahrabani — the mention "editor E. Shoḥet" currently associated with the work actually designating the commercial printer of the volume, distinct from its author. Shahrabani (born June 4, 1881 in Baghdad, died August 21, 1960 in Ramat Gan) was a student of rabbi Yosef Ḥayim of Baghdad, called the "Ben Ish Ḥai", before serving as rabbi of the Jewish communities of Abadan and Mahmoura in Persia. A biblical exegete, pedagogue, and prolific liturgical poet — approximately 900 pieces are attributed to him — he published in Baghdad a biblical commentary (Kfitor va-Feraḥ), a work entitled Pardès Rimmonim, as well as two collections of liturgical poetry, Shirot u-Teshbaḥot and Shirah la-El, the latter corresponding precisely to the item held by the IJA. He emigrated to Israel in 1949 and settled in Ramat Gan in 1950. The IJA record describes the copy as a volume bound in leather with decorated paper covers, 18.2 cm by 12.0 cm and 0.8 cm thick, with sewn binding, containing manuscript annotations, and subjected to conservation treatment against mold before reconditioning. The Hebrew printing house of Baghdad, active from 1862 to the 1960s, produced abundant liturgical literature according to the local rite — more than 400 liturgical works have been found in the IJA collection, of which approximately one quarter were printed locally — the house of Elisha (E.) Shoḥet, active at least until 1940, was one of its principal actors alongside the printing house founded by Ezra Reuben Dangoor in 1904.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Bagdad → - MisererePublicationSep 14, 2026
Miserere (1910) by Semyon Yushkevich at the Moscow Art Theatre: critical reception and the author's biography
According to the official archives of the Moscow Art Theatre, the premiere of Miserere took place on 17 December 1910, with sets by Vladimir Egorov and incidental music by the young composer Ilya Sats; the staging is attributed by this same institutional archive to Vladimir Nemirovitch-Dantchenko and Vassili Loujski, whereas the Jewish electronic encyclopedia ORT attributes it to Vsevolod Meyerhold and another secondary source to Constantin Stanislavski — an unresolved divergence between sources. According to contemporary criticism by Maximilian Volochine, the action takes place in a popular Jewish quarter after the events of 1905, in seven scenes: a group of young men becomes enamoured, in taverns, of a woman deliberately described as ugly, Tina (a role played by actress Olga Gzovskaïa), who promises them "something better than love," and gradually commits suicide. Volochine judges the play commercially unsuccessful but followed by passionate admirers; he severely criticizes its dramatic construction (up to 72 characters, of whom only two are truly dramatic) while unreservedly praising the Moscow Art Theatre's performance, which renders "Jewish life and Jewish types with truth, precision and vitality." Born on 12 (24) July 1868 in Odessa into an assimilated Jewish family, Semyon Yushkevich lived in Paris from 1893 to 1902, completing medical studies at the Sorbonne; he achieved literary acclaim with the novella "Decomposition" (1902) and became, with the support of Maxime Gorki, the recognized chronicler of Jewish poverty and family disintegration — Chekhov reportedly said of him: "We have never had writers like him." After the Kishinev pogrom (1903), he settled for a time in Berlin; after the Russian revolution, he emigrated definitively in 1920, before settling in Paris from 1924, where he died on 2 December 1927 — and not in Nice. He is credited with having developed a "Russo-Jewish speech," rendering Yiddish inflections through Russian vocabulary, a technique that would influence Isaac Babel; a posthumous collection, Posthumous Works (1927), brings together unpublished short stories including the novella "Seven Days."
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Moscou → - Beit YishaiPublicationSep 14, 2026
Beit Yishai (2004): the work of Rabbi Shlomo Fisher, a bridge figure between the "haredi" world and religious Zionism
The identification is confirmed in a convergent manner by at least six independent sources, including the National Library of Israel: this is the work of Rabbi Shelomo Yehonatan Yehuda Fisher (6 February 1932 - 18 November 2021), a major rabbinical authority in Jerusalem. The work comprises two distinct volumes, Hiddushim (Talmudic novelties) and Derashot (Torah discourses); the 2004 edition corresponds to a revised edition of Beit Yishai — Derashot al HaTorah. The Derashot Beit Yishai collection received the Jerusalem Prize for Torah literature in 5761 (2000-2001), Rabbi Fisher having already received the Rav Kook Prize for Torah literature in 5748 (1987-1988), awarded by the municipality of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa. Born in Jerusalem in 1932, fatherless from 1942, trained at the Mir yeshiva under the teaching of Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, Fisher considered himself an intellectual disciple of the Hazon Ish although he met him only once; he was for decades rosh yeshiva of the Yeshivat Itri in Beit Tsafafa (Jerusalem), then dayan of the rabbinical court of the Edah HaChareidis and, in the 1990s, of the Beit Din of Jerusalem at the invitation of Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira. His scholarly method synthesized the Talmudic analysis of Brisk and the "peshat" defended by the Hazon Ish and the Gaon of Vilna, with encyclopedic knowledge of halakha, Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah — a rare combination among Jerusalem's great sages; he published notably an annotated edition of the Or Hashem of Hasdaï Crescas (1990) and contributed to the edition of the works of Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman. Despite a strictly "haredi" appearance, he taught in several yeshivot hesder of religious Zionism (Kiryat Arba, Beit El, Gush Etzion, Maalé Adoumim, Shaalvim), playing a rare bridging role between the two Orthodox worlds; he was buried on the Mount of Olives the evening of his death, 18 November 2021.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Le sionisme religieux → - Cristãos-Novos na BahiaPublicationSep 14, 2026
Cristãos-Novos na Bahia (1972) by Anita Novinsky: genesis of a founding thesis in Brazilian historiography of the Inquisition
The work originates from Anita Novinsky's doctoral thesis in social history (University of São Paulo), first published in 1972 by Editora Perspectiva (São Paulo, "Estudos" collection no. 9, 238 p.) under the title Cristãos-novos na Bahia: 1624-1654, the fruit of ten years of research supported notably by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for access to Portuguese archives; the 2007 edition, bearing the slightly revised title Cristãos-Novos na Bahia: A Inquisição, is a revised reprint by the same publisher. Upon its publication in 1972, the work was reviewed by two major North American academic journals, The Americas (Cambridge University Press) and the Hispanic American Historical Review (Duke University Press), which count it among the founding theses of the 1970s on the history of the Inquisition in Brazil: it documents the social exclusion of new Christians in seventeenth-century Bahian society and inquisitorial trials for Judaisation. Anita Waingort Novinsky was born on 22 November 1922 in Stachów, Poland, and emigrated to Brazil with her family at the age of one; a graduate in philosophy (USP, 1956), specializing in psychology (1958) and doctorate in social history (USP, 1970), she undertook study periods at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne between 1977 and 1983. Professor and then professor emeritus of history at USP, she participated in 1969 in the founding of the Centro de Estudos Judaicos, the first centre of its kind on the American continent, directed from 2002 to 2006 the Laboratório de Estudos sobre a Intolerância, and was distinguished as "Pioneira da Ciência no Brasil" by the CNPq in 2013. She died on 20 July 2021 in São Paulo, at the age of 98; several institutions, including the postgraduate programme in social history at USP and the Museu Judaico de São Paulo, paid tribute to her, the latter having published in 2025 an academic article devoted to her trajectory and historiographical interpretation.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Inquisition → - Frank Iny SchoolArchivesSep 14, 2026
School Records from the Frank Iny School (1961-1971): British and American Examinations in the Final Years of Baghdad's Jewish School
According to the primary catalog record of the Iraqi Jewish Archive (United States National Archives), this documentary collection covers more precisely the period 1961-1971 and brings together correspondence between the Jewish schools of Baghdad and the Iraqi Ministry of Education, as well as individual student files from the Frank Iny School containing photographs, examination results and disciplinary records. These results include notably the General Certificate of Education Overseas (British), the SAT from the College Entrance Examination Board of Princeton, and examinations from the University of Cambridge — traces of a school system that remained connected, until the end, to international educational standards. The original support was a ring binder whose cover is missing; the documents, written in Arabic and English, required conservation treatment against mold, mechanical flattening and selective re-gluing of photographs with wheat starch adhesive before rehousing. A contextual fact, noted by the same "Text & Heritage" exhibition of the National Archives regarding another item from the Baghdad educational collection (school textbooks), illustrates the political climate experienced by these establishments in their final years: more than sixty copies of an elementary Hebrew textbook systematically present pages 73-74 torn out, pages that contained a text and a poem of loyalty to King Faisal II, removed after his assassination during the military coup of 1958. This collection of student files was presented in 2013-2014 at the exhibition "Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage", organized jointly by the National Archives (Washington, October 2013-January 2014) and the Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York, spring 2014).
