On May 26, 1940, the New York Times  daily column,  “Program for Today at the World’s Fair,” announced an event at the Temple of Religion: a symposium on the “role of Orthodox Jewry in promoting Jewish education among Jewish youth by Dr. Bernard Revel, Dean of Yeshiva College, Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein, Dr. […]

Passover raises thoughts and questions about slavery and freedom.  Me-‘avdut le-herut … mi-shi’bud li-ge’ulah – from slavery to freedom , from bondage to redemption – these phrases from the Pesach Haggadah [Mishna Pesachim 10:5] commemorate and celebrate the Exodus from Egypt.

The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), spearheaded by Jacob Birnbaum, […]

How do you say “Purim carnival” in Hebrew? Perhaps Purimta; it rhymes with the names of many of Haman’s sons, such as Parshandata and Vayzata. What about Pur-Rina? Or possibly Pur-Ditsa?  Daniel Persky suggested these terms in a 1932 contest to coin a Hebrew name for the Purim carnival in Tel-Aviv.  After all, the word carnival […]

Half a century ago, in 1972, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) organized “From Potma to Purim Vigil and Fast,” a demonstration on behalf of  Sylva Zalmanson and other prisoners of conscience in Potma, a notorious Russian labor camp. What were the prisoners’ crimes? They had expressed the desire to leave the Soviet […]

A new, large set of synagogue bulletins has been added to the Libraries’ existing digital collection of historic bulletins from Modern Orthodox synagogues in the New York City area. This new set adds over 1,400 issues to the current collection of bulletins from the Institutional Synagogue, a renowned congregation established in 1917 in Harlem that […]

The exhibit, “Judah David Eisenstein, Encyclopedist par Excellence,” is now on the fourth floor of the Mendel Gottesman Library.

J.D. [Judah David] Eisenstein was known as the Ba’al Ha-Otsarot, Master of the treasuries, for his compendia of Jewish law, lore, and literature.

Eisenstein was born in Mezhirech [Poland/Ukraine] in 1854, emigrated […]

As the nation commemorates the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Yeshiva University Archives provides two offerings from its holdings documenting initiatives by or relating to the University from that dark time.

First, we remember with great pride and gratitude the students of Stern College for Women who, for months after the attacks, covered the Shabbat rotation […]