Artist Mikhail Magaril has taken Leo Tolstoy’s text and adapted it to images from the Jewish shtetls that once existed in Eastern Europe.  Click here to visit exhibit.

Yingl Tsingl Khvat (The Mischievous Boy) by Mani Leib and El Lisitzky, Kiev, 1918?

The Yiddish Book Collection of the Russian Avant-Garde contains books published between the years 1912-1928 by many of the movement’s best known artists. The items here represent only a portion of Yale’s holdings in Yiddish literature. The Beinecke, in collaboration with the Yale University library Judaica Collection, continues to digitize and make Yiddish books available online.

With the Russian Revolution of 1917, prohibitions on Yiddish printing imposed by the Czarist regime were lifted. Thus, the early post-revolutionary period saw a major flourishing of Yiddish books and journals.  The new freedoms also enabled the development of a new and radically modern art by the Russian avant-garde.  Artists such as Mark Chagall, Joseph Chaikov, Issachar Ber Ryback, El (Eliezer) Lisitzsky and others found in the freewheeling artistic climate of those years an opportunity Jews had never enjoyed before in Russia: an opportunity to express themselves as both Modernists and as Jews. Their art often focused on the small towns of Russia and Ukraine where most of them had originated. Their depiction of that milieu, however, was new and different.

Jewish art in the early post-revolutionary years emerged with the creation of a secular, socialist culture and was especially cultivated by the Kultur-Lige, the Jewish social and cultural organizations of the 1920s and 1930s.  One of the founders of the first Kultur-Lige in Kiev in 1918 was Joseph Chaikov, a painter and sculptor whose books are represented in the Beinecke’s collection. The Kultur-Lige supported education for children and adults in Jewish literature, the theater and the arts. The organization sponsored art exhibitions and art classes and also published books written by the Yiddish language’s most accomplished authors and poets and illustrated by artists who in time became trail blazers in modernist circles.

This brief flowering of Yiddish secular culture in Russia came to an end in the 1920s.  As the power of the Soviet state grew under Stalin, official culture became hostile to the experimental art that the revolution had at first facilitated and even encouraged. Many artists left for Berlin, Paris and other intellectual centers. Those that remained, like El Lisitzky, ceased creating art with Jewish themes and focused their work on furthering the aims of Communism. Tragically, many of them perished in Stalin’s murderous purges.

The Artists

Cover from Sikhes Hulin (Small Talk) by Moshe Broderzon and El Lisitzky, 1917

Eliezer Lisitzky (1890–1941), better known as El Lisitzky, was a Russian Jewish artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect. He was one of the most important figures of the Russian avant-garde, helping develop Suprematism with his friend and mentor, Kazimir Malevich.  He began his career illustrating Yiddish children’s books in an effort to promote Jewish culture. In 1921, he became the Russian cultural ambassador in Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus movement. He brought significant innovation and change to the fields of typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim. However, as he grew more involved with creating art work for the Soviet state, he ceased creating art with Jewish themes. Among the best known Yiddish books illustrated by the artist is Sikhes Hulin by the writer and poet Moshe Broderzon and Yingel Tsingle Khvat, a children’s book of poetry by Mani Leyb.  Both works have been completely digitized and can be found in the Digital Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Cover from Finf Arbeslakh (Five Peas) by Hans Christian Anderson and Joseph Chaikov, 1919

Joseph Chaikov (1888-1979) was a Russian sculptor, graphic artist, teacher, and art critic.  Born in Kiev, Chaikov studied in Paris from 1910 to 1913.  Returning to Russia in 1914, he became active in Jewish art circles and in 1918 was one of the founders of the Kultur-Lige in Kiev. Though primarily known as a sculptor, in his early career, he also illustrated Yiddish books, many of them children’s books.  In 1921 his Yiddish book, Skulptur was published. In it, the artist formulated an avant-garde approach to sculpture and its place in a new Jewish art.  It too is in the Beinecke collection.

Another of the great artists from this remarkable period in Yiddish cultural history is Issachar Ber Ryback. Together with Lisistzky, he traveled as a young man in the Russian countryside studying Jewish folk life and art. Their findings made a deep impression on both men as artists and as Jews and folk art remained an abiding influence on their work. One of Ryback’s better known works is Shtetl, Mayn Khoyever heym; a gedenknish (Shtetl, My destroyed home; A Remembrance), Berlin, 1922.  In this book, also in the Beinecke collection, the artist depicts scenes of Jewish life in his shtetl (village) in Ukraine before it was destroyed in the pogroms which followed the end of World War I. Indeed, Shtetl is an elegy to that world.  Click here to see an online exhibit of Ryback’s Portrait of Shtetl Life.