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Bagdad → - ija-3116ArchivesSep 12, 2026
The Ezra Menahem Daniel endowments collection, now made accessible through an artificial intelligence project (2026)
Item ija-3116 contains, according to the Iraqi Jewish Archive's own description, invoices, lease contracts, tenant receipts and an authorization document related to the administration of the pious endowments (waqf) of Ezra Menahem Daniel, written in Arabic and preserved in the archives of the Administrative Committee of the Jews of Iraq in Baghdad. The Daniel family was among the most influential in the Baghdad Jewish community: Senator Menahem Saleh Daniel (1846-1940) donated, with his son, the land and buildings of the "Menahem Daniel School," an elementary school for girls founded in 1904, and a sports ground bearing the name of Ezra Menahem Daniel is also listed in the same collection. In March 2026, the media outlet J. The Jewish News of Northern California (jweekly.com) reported on the "Voices from the Archive" project (judeoiraq.org), designed by engineer David Breslauer (Oakland, California), whose family had fled Baghdad in 1950. This project applies artificial intelligence to the transcription, English translation and indexing of tens of thousands of documents from the collection, which until now have been largely inaccessible due to lack of translation — Breslauer himself found traces of his own family there. The organization JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, San Francisco) serves as fiscal sponsor for the project. The repatriation status of the entire collection to Iraq remains pending, the collection still being preserved in the United States.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Bagdad → - averroes-1126-1198-grand-commentaire-sur-la-metaphysique-d-aristoteManuscriptsTo be confirmedSep 12, 2026
A Parallel Hebrew-Latin Critical Edition of Averroes' Grand Commentary on the Metaphysics, in Preparation at Cologne
The Grand Commentary of Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198) on Aristotle's Metaphysics was transmitted in the Jewish world through the Hebrew translation of Qalonymos ben Qalonymos (14th century), judged to be very literal by specialists to the point of serving today to reconstruct passages of the incompletely preserved Arabic text. According to the "Current Editions" page of the Averroes project at the University of Cologne (Thomas-Institut, Digital Averroes Research Environment), a parallel critical edition of the Hebrew and Latin translations of this Grand Commentary is currently in preparation, entrusted to Massimo Perrone and Oded Horezky. The project emphasizes that the Hebrew tradition is enriched with medieval Jewish super-commentaries citing and paraphrasing Averroes. The previous reference Arabic-Hebrew edition, established by Maurice Bouyges in the 1940s, already relied on eight medieval Hebrew manuscripts against only two incomplete Arabic manuscripts, a sign of the central role of the Hebrew pathway in the transmission of this work. To be distinguished from a recent critical edition published by Brill (Aouad, Di Vincenzo, Fadlallah) which concerns the Middle Commentary, a distinct work.
- ija-1139ManuscriptsSep 12, 2026
Sefer Zivhei Tsedek, halakhic reference work by the Chief Rabbi of Baghdad Abdallah Somekh
Item ija-1139 corresponds to the second volume (חלק ב') of the Sefer Zivhei Tsedek, a collection of halakhic decisions and responsa compiled by hakham Abdallah (Ovadia Abraham Yosef) Somekh (1813-1889), one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of nineteenth-century Baghdad. From 1840, Somekh directed the yeshiva Midrash Abu Menashe, later renamed Midrash Bet Zilkha, which remained active until 1951; he trained there notably Yosef Hayyim, known as the "Ben Ish Hai", who entered his school at fifteen and considered him his principal teacher, as well as Yaakov Chaim Sofer, author of the Kaf HaChaim. The Zivhei Tsedek deals principally with the Yoré Dea section of the Shulhan Arukh (dietary laws, ritual slaughter), with practical decisions incorporating the usages particular to the Jewish community of Baghdad. Published in Baghdad — catalogues place an edition in two volumes in 1914, after the author's death — the work became the reference manual for communities of Baghdadi origin as far as India and the Far East. The National Library of Israel preserves several copies, including one that belonged to the Valmadonna Trust collection.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Valmadonna Trust Library → - ben-ha-melekh-ve-ha-nazir-le-prince-et-l-asceteManuscriptsSep 12, 2026
A Sephardic Manuscript of the Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir (17th-18th Century) Offered for Sale at Sotheby's in 2024
In 2024, the Sotheby's auction house presented, during its "Important Judaica" sale, a Hebrew manuscript of the Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir attributed to Abraham ibn Hisdai. It is a volume of 98 paper leaves (approximately 16.8 × 11.1 cm), copied in semi-cursive Sephardic script and dated by experts to the 17th-18th centuries. The cataloging entry, credited to Hebraicists Menahem Schmelzer (z"l) and Benjamin Richler — the latter having directed the cataloging of Hebrew manuscripts at the National Library of Israel — places the narrative within the tradition of Indian wisdom literature. This sale attests to the continued circulation, in the Jewish rare book market, of ancient manuscript copies of this work.
- ben-ha-melekh-ve-ha-nazir-le-prince-et-l-ascetePublicationSep 12, 2026
Scholarly Annotated Edition of Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir by Eilat Attinger (TAUPress)
The Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir ("The Prince and the Ascetic"), a medieval Hebrew adaptation of the novel of Barlaam and Josaphat, is generally attributed to Abraham ben Shemuel ha-Levi ibn Hisdai, a poet and translator active in Barcelona in the first half of the 13th century, who is said to have translated the text from Arabic while removing Christian elements and enriching it with narratives, maxims and poems of his own. The National Library of Israel lists a scholarly reference edition, established, introduced and annotated by researcher Eilat Attinger, published by TAUPress (the University of Tel-Aviv press) in partnership with the Mif'al le-Targoumei Sifrei Mofet; the Hebrew entry on Wikipedia dates this edition to 5771 in the Hebrew calendar, that is 2010-2011. This edition, which follows that of A. M. Habermann (1951), remains the most cited scientific reference for this text.
