VIDEO: Watch this rare home film of a Seder in 1932
Ruth Katcher, whose great-grandfather is leading the seder, shares the digitized version of the film.
Ruth Katcher, whose great-grandfather is leading the seder, shares the digitized version of the film.
This photo is of my paternal grandparents, Itche Mayer and Ruda Fuks. I was told that my grandfather wrote commentary on religious texts but he earned a living as a sign painter, and also sculpted lions and eagles for synagogues. What’s unusual about this picture is that it seems to be a candid portrait during…
This story is part of the Forverts series, “Our Favorite Heirlooms.” My favorite heirloom is a blouse that my mother made with fabric that she had hidden from the Nazis before being deported to the notorious Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. Before the war, my mother lived in Radom, Poland, a…
Read this article in Yiddish June 2020 through August 2021 was supposed to be a gap year for me as I moved from my undergraduate to graduate studies. I didn’t plan for the pandemic, let alone its impact on my Jewish, scholarly and music communities. We were all forced to adapt to online formats, reshaping…
Earlier this year, the Forverts asked readers to submit anecdotes and photos of their favorite heirlooms. Heirlooms are not only a way of keeping us connected to our past; they are also a wonderful way to transmit family history to our children and grandchildren The response to our search was an enthusiastic one and 22…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the summer of 2001, two psychologists at Emory University conducted a unique study, hoping to find the “secret” to raising resilient children. The researchers, Marshall Duke and Robin Feivush, suspected that children who had strong ties to previous generations were psychologically more intact. So they interviewed…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Those of us who love Yiddish are often naturally drawn to objects of a previous era. No surprise, then, that many of us have boxes of old stuff stashed away in the attic or closet, related either to our own past or to that of a relative…
It’s the smell that hits me first — musty, almost sweet, emanating from the green felt that cradles each piece of silver cutlery in its own place. Every year as I ready for Passover, I unlock the nondescript cabinet tucked into a corner of my New York apartment, pull out the two shaky drawers, and…
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