When Samuel Ha-Levi illegally built a synagogue in the provincial Spanish town of Toledo, no one could have known that it would one day become a church, then a military barracks in the Napoleonic war, a national monument, and finally a museum… but that’s just the beginning!
In modern-day Israel, the word “shluh” is sometimes used as an offensive term to describe a person of disheveled or messy appearance. The word in fact hails from Morocco, where it referred negatively to a certain ethnic group, and was used disparagingly by city dwellers to describe uncultured village folk…
Lev Levanda spent decades advocating for Jewish assimilation into Russian culture. It all changed after pogroms shook the empire…
A beautiful illustration from a book printed in 1601 for the Jewish community in Venice contains the first-ever printed documentation of the Lag BaOmer holiday haircut tradition
A special dedication in a copy of the book “Mesilat Yasharim” sparked some fascinating detective work tracing the history of the Austrian Jewish community during the Holocaust, and the story of a young man and his family who were murdered by the Nazis…
A rabbi, a moneychanger and a goldsmith meet in a German photography studio in the early 20th century. No, this is not the opening line of a joke. It is the beginning of a mystery, since all three characters are in fact the same person
Jono David’s ‘never-ending Jewish photo tour’ led him to document a diverse collection of the African continent’s often-overlooked Jewish communities, both new and old
A collection of photographs received by the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People documents the lives of thousands of residents of the town of Bitola, who were sent to Treblinka in 1943
In the 1980s, photographer, painter and poet Myriam Tangi took three separate trips to Yemen in the hopes of photographing the last Jews living in the country.
These historical photographs documenting Jewish communities in Libya now appear more life-like than ever.