- les manuscrits de la mer MorteArchaeologySep 11, 2026
AI dating rejuvenates — and sometimes ages — the chronology of the Dead Sea Scrolls
A study published on 4 June 2025 in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE proposes a new method for dating the Dead Sea Scrolls based on artificial intelligence. Conducted by Mladen Popović (director of the Qumran Institute, University of Groningen) and Eibert Tigchelaar (University of Louvain), in collaboration with the Israeli Antiquities Authority, as part of the ten-year project "The Hands That Wrote the Bible" financed by the European Research Council, the study first dated thirty manuscripts by radiocarbon, then trained a model named "Enoch" on geometric analysis of handwriting patterns (79% agreement with human paleographers) before applying it to one hundred thirty-five additional manuscripts. Results: several manuscripts prove to be several decades, even several centuries, older than classical paleography had suggested; the "Hasmonean" and "Herodian" script categories would not correspond exactly to the historical periods attributed to them; two fragments (Daniel, Ecclesiastes) appear to have been copied only years after their original composition; and most importantly, several texts traditionally associated with the Essene community of Qumran prove to predate the site's settlement itself, suggesting an origin elsewhere for part of the corpus.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Israel Museum — Sanctuaire du Livre → - Steaua fără nume (Mihail Sebastian)PublicationSep 11, 2026
Steaua fără nume, Mihail Sebastian's Play, in a New Critical Edition (2025) and Its English Translation
Steaua fără nume, a comedy by Mihail Sebastian published in 1944, stages the quest for identity and authentic happiness in a small provincial town representative of interwar Romania. In 2025, Cartex editions published a new edition of Sebastian's theater, accompanied by an introductory study entitled "Sebastian-dramaturg în serviciul interbelicului," signed by Lucian Pricop. On the translation side, an English version entitled The Star with No Name was published by Aurora Metro Books on October 6, 2020 — a notable milestone, as the play had never been translated into English before this date according to an American theater director; an earlier adaptation by Ana-Catrina Buchser had already served as the basis for American productions as early as 2015, notably in San Francisco. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish Romanian writer, died accidentally in Bucharest in 1945, a few months after the end of the war.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Histoire des Juifs de Roumanie → - Chotam Tochnit (Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines)ManuscriptsSep 11, 2026
Chotam Tochnit: The Logical Method Applied to the Talmud According to Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines
Chotam Tochnit is a work of halakhic-talmudic methodology first published in Mainz in 1880, then reissued in Jerusalem in 1934 by the author's son, Rabbi Avraham Dov Ber Reines; it constitutes the third version of a larger project entitled "Derekh Bayam". The work proposes to apply the "laws of logic" to the study of the Talmud and the decisors in order to explain their rational foundations, an approach that prompted both letters of praise from great sages of the period and sharp criticism from circles fearing the introduction of "modern" methods into talmudic study. Isaac Jacob Reines (1839, Karlin - 1915, Lida) is the founder of the Mizrachi movement, matrix of religious Zionism. A study by Asaf Brown, "The Unification of Torah — between halakha and aggada in the Thought of Rabbi Reines" (2023), situates Chotam Tochnit within this intellectual genealogy and analyzes the link that Reines establishes between halakha and aggada via a hermeneutics founded on reason.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Le sionisme religieux → - Midbar Shur (Rav Kook)ManuscriptsSep 11, 2026
Midbar Shur: The Stolen Manuscript of Young Rav Kook, Rabbi of the Lithuanian Town of Žeimelis
Midbar Shur is a collection of thirty-eight sermons on the weekly Torah portions and festivals, composed by Rav Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook while he was rabbi of the Lithuanian town of Žeimelis, where he served for approximately between 1888 and 1895-1896, a little more than thirty years, claiming a homiletic method he judged to be unprecedented. The manuscript was stolen from his home; Rav Kook refused to pursue the thieves out of concern not to provoke public ḥiloul haShem, while predicting it would return — which it did: it was recovered by his son and successor Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook, and published in Jerusalem only in 1999, a century after its composition, by Mossad Merkaz HaRav. A chapter devoted to the "writings of the Zeimel period", including Midbar Shur, appears in the academic work "Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity" (Academic Studies Press, September 2024), attesting to current university interest in this biographical period. Point of vigilance: the sources consulted systematically place the composition of Midbar Shur during the rabbinate of Žeimelis (end of the 1880s-1895/96) and not "around 1899" — in 1899 Rav Kook was already serving in Bausk (Boisk), a position he held after leaving Žeimelis; this date discrepancy would merit further verification by a primary source.
- Mayn lebn (Isaac Raboy)ArchivesSep 8, 2026
Mayn lebn, the posthumous memoirs of Isaac Raboy (1945-1947)
Mayn lebn ("My Life") was published posthumously in New York in two volumes by the IKUF publisher, in 1945 and then 1947 — 261 pages for the first volume, 336 for the second. Isaac Raboy, born Ayzik Raboy on November 15, 1882 in Ukraine and died on January 10, 1944, had emigrated to the United States after the Kichinev pogrom of 1903. These memoirs recount his education at the Baron de Hirsch agricultural school in Woodbine, New Jersey, in 1908, then his time on a horse ranch in North Dakota — an experience that would inspire his novel Der Yidisher Kauboy (1942, translated into English as Jewish Cowboy in 1989). The YIVO archives hold, under the Isaac Raboy collection, the manuscripts of these memoirs as well as his correspondence with several major figures of Yiddish literature: Itsik Feffer, David Ignatoff, Leib Kvitko, Mani Leib and Joseph Rolnick. A Hebrew translation, Pirke ḥayim, was published in Tel-Aviv in 1969 by H. Peleg.
- Tel TalpiyotPublicationSep 8, 2026
Tel Talpiyot, Rabbinic Review of Vác, Hungary (1892-1938)
The bimonthly rabbinic review Tel Talpiyot appeared in Vác (Waitzen), Hungary, from 1892 to 1938 — and not until the Shoah as one might suppose: its publication ceased six years before the community's deportation. It was led by David Tsevi Katzburg (1856-1937), Orthodox dayan of Vác, in connection with the chief rabbi Yeshaya Silberstein, head of the city's Orthodox rabbinic jurisdiction from 1884. Its columns, often signed "Ha-Gaon Av Bet Din," mixed learned halakhic discussions and positions on the burning issues of the time: status of non-Orthodox Jews, civil marriage, conversion, Zionism, relations with Agudas Yisroel and the Neologue faction. The Jewish community of Vác, numbering 1,854 members in 1941, was annihilated following the German invasion of 19 March 1944: its members were deported to Auschwitz, and only 377 remained in 1946.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs hongrois → - A merder oys libe (Leon Kobrin)PublicationSep 8, 2026
"A merder oys libe", Leon Kobrin's first original narrative (1894)
"A merder oys libe" (literally "a murderer by love"), the first original narrative in Yiddish by Leon Kobrin (Vitebsk, 1872 – New York, 1946), appeared in 1894 in the Philadelphia newspaper Filadelfyer Shtot-Tsaytung. Kobrin, who emigrated in 1892 after first writing in Russian and working as a shirtmaker, cigar maker and baker, had previously published literary criticism articles in this same newspaper, including one of the very first reviews devoted to Morris Rozenfeld. This narrative marks his shift from criticism to original Yiddish fiction and brings him immediate attention that establishes him as a writer; he follows with texts in the Ovntblat, which earn him a permanent position and his move to New York, then his first collected volume, Yankl Boyle (1898). Recognized as one of the most original representatives of American Yiddish realism, in the tradition of Chekhov and Maupassant under the influence of Jacob Gordin, Kobrin would himself recount his trajectory in his own memoirs, Derinerungen fun a Yidishn Dramaturg (1925) and Mayne Fuftsik Yor in Amerike (1955, 1966).
- « Une vie » (Simone Veil)PublicationSep 7, 2026
"A Life": Simone Veil's autobiography, best-seller of 2007
"Une vie" is the autobiography of Simone Veil (born Simone Jacob, 1927-2017), published by Stock editions in October 2007 (ISBN 978-2-234-05817-0). The book traces her childhood in an assimilated Jewish family in Nice, her deportation with her mother and one of her sisters to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1944, her studies at Sciences Po after the war, her marriage to Antoine Veil in 1946, her appointment as Minister of Health in 1974 where she championed the law on abortion, her presidency of the European Parliament in 1979, up to her election to the Académie française in 2008. The work, best-seller of 2007 in the Essays/Documents category with more than 302,000 copies sold, had its first four chapters republished separately in 2010 under the title "A Youth in the Time of the Shoah".
Communities
All Great Books →- la communauté juive de Naplouse (Sichem)PublicationTo be confirmedSep 14, 2026
An AJS Review article traces a scandal that affected the Jewish community of Nablus in the eighteenth century
The academic journal AJS Review (Association for Jewish Studies) has published an article devoted to a scandal involving the small Jewish community of Nablus (Shechem) in the eighteenth century. The article, available on the Project MUSE platform, draws on Ottoman and community archival sources to reconstruct the circumstances of this episode and its consequences. Nablus then housed a small Jewish community, alongside the city's larger Samaritan community. The work is part of broader research on Jewish communities of the Ottoman Levant in the pre-modern period. The publication has so far been identified only through this single institutional source.
