“Up to this point, there has not been a single book about electricity in Yiddish, aside from a few small pamphlets,” declared the engineer Israel Okun in January 1922. It was a bold, frank introduction to his new Yiddish translation of…
On a cold winter afternoon in February 1919, several hundred soldiers descended upon the Jewish neighborhoods of the small Ukrainian city of Proskuriv (today Khmel’nyts’kyi, Ukraine). Ten days earlier, Symon Petliura, head of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, had dispatched to the border city nearly…
On a humid summer’s night in July 1961, thirteen-year-old Ricky Farber and his friends bounced around their suburban neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. There, they stumbled upon an odd and frightening house draped in massive Nazi battle flags. What happened next would be a source of contention: Farber and…
“Wall newspapers”—large, hand-lettered or typed newsletters posted in a shared communal space—have their roots in Soviet propaganda. Among the rich historical resources available through the Center for Jewish History’s digital collections are wall newspapers that form a portion of YIVO’s Displaced Persons…
