“Esther,” the name of the heroine of the Purim story, means hidden.  Some of the megillot, the scrolls which tell the story of Esther and Purim, contain hidden blessings. A little known genre of Jewish folk art is the format of the presentation of the blessings recited upon reading the Megillah.  Some Megillah scrolls reveal a […]

“Big Brother is Watching Them. Our Brothers are Waiting for Us,” was the message of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in 1984. Today you are welcome to watch and listen to Soviet Jewry activists reminisce about their efforts to breach the Iron Curtain here.

The Soviet Jewry Oral History Project was initiated by […]

What images do you conjure up when you imagine Sefer Shemot [Exodus], which we start reading in the synagogue this week?  In the 1720s, an anonymous artist illustrated the opening page of this lavish volume of Shemot with scenes of baby Moses on the Nile, and the adult Moses besting Pharaoh’s magicians in the […]

The Central Relief Committee (CRC) issued a combined Thanksgiving and Chanukah fundraising brochure in 1915. The CRC was founded by the Union of Orthodox Congregations of America on October 14, 1914, three months after the outbreak of the First World War, to provide aid to “Jews in Eastern Europe and the Holy Land” […]

A century ago, in the fall of 1918, the Jewish National Fund (JNF, Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael), issued a manifesto from its headquarters in The Hague. The organization, founded in 1901, was assessing its mission and goals in light of recent events. The Balfour Declaration, which stated that the British government views with “favour the […]