- la communauté juive du Costa RicaCommunitiesSep 14, 2026
Costa Rica: The Jews of Żelechów at the origin of the community, and the museum's transfer to Rohrmoser (1999-2005)
Multiple concordant sources clarify that the majority of Costa Rican Jews are descended from immigrants from the Polish city of Żelechów (with a smaller contribution from Siedlce), and not from Zmigród as stated elsewhere — none of the sources consulted mention this latter locality in connection with Costa Rica. In 1999, the board of directors of the Centro Israelita Sionista de Costa Rica decided, due to the deterioration of the building on Paseo Colón, to undertake a new transfer of community facilities; this was carried out between 2004 and 2005, to the Rohrmoser district (Pavas), where the Museum of the Jewish Community of Costa Rica (Museo de la Comunidad Judía de Costa Rica) opened its doors in 2005 within the new premises of the Centro Israelita — and not under the name "Sephardic museum," the community being overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and of Polish origin. The museum comprises six rooms as well as a space called "Parque de la Vida," dedicated to the traditions, history, contributions of the community and the memory of the Shoah; admission is free, by appointment, with visits generally including the adjoining synagogue.
- la communauté grana de TunisPublicationSep 13, 2026
The Grâna Community of Tunis: Names and Origins (Alexander Beider) — onomastic study of the grana community of Tunis
Article by Alexander Beider published in the journal Jewish Genealogy of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG), Winter 2026 issue (Issue 1). The study takes up and refines the work of Paul Sebag on the surnames of the grana community of Tunis — descendants of Livornese Jews ("Gorneyim") and Iberian exiles settled in Tunis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beider divides the names into three documented groups: approximately half Iberian names inherited from former Portuguese or Spanish marranos, approximately one third Italian names (Romans, Italianized Ashkenazis, Provençal families), and approximately 15 percent Maghrebi names. The article draws on recent genealogical, historical and linguistic sources.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Marano → - les Juifs « baghdadi » d'Inde, de Birmanie et de MalaisieGenealogySep 13, 2026
A scholarly work devotes a chapter to the "Baghdadi" Jews of India, Burma and Malaya
Oxford University Press published on 27 February 2026 the English edition of the collective work "Jews from Elsewhere: Forgotten Diasporas and Singular Jewish Identities", an expanded version of the French book "Juifs d'ailleurs" edited by anthropologist Edith Bruder. The work brings together studies on "forgotten" Jewish diasporas in Asia and Africa, including a chapter entitled "The 'Baghdadi' Jews of India, Burma, and Malaya", devoted to Arabic-speaking Jewish families who left Baghdad and settled in Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon and British Malaya from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Other chapters address Jewish communities in China, Ethiopia and West Africa, as well as the chapter "The Jews of Cochin", authored by researcher Shalva Weil. The book is part of a publishing initiative aimed at integrating the history of these "distant" diasporas into a global Jewish history, beyond the sole Ashkenazi/Sephardic divide. It constitutes a recent reference source for the communal genealogy of the Baghdad Jews who spread throughout South and Southeast Asia.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Bagdad → - la communauté séfarade et mizrahi de Kobe, au JaponPublicationTo be confirmedSep 12, 2026
A study traces the first seventy years of the Sephardi and Mizrahi community in Kobe, Japan (1870-1940)
Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch, retired Israeli diplomat turned researcher in Sephardi genealogy, publishes "The Sephardi and Mizrahi Community in Kobe, Japan; the First 70 Years (1870-1940)" in issue 4 (summer 2026) of "Jewish Genealogy: The IIJG Journal". The article traces the first seven decades of the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish community established in the port of Kobe, composed mainly of families originating from Iraq and Iran, alongside an Ashkenazi community from Russia.
- juifs-de-rangounCommunitiesSep 12, 2026
The Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in Yangon: 2013 restoration and community under tension since 2021
The Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, built in 1854 by the Baghdadi Jewish community of Rangoon and then rebuilt in 1896, is today the only Jewish place of worship still standing in Burma. On December 8, 2013, an interfaith event bringing together Burmese presidential minister U Aung Min, American ambassador Derek Mitchell and Israeli ambassador Hagay Moshe Behar celebrates the completion of a restoration carried out between 2007 and 2013 thanks to international funding, as well as the establishment of the synagogue's financial self-sufficiency. Three people are credited with this project: anthropologist Ruth Cernea, author of a history of the Jewish community of Rangoon, Laura Hudson and Stuart Spencer, a member of the diaspora connected to the synagogue. It has been managed for decades by the Samuels family: Moses Samuels, who died on May 29, 2015, then his son Sammy Samuels, a graduate of Yeshiva University, now head of the small community of Yangon. On February 5, 2021, the day after the military coup, Sammy Samuels publishes on Facebook "A Sad Day for Myanmar", evoking the memory of the 1988 violence.
- les-juifs-d-alexandrieArchaeologySep 12, 2026
Three Jewish cemeteries in Alexandria being classified as antiquities (2018)
In late December 2018, Mohamed Mahran, president of the Central Department of Jewish Antiquities at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, announced the preparation of a classification of three Jewish cemeteries in Alexandria, located in the Azarita and Shatby quarters, under the protection of antiquities law no. 117 of 1983 as amended. One of these cemeteries alone contains approximately 20,000 tombs; the three sites together cover an area of 15 feddans (approximately 6.3 hectares) and date back approximately 170 years. The commission in charge of the dossier documented each site through photographs, recording of burial dates and translation of funeral inscriptions, before submission to the Permanent Commission of Antiquities for approval. This dossier is part of the broader context of preserving Jewish heritage in Alexandria, a city that had up to 20 synagogues before 1930, serving Moroccan, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, French and Arabic-speaking Jewish communities.
- les-juifs-de-sidi-bel-abbesMemorySep 12, 2026
The Civic Disenfranchisement of 373 Jews from Sidi-bel-Abbès (1938-1939)
On 8 January 1938, the mayor of Sidi-bel-Abbès, Lucien Bellat, struck 373 Jews from the electoral rolls and French citizenship, on the pretext that their ancestors had not made the declaration before the judge of the peace required by the Crémieux decree. It was not until a state decree of 17 January 1939 that these individuals were restored to their citizenship, thwarting the municipal maneuver. At that time, the Israelite community of Sidi-bel-Abbès numbered approximately 3,500 people, settled mainly in the district of Montagnac and Catinat streets. The first local Israelite consistory had been founded around 1865; the great synagogue was located on Boulevard Verdun, and three other places of worship existed on Lord Byron, Catinat and Gambetta streets. This episode of collective disenfranchisement, preceding the Vichy laws, illustrates an early local attempt to revoke the citizenship of the Jews of Algeria.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs algériens → - les-juifs-de-manilleMemorySep 12, 2026
The precise origins of the rescue of the Jews of Manila (1937-1945)
The impetus for the Philippine rescue of German Jews originated in September 1937: a German ship chartered to evacuate nationals to Shanghai made a stopover in Manila carrying 28 German Jewish families on board, who were taken in by the small local Jewish community — an episode that triggered the rescue plan subsequently led by Philippine president Manuel Quezon, the Frieder family, and American High Commissioner Paul McNutt. The four Frieder brothers, whose father Samuel had founded the Helena Cigar Factory in the 1920s, took turns in Manila in two-year periods while residing in Cincinnati, Ohio. President Quezon made available to the refugees land he was developing for his son, named Mariquina Hall, where they were able to live and cultivate their food. Between 1937 and 1941, approximately 1,200 European Jewish refugees found asylum in the Philippines. Notable fact: during the Japanese occupation of Manila (December 1941-September 1945), the Jewish refugees, of German nationality, were — unlike all other foreign nationals, who were systematically interned — treated as nationals of a country allied with Japan and thus escaped internment.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Les Juifs de Manille (Philippines) → - les-juifs-de-bogotaCommunitiesSep 12, 2026
Colombia Officially Rejects Antisemitism at Diplomatic Meeting
On August 26, 2026, Colombian Chancellor Omar Bula Escobar received in Bogotá Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, special envoy of the U.S. State Department responsible for combating antisemitism. Following this meeting, the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a statement rejecting "unequivocally antisemitism, hatred toward Jewish people and any form of persecution, discrimination or violence motivated by religious reasons". The government committed to strengthening interfaith dialogue and protecting Colombia's Jewish community, which numbers approximately 4,500 to 5,000 people, three quarters of whom live in Bogotá. The statement reaffirms religious freedom as a constitutional right, in a context marked by acts of vandalism reported in recent years against synagogues and the Jewish cemetery in the capital.
- juifs-de-romeMemorySep 12, 2026
The Jewish Museum of Rome inaugurates a room on the twentieth century thanks to the Ascarelli donation
On February 5, 2026, the Museo Ebraico di Roma, housed in the Tempio Maggiore (Great Synagogue), inaugurated a new room titled "Dall'emancipazione ai giorni nostri" (From Emancipation to Our Days), devoted to the history of Italian Jews in the twentieth century. This renovation was made possible by a donation made in 2025 by sisters Luciana and Margherita Ascarelli, in accordance with the wishes of their deceased brother Dario Ascarelli: a collection of paintings and ceramics created by Italian Jewish artists of the twentieth century. The museum's director, Olga Melasecchi, and co-curator Lia Toaff, presented this room as a way of bringing together the newly donated works with the documentary heritage already preserved by the institution (archival documents, photographs, historical objects).
- l'institut YIVOArchivesSep 11, 2026
The YIVO institute is digitizing 3.5 million pages of archives from the Bund and the Jewish labor movement
The YIVO institute (New York) has been conducting since March 2023 an eight-year digitization project of its Jewish Labor and Political Archives, comprising approximately 3.5 million pages relating to revolutionary, socialist and Jewish labor movements in Europe and America between 1870 and 1992 — the largest digital archiving project in the institute's history. The core of this collection consists of the Bund archives, the Jewish socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897, which survived Nazi destruction and form, according to YIVO, the most significant surviving documentary collection on Jewish social and political activism of this period, including Bund satellite organizations (the youth movement SKIF, Zukunft, the sports organization Morgenshtern, the Kultur Liga publishing house, the TSYSHO Yiddish school network). Funded at 8.5 million dollars, the project had raised over 6 million dollars in private donations as of August 4, 2025. Online traffic to already digitized collections increased from 350,000 users in 2023 to nearly 700,000 in 2024, a sign of growing research interest in this corpus.
- la communauté juive de New Delhi (synagogue Judah Hyam)CommunitiesSep 11, 2026
The Judah Hyam Synagogue of New Delhi, last refuge of a community of fewer than ten families
The Jewish community of New Delhi, essentially composed of Bene Israël originally from western India, now numbers fewer than ten families. Its sole place of worship, the Judah Hyam Synagogue, was built at 2 Humayun Road thanks to a donation from Dr Rachael Judah in memory of her father, Judah Hyam, a civic and religious figure of Pune; the cornerstone was laid on 12 February 1956 and the building completed on 2 September 1956, according to plans by Bene Israël architect Joshua M. Benjamin, who also worked on an annex to the Indian Parliament. An annex housing an interfaith library was added in 1979. Since the 1980s, the synagogue has been voluntarily directed by Rabbi Ezekiel Isaac Malekar (born in 1945), who conducts services there every Friday evening in Hebrew and English and has officiated at approximately fifteen interfaith weddings. The overall Indian Jewish population, estimated at approximately 50,000 in the 1940s, is today approximately 6,000, distributed among Bene Israël, Baghdadi Jews of West Bengal, Cochin Jews, Bnei Menashe of the northeast, and Bene Ephraim of Andhra Pradesh.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Les Juifs de Delhi → - les Banu Qaynuqa (tribu juive de Médine)PublicationSep 11, 2026
Revised and expanded edition of Michael Lecker's reference study on the "Constitution of Medina" and the Banu Qaynuqa
Historian Michael Lecker (professor emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), recognized specialist in the Jewish tribes of Medina, published in 2024 with Gerlach Press (Berlin) a revised edition of his work "The Constitution of Medina: Muḥammad's First Legal Document" (238 p.), also available online via Cambridge Core. This document, dated to the first year after the hijra (622 CE), constitutes the non-belligerence treaty concluded by Muhammad with the Arab and Jewish tribes of Yathrib, among them the Banu Qaynuqa, then client-allies of the Arab tribe of Khazraj. The work offers an annotated translation and historical reinterpretation, clarifying the legal status of the Jewish tribes that were signatories, including the Qaynuqa. It is the most recent and most authoritative scholarly synthesis on this foundational text of relations between Muhammad and the Medina Jewish tribes, still dominated by Arabic textual sources (sira) in the absence of any archaeological markers specific to the Banu Qaynuqa identified to date.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Mohammed → - XanthiCommunitiesSep 8, 2026
The Jewish community of Xanthi: from its official founding (1907) to its dissolution (1958)
The Jewish community of Xanthi, in western Thrace in Greece, was officially established on 14 December 1907, when the town had 234 Jews out of 15,122 inhabitants. Composed of families from Andrinople, Didymotique and Salonika, speaking Judeo-Spanish, it reached its peak in 1934 with 1,100 members out of 35,912 inhabitants. The first stone of the synagogue was laid on 10 July 1924; the building adjoined a two-storey community centre housing a school with 114 pupils and 17 teachers. The community's economy rested largely on three major tobacco trading houses, a major activity in the region. After the deportation in March 1943 to Treblinka camp, under Bulgarian occupation, the community had only 6 survivors; it continued a residual existence until its official dissolution in 1958. The community centre was sold in 1963, the synagogue demolished in 1995, and the cemetery, whose documented tombs date back to 1923, was restored in 2015.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs de Salonique (Saloniciens) → - PlevenMemorySep 8, 2026
The fire at Kaylaka camp, near Pleven, during the night of 10-11 July 1944
In May 1943, all Jews from Sofia, approximately 23,000 people, were forcibly interned in the provinces; those who "violated" anti-Jewish legislation were sent to two labor camps, one in Pleven, in northern Bulgaria, the other near the village of Somovit on the Danube. The Pleven camp was located in Kaylaka park, south of the city, in a karst valley. During the night of 10-11 July 1944, a fire of undetermined origin broke out in the barracks where 108 Jewish detainees were interned — men, women and children, interned as "communists" or for violation of anti-Jewish legislation. Around two o'clock in the morning, the barracks was reduced to ashes in a few minutes; ten detainees died in the flames, several dozen were seriously injured. The question of whether it was a forgotten candle or an act of arson remains, more than eighty years after the events, unresolved by historiography.
- PlevenCommunitiesSep 8, 2026
Pleven, a city of convergence of four waves of Jewish refugees between the 14th and 16th centuries
A Jewish community is attested in Pleven, Bulgaria, from the Byzantine period. It was successively enriched by Hungarian refugees expelled in 1376, by Wallachian refugees fleeing the revolt of Vlad V in 1461, by Jews from Bavaria expelled in 1470, then by Spanish refugees and new Hungarian refugees after the Ottoman conquest of Hungary in 1526. In the 16th century, Ashkenazi, Hungarian and Sephardi communities thus coexisted in Pleven, which eventually merged into a single community. After the great fire of 1582, a single synagogue was rebuilt, with each group partly maintaining its own customs within the Sephardi rite that had become dominant. Around the year 2000, the Jewish community of Pleven, still active, numbered only around 70 members; its cemetery dates from the late 19th century.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs des Balkans → - Dnipropetrovsk (Iekaterinoslav)MemorySep 8, 2026
The massacre of the Jews of Dnipropetrovsk (Yekaterinoslav), October 1941 – January 1942
The German army occupied Dnipropetrovsk (formerly Yekaterinoslav, today Dnipro) on 25 August 1941. The majority of the Jewish population managed to evacuate before the arrival of troops; the remaining Jews were confined to a ghetto. According to a report by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, 10,000 to 12,000 Jews were massacred on 13 October 1941 in a ravine near the city's Institute of Transport; to conceal traces of the crime, the Nazis filled the ravine with earth and planted trees there. At the end of December 1941 – beginning of January 1942, the approximately 5,000 Jews remaining in the ghetto were in turn shot. The Jewish community of Dnipropetrovsk numbered 41,240 people in 1897, representing 36.3% of the city's total population, making it one of the most important centres of Jewish life in Ukraine before the Shoah; it had already experienced two major pogroms, in July 1883 and in May 1919, the latter led by the bands of ataman Nikifor Grigoriev and resulting in over 150 deaths.
- BitolaArchivesSep 8, 2026
The National Library of Israel Reveals Photographic Albums of the Jewish Community of Bitola, in Macedonia, Before Its Deportation
The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), attached to the National Library of Israel, preserves a collection of photographic albums and files devoted to thousands of Jewish residents of Bitola, a city in Macedonia that had before the war 810 Jewish families, or 3,351 people, within a dynamic Sephardic community whose Zionist movement animated the cultural and political life of the interwar period. These albums were constituted by the Bulgarian occupation authorities before the roundup and deportation of the photographed persons to the Treblinka camp, each photograph bearing on its verso annotations in Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian specifying family ties, professions and addresses. Having reached Israel after the war, these documents were preserved within the Eventov collection, constituted by the Association of Immigrants from Former Yugoslavia, before joining the holdings of the CAHJP, where they today restore a face and a name to the victims of this annihilated community.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs des Balkans → - Batavia-JakartaMemorySep 8, 2026
From twenty families to several thousand members: the rise and collapse of the Jewish community of Batavia-Jakarta (1861-1945)
In 1861, Jewish emissary and traveller Jacob Saphir (1822-1886), passing through the Dutch East Indies on his way to Australia, reported the existence of at least twenty Jewish households in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), all of European origin—principally Dutch and German—without being able to ascertain the existence of organized communal life. It was only in the early twentieth century that the Jews of the Dutch East Indies formed a substantial community, which numbered several thousand members on the eve of the Pacific War, the majority of Dutch origin, to which were added several hundred "Bagdadi" Jews and refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe. The Japanese occupation of the archipelago, beginning in early 1942, precipitated the dissolution of this community: the majority of its members was first interned with other Dutch civilians in the first months of the occupation, then, in the second half of 1943, the Jews remaining outside the camps were in turn detained, this time as Jews. The community never recovered from this rupture after Indonesian independence.
- l'Institut de Kiev pour la culture prolétarienne juive (IEPK)ArchivesSep 7, 2026
The Dispersed Fate of the Archives of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture
Historian Efim Melamed traced the history of the archives of the Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kiev (IEPK) — founded as a chair in October 1926, becoming an institute in 1929 under the direction of communist Yossef Liberberg (1897-1937), then closed in May 1936. Its collections notably included musical motifs gathered by Yulia Engel and Zinoviy Kiselgof. Between 1941 and 1945, German authorities transferred more than one hundred tonnes of documents from Soviet Jewish institutions to Frankfurt, via the Offenbach repository after the war. Melamed identified two distinct deposits from this collection: nine Kievan documents preserved in the "Smolensk Archive" (returned to Russia in December 2002) and, especially, a set of 52 boxes at the YIVO Institute in New York, comprising approximately 300 files and 14,000 pages, catalogued under "Institute for Proletarian Yiddish Culture Records". This research, published in 2012 in the journal East European Jewish Affairs, was relayed in Yiddish by the cultural website Yiddish Branzhe.
- le Conseil juif d'Amsterdam (Joodse Raad)ArchivesSep 7, 2026
Netherlands: the "Cartotheek" of the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, 157,694 personal files on Jews under the Occupation, fully digitized
The Dutch National Archives (Nationaal Archief) have had fully digitized the "Cartotheek van de Joodse Raad", a file of 157,694 cards established during the Second World War containing personal data on Jews registered by the Jewish Council of Amsterdam (Joodse Raad), and which was used after 1945 to trace the fate of many of them during the Shoah. The digitized version is now accessible online via the Arolsen Archives portal and via the Dutch website oorlogsbronnen.nl; the 143 boxes of original physical cards were transferred in September 2021 to the Joods Cultureel Kwartier (Jewish Cultural Quarter of Amsterdam) and have been on display since the opening of the Nationaal Holocaustmuseum in 2024. This collection, distinct from the Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging (CABR) already mentioned on the site regarding judicial purge, has never been presented from this angle of individual registration of Dutch Jews.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Amsterdam → - la communauté juive de KönigsbergMemorySep 7, 2026
Königsberg: a precise chronology of the Jewish community, from the 16th century to its disappearance
The first Jews of Königsberg are documented from 1538 with court physician Isaak May. A permanent community established itself from 1704 (designation of a Jewish cemetery); a Hasidic synagogue was built between 1753 and 1756 for 29 "protected" families. The population grew from 300 inhabitants in 1756 to 900 in 1800, 1027 in 1817, and peaked at 5000 in 1880. The Old Synagogue, destroyed by fire in 1811, was rebuilt in 1815; the Orthodox congregation Adass Jisroel opened in 1893, and the New Synagogue was built between 1894 and 1896 in the Lomse district. Under Nazism, the population fell to 3500 in 1933; Kristallnacht in November 1938 destroyed the New Synagogue; only 1585 Jews remained in May 1939, before deportations beginning in 1942 and an annex camp of Stutthof (1944-1945). The last German Jews left Kaliningrad in April 1948; the New Synagogue was rebuilt identically in 2018. Contrary to an initial hypothesis, philosopher Hermann Cohen was not born in Königsberg but in Coswig (Anhalt-Bernburg) on 4 July 1842; it is mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909) who was linked to the city.
Places
All Great Books →- CastillePublicationTo be confirmedSep 14, 2026
A study published in De Medio Aevo documents the houses of Jewish families in medieval Castile
The journal De Medio Aevo, edited by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, has published a study devoted to houses belonging to Jewish families in the medieval kingdom of Castile. The article is based on notarial and fiscal archive documents to reconstruct the location, structure and transmission of these real estate properties within Castilian Jewish communities before the expulsion of 1492. The work sheds light on the material living conditions of the Jews of Castile and their integration into the urban fabric of the cities concerned. The publication has so far only been identified through this single institutional source.
- DebdouMemorySep 14, 2026
Debdou: the Spring of Ishbiliya, Living Memory of the Arrival of Refugees from Seville in 1391
Several recent Moroccan sources corroborate and clarify the history already documented on the site's record: the toponym "Aïn Ishbiliya" (the Spring of Seville), whose water has flowed for five centuries in Debdou, perpetuates the memory of the settlement in the city of more than one hundred fifty families fleeing the anti-Jewish persecutions of Seville in 1391 — and not the expulsion of 1492. The Sephardic community thus formed reached its demographic peak in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, representing according to these sources two-thirds to three-quarters of the city's population in certain periods, equipped with a rabbinical court and a reputed yeshiva. The community left Debdou for Casablanca or abroad after the Six-Day War of 1967; the mellah and two Jewish cemeteries remain there today as places of memory and pilgrimage, maintained notably by a cultural centre dedicated to local Judaism.
- LidaCommunitiesSep 14, 2026
Lida: Rabbi Reines' yeshiva "Torah and Science" and the destruction of the community during the Shoah
Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines (1839-1915) founded the yeshiva "Torah and Madaa" (Torah and Science) in Lida in 1905, after an initial failed attempt in Sventsyany which was closed under pressure from hostile religious circles: the institution combined seven hours of daily traditional religious study with three hours of secular subjects, with more than three hundred students by 1911. During the Shoah, the community was confined in three successive ghettos; sources document several waves of liquidation between 1942 and 1943 — Yad Vashem places an action on 8 May 1942 that resulted in more than six thousand deaths across the three ghettos, while Wikipedia distinguishes stages dated 4 March 1942, 22 September 1942 and 17 December 1943, for a total of approximately ten thousand victims; these two counts overlap without matching exactly and call for cross-verification before any definitive figure is published. The memorial book "Sefer Lida" (Tel-Aviv, 1970, 438 pages, in Hebrew, Yiddish and English, edited by A. Manor) was published by associations of former residents of Lida in Israel and the mutual aid committee of Jews from Lida in the United States.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Yeshibah → - FürthCommunitiesSep 14, 2026
Fürth, "Franconian Jerusalem": the yeshiva, the Hebrew printing press and the Jewish cemetery that founded the city
The yeshiva of Fürth originated in that of Nuremberg, transferred after the expulsion of Jews from that city on 9 March 1499; it became one of the most important in Europe, counting up to six hundred students at its height, before its closure by police in 1830. In 1690, brothers Josef and Abraham Schneior founded a Hebrew printing press at 75 Königstraße that notably published an arithmetic manual by local mathematician Naftali Hirsch ben Iesaia; more than a dozen Jewish printing workshops subsequently succeeded one another in Fürth, distributing religious texts throughout Europe. The old Jewish cemetery of the city, established in 1607 and covering approximately twenty thousand square meters, is among the oldest and largest in Germany and Europe. Henry Kissinger, born in Fürth in 1923 at 5 Marienstraße, has been its honorary citizen since 1998. The Jüdisches Museum Franken (Fürth and Schnaittach) presents a permanent exhibition on the history and culture of Jews in Franconia, to which is added a temporary exhibition devoted to portraits from the United States, England, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany, scheduled from November 2026 to March 2027.
- SighetCommunitiesSep 14, 2026
Sighet: the Teitelbaum Hasidic dynasty, the birth of Elie Wiesel and the deportation of May 1944
Rabbi Chananya Yom-Tov Lipa Teitelbaum (1836-1904), chief rabbi of Sighet and leader of the local Hasidic court, was succeeded by his eldest son Chaim Tzvi Teitelbaum (1879-1926); the younger son, Yoel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), excluded from succession, settled in Satu Mare where he founded the Satmar branch in 1928, survived the Shoah via the Kasztner train and Bergen-Belsen, then reconstituted his court in Williamsburg (Brooklyn). Chaim Tzvi's son, Yekutiel Yehuda Teitelbaum (1912-1944), the last rabbi of Sighet to remain in Europe, died at Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was born in Sighet in 1928 in the Jewish quarter, at the corner of Dragoș Vodă and Tudor Vladimirescu streets; his birthplace, which has become the "Elie Wiesel Memorial House", is now part of Sighet's memorial museum dedicated to the victims of communism and resistance, and hosts commemorative ceremonies as well as school groups from throughout Europe. The two ghettos of Sighet, which housed approximately thirteen thousand Jews, were emptied between 16 and 22 May 1944, with twelve thousand seven hundred and forty-nine persons deported to Auschwitz. Since 2023-2024, the Tarbut Sighet Foundation — a recognized Romanian association and member of the European network of Jewish heritage routes — has been conducting a multi-year programme of commemorative actions: European Days of Jewish Culture, study trips to Auschwitz for secondary school students, the "We Won!" exhibition, the "Parallel Traces" project and heritage trails throughout the city.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Teitelbaum → - Gath (Tell es-Safi), temples philistinsArchaeologySep 11, 2026
A 2024 archaeobotanical study reveals the use of psychoactive plants in the Philistine temples of Gath
Published in February 2024 by the team of archaeobotanist Suembikya Frumin and Professor Aren Maeir (Bar-Ilan University, director of excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath since 1996), a study analysed more than 2000 samples of carbonised seeds and fruits from two Philistine temples in Gath — the biblical birthplace of Goliath — built in the 10th-9th centuries BCE and destroyed around 830 BCE. The researchers identified there remains of chaste tree (aphrodisiac and anaesthetic), darnel (hallucinogenic alkaloids similar to LSD), as well as traces of cinnamon and oils imported over long distances, burned in ritual bowls and incense altars. These elements suggest, according to the authors, a cultic practice combining food offerings and psychoactive substances, probably linked to a Mother Goddess cult of Aegean inspiration. The study was widely covered in the specialist press and ranks among the major biblical archaeological discoveries of 2024.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Archéologie Biblique → - Azemmour (cimetière juif)ArchivesTo be confirmedSep 8, 2026
The Jewish cemetery of Azemmour, presented as the largest Jewish necropolis in Morocco
The Jewish cemetery of Azemmour, on the Moroccan Atlantic coast, is reported to contain approximately 7,045 graves according to Moroccan regional press, extending over an estimated area of six hectares — which would make it the largest Jewish necropolis in Morocco, ahead of that in Marrakech. The last burial there dates back approximately one hundred ninety years, making this site a funerary archive covering several generations of continuous Jewish presence in Azemmour. The municipal council is said to have committed itself to a rehabilitation programme for these sites of Hebrew memory. The precise figure of 7,045 graves and the area of six hectares are at this stage based only on a regional press source and have not been cross-checked against an academic or institutional source.
- synagogue Beth Shalom (Surabaya)MemorySep 8, 2026
The Beth Shalom Synagogue of Surabaya, the last synagogue in Java, destroyed in 2013 despite its heritage listing
A residential building completed in 1939 and purchased in 1948 by the Israelitische Gemeente Soerabaia congregation to establish the Beth Shalom synagogue, this Dutch-style building located in the heart of Surabaya's business district was, until its destruction, the last active synagogue on the island of Java. Nothing in its architecture, apart from a mezuza and Stars of David sculpted on the doors, distinguished it from other residential buildings in the district. Sealed by Islamist groups from 2009 onwards, the same year Surabaya's tourism agency had listed it as a heritage site, the synagogue was demolished in May 2013 without official notice, in violation, according to the city's legislative council, of Indonesian law on cultural heritage — an event that sparked outrage from international Jewish organizations and coincided with the visit of a group of American students who had come to study Indonesian religious pluralism.
- Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureş) — synagogue de NáznánfalvaArchivesSep 7, 2026
The Jewish Museum of Budapest Exhibits Unique Remains from the Wooden Synagogue of Náznánfalva and Inscribed Bricks from the 1944 Ghetto
The Magyar Zsidó Múzeum és Levéltár (Museum and Archives of Hungarian Jewry, MILEV) presents a new exhibition titled "Az írás a falon – Mikdás meát" ("Writing on the Wall"). The centerpiece is the remains of the wooden synagogue of Náznánfalva, built in 1747 by the Jewish community settled on the Barcsay family estate near Marosvásárhely (Transylvania), with a simple exterior of barn-type construction but whose interior walls bore painted prayer texts. In 1941, members of the Hungarian Jewish Museum, aided by the Marosvásárhely community, transported these remains to Budapest. The exhibition connects this collection to a distinct and recent discovery: inscribed bricks bearing dates—24 May and 3 June 1944—were uncovered in the chimney of the Mazsihisz headquarters (federation of Hungarian Jewish communities) on Síp Street in Budapest during renovation work; they document graffiti from the period of the Budapest ghetto. Chief archivist László Csősz and Mátyás Király of MILEV studied these marks as testimonies of identity preservation during persecution.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Juifs hongrois → - La HayeManuscriptsTo be confirmedSep 7, 2026
The Hague preserves the oldest community Jewish registers of the Netherlands — the digitized Ashkenazi and Sephardic pinkassim
The Municipal Archives of The Hague (Haags Gemeentearchief) have had digitized approximately ten handwritten registers from the eighteenth century belonging to the Nederlands-Israëlietische Gemeente (NIG, Ashkenazi community) and the Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente of The Hague, including a "pinkas" — register of the deliberations of the parnassim — covering the period 1723-1786, opened at the inauguration of the Ashkenazi synagogue of the Brouwersloot in 1723, considered the oldest document of this type preserved in the Netherlands. To these are added treasurer's account registers and membership lists (1723-1785) as well as archival documents from the early eighteenth century of the Portuguese community, notably the regulations of the Beth Jacob congregation (1709-1743). The project, conducted with Israeli specialized photographer Ardon Bar Hama, makes these sources available online both on the site of the Municipal Archives of The Hague and on that of the National Library of Israel. Neither of these two collections has previously been presented on the site.
- KampenArchaeologySep 7, 2026
In the Netherlands, a geophysical study confirms the absence of burials at the former Jewish cemetery in Kampen
At the request of the municipality of Kampen (Overijssel), the RAAP research bureau, in partnership with Dutch soil geophysics specialist Saricon, conducted a non-invasive survey in November 2024 and April 2025 on the site of the former Jewish cemetery at 1e Ebbingestraat. Combining electromagnetism and ground-penetrating radar, this method made it possible to probe the subsoil without excavation, respecting the eternal rest prescribed by halakha. This cemetery, in use until 1830, had been emptied in 1948, its remains transferred under police supervision and in the presence of a representative of the Jewish community of Zwolle to the cemetery at IJsselmuiden. The Vereniging Het Joodse Begrafeniswezen had expressed doubts about the seriousness of this post-war operation, doubts which prompted the new study. The results, announced on 26 June 2025, revealed no trace of grave pits, confirming that the 1948 transfer had been completed. The interprovincial chief rabbi of the Netherlands, Binyomin Jacobs, had approved the method selected; the Jewish community of Zwolle and the municipality of Kampen declared themselves satisfied with these conclusions.
- BayreuthManuscriptsSep 7, 2026
The Bayreuth Geniza: 8,000 Hebrew documents from the 16th century, soon to be exhibited in the city's future Jewish cultural center
In autumn 2009, during roof restoration work at the Bayreuth synagogue (Bavaria), workers discovered, beneath floorboards in the attic, a geniza (ritual repository of used Hebrew texts) comprising approximately 8,000 items — scrolls, prayer books and religious objects, some dating back to the 16th century. According to the Jewish Community of Bayreuth (IKG Bayreuth), this is the only geniza found and recovered according to scientific protocol in an active synagogue in Germany; the rescue was entrusted from January 2010 to the "Geniza Project" of the Jewish Culture Museum in Veitshöchheim, under the direction of Elisabeth Singer-Brehm and Beate Weinhold. More than 1,500 inventory numbers had been catalogued by 2013, and the collection has been accessible online since July 2014. According to the city of Bayreuth, items from this geniza are to be presented in the future Jewish cultural and community center currently being developed in the former Mint building of the city (1778), which will also house archives and a library — a project still in progress in 2026 according to the bulletin of the Bavarian delegate for combating antisemitism (April 2026).
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Les manuscrits et la guéniza du Caire → - Saint-Paul-Trois-ChâteauxArchaeologySep 7, 2026
A Medieval Mikveh Uncovered in the Jewish Quarter of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, in the Drôme
In 2017, a team from the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (Inrap) excavated a cellar seven meters by four, on rue Juiverie, at the heart of the medieval city of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux (Drôme). A continuous water resurgence, observed since the 1990s by Mylène Lert, curator at the tricastine archaeology museum, had raised suspicions. Claude de Mecquenem, specialist in Hebrew history at Inrap, put forward the hypothesis of a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath for purification. After two weeks of excavation, the uncovering of a dressing room, a stairway access and adjoining spaces confirmed this identification. A Hebrew holy ark had already been found in a neighboring house. From the thirteenth century onward, the city had a prosperous Jewish community of about sixty families, protected by its status as an episcopal city of the Holy Roman Empire, which exempted it from the successive expulsions affecting the kingdom of France. The place name "rue Juiverie" perpetuates the memory of this quarter.
Themes
All Great Books →- les premières alyot séfarades (recensements Montefiore)PublicationTo be confirmedSep 12, 2026
A study draws on the Montefiore censuses to establish the Sephardic predominance of the first aliyot
Raquel Levy-Toledano and Sergio DellaPergola publish "The First Aliyot Were Sephardic: What the Montefiore Censuses Reveal about Sephardic Jews in the Land of Israel in the 19th Century" in issue 4 (summer 2026) of "Jewish Genealogy: The IIJG Journal". The article exploits the nominative censuses commissioned by Sir Moses Montefiore in the Land of Israel in the 19th century to show that the first waves of Jewish immigration to the region were predominantly Sephardic, before the massive arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants later in the century. Sergio DellaPergola is a demographer, recognized specialist in contemporary Jewish demography.
- l'opération « Tapis volant » (évacuation des Juifs d'Aden et du Yémen)ArchivesTo be confirmedSep 11, 2026
JDC archives on "Operation Magic Carpet" (evacuation of Jews from Aden and Yemen, 1949-1950) are digitized
The Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which organized and financed the aerial evacuation of approximately 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel between December 1948 and September 1950 ("Operation Magic Carpet"), has made accessible online, via its digitized archives, documents relating to its role in this operation: the air transit camp established by the British in the Crown colony of Aden, the chartered flights—notably by Alaska Airlines—and the journey on foot over hundreds of kilometers undertaken by Yemenite Jewish families across deserts and mountains to reach Aden. The British Library furthermore preserves, in its India Office Records relating to British administration of Aden (1837-1967), earlier documents mentioning notably the district known as "Jews Town" in Aden, which Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines, British political agent, had at one point proposed to demolish—a sign of the antiquity and topographical centrality of this community in the city. These British colonial collections remain only partially accessible on-site or via commercial databases, without confirmation of complete and unrestricted digitization specific to Aden to date.
- la céramique dite « madianite »ArchaeologySep 11, 2026
Recent Archaeological Studies on "Midianite" Pottery: From Ethnicity to Commercial "Brand"
Painted pottery traditionally associated with the Midianites, found notably at the sanctuary of the Hathor temple at Timna (Negev), is the subject of recent work that reclassifies the designation "Midianite" — deemed too ethnically restrictive — in favour of the term "Qurayyah Painted Ware" (QPW), named after the oasis producer in northwestern Arabia. An article by S. Kleiman, published in 2024 in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, argues for a dispersed community of practice in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age rather than a unique ethnic artifact. An integrated technological, petrographic and geochemical study of stratified samples from a pottery kiln at Qurayyah itself, published in PLOS ONE and reported in 2026, establishes the genesis of this production around 1600 before our era and demonstrates a standardization of style, techniques and origin comparable to a veritable brand before the fact, circulating across hundreds of kilometres. A third article, devoted to funerary rituals linked to this painted pottery, appeared in 2025 in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies (vol. 54). This work articulates with the chronology already established at Timna, where the presence of "Midianite" pottery is stratigraphically attested from the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the twelfth century before our era, the peak period of Egyptian copper exploitation in association with local Midianites and Amalekites.
- Hypsistariens (Theos Hypsistos)ArchaeologySep 8, 2026
The epigraphic corpus of the Hypsistarians illuminates the links between Judaism and cults of the "Most High God" in Roman Anatolia
The corpus of inscriptions dedicated to Theos Hypsistos ("Most High God"), discovered in Asia Minor, Greece and on the shores of the Black Sea, comprises more than three hundred pieces — some studies numbering even more than four hundred — dated to approximately 100 to 400 CE: ex-votos, altars and stelae for the most part. This cult, attested with particular clarity in Cappadocia in the fourth century by the testimony of the Church Father Gregory of Nazianzus, designated the Hypsistarians, a syncretic group blending Jewish and pagan elements within a framework close to monotheism. Part of modern scholarship, notably the work of Stephen Mitchell, proposed identifying these Hypsistarians with the "God-fearers" (God-fearers) mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, these pagan sympathizers of Second Temple Judaism who frequented synagogues without formally converting — Mitchell having since qualified this identification by describing them as groups "very close" rather than strictly identical. These inscriptions remain one of the rare direct material sources on the influence of Jewish monotheism outside the Jewish community itself in the Roman Empire.
- ZuzimOtherSep 7, 2026
The Zuzim, a biblical people whose identity remains unresolved by current scholarship
The Zuzim appear only once in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 14:5), as a people inhabiting the region of Ham, east of the Jordan, defeated by King Kedorlaomer. The Septuagint and the Peshitta translate them by a term meaning "the mighty ones", linking them to the Rephaim. Since the work of H. E. Ryle in 1921, many scholars have identified them with the Zamzummim mentioned in Deuteronomy 2:20, an identification however contested. No inscription or archaeological artifact explicitly mentions this name. A recent academic article by Amar Annus, associate professor of history of religions of the Near East at the University of Tartu (Estonia), published on July 13, 2026 on the scholarly platform TheTorah.com and dedicated to the Rephaim, confirms in a note that the precise identity of the Zuzim remains unresolved in current scholarship.
Poured intoLe Grand Livre — Archéologie Biblique →