David Hofstein’s book of poems, Troyer (Tears), illustrated by Mark Chagall also mourns the victims of the pogroms. It was published by the Kultur-Lige in Kiev in 1922. Chagall’s art in this book is stark and minimalist in keeping with the grim subject of the poetry. Chagall was a leading force in the new emerging Yiddish secular art and many of the young modernist artists of the time came to study and paint with him in Vitebsk, his hometown. Lisistzky and Ryback were among them. Chagall, however, parted ways with them when their artistic styles and goals diverged. Chagall moved to Moscow in 1920 where he became involved with the newly created and innovative Moscow Yiddish Theater.

These books are part of the General Modern Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  Search the Beinecke’s Digital Collection by author name to find more images.

Moyshe Broderzone

Moyshe Broderzon was born November 23, 1890. He was a Yiddish poet and theater director. A descendant of a family of wealthy merchants who were permitted to reside in Moscow, Broderzon received his early education in that city and at a Lodz commercial academy. He lived in Lodz from 1918 to 1938. Active as a journalist, poet, and writer of short plays, he founded little theaters in Lodz: Had Gadya, the first Yiddish marionette theater, Ararat, and Shor ha-Bor. He was head of the literary group Yung-Yidish and discovered many new Jewish talents for the stage. He wrote songs for children, which were frequently reprinted and set to music, and also libretti for operas, including David and Bath-Sheba (1924). His final lyrics, which appeared in 1939 with the single letter Yod as title, comprise 50 poems of 16 lines each, laden with tragic premonitions of the end of Polish Jewry in a coming world catastrophe. Broderzon returned to his native Moscow in 1939. At the time of Stalin’s persecutions of Yiddish writers he was confined and remained in a Siberian work camp from 1948 to 1955. Repatriated to Poland on his liberation, he was enthusiastically acclaimed by the surviving Jews there, but collapsed and died a few weeks later while visiting Warsaw. Broderzon was a consummate master of the Yiddish tongue and of most original Yiddish rhymes. His poems combine Jewish folklore with European expressionism. His wife, the actress Sheyne Miriam Broderzon, described their years of suffering (1939-56) in Mayn Laydnsveg mit Moyshe Broderzon (“My Tragic Road with Moshe Broderzon,” 1960). [taken from Encyclopedia Judaica]

–Nanette Stahl, Judaica Collection Curator

Dates: December, 2009-Februrary, 2010

Location: Sterling Memorial Library

Click here to preview exhibit.

Click here to see some of the images of Tel Aviv in our New Notable Acquisitions.

• The Passover Haggadah:  Modern Art in Dialogue with an Ancient Text.   The exhibit highlighted the highly personal and imaginative decoration of the Haggadah by modern artists.  We are living in a new golden age of Haggadah illumination and the selection of artists from different parts of the world represented in the exhibit demonstrated the variety of styles and approaches by which each artist chose to maintain a dialogue with this ancient text.  The online version of the exhibit can be accessed here.

• The Ketubah: A Study in Jewish Diversity featured ketubot in the Yale library collection from different regions of the world.   Though the text of the ketbbah (Jewish marriage contract) is basically the same for all Jewish communities, the decorations surrounding the text reflect the regions and cultures of the communities in which they originated.  The exhibit was divided into three geographic areas: Italy, Iran and the regions that once constituted the Ottoman Empire.   The ketubot were primarily from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  The online version can be found here.

–Nanette Stahl, Judaica Collection Curator

The Yale collection contains documents from all the major centers of Jewish life in Morocco.  These include Casablanca, Fez, Marrakesh, Mogador (also known as Essaouira), Meknes, Rabat, Sefrou, Tetuan and Tangier.  There is also material from smaller and less well-known towns and villages.  The documents are in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, French and Spanish. The collection consists of documents from the late 16^th to the mid-twentieth centuries.  They consist of rabbinic documents concerning such issues as marriage, divorce, property and inheritance.  In addition, there are manuscripts of poetry, liturgy and other subjects that remain to be studied and identified.   In order to make the North African Collection accessible to researchers, we invited Professor Moshe Bar Asher, who was born in Morocco and is one of the most knowledgeable scholars in the world on the subject, to help organize and catalog the collection.   Professor Bar Asher is also president of the National Academy of the Hebrew Language and an emeritus professor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Here are several examples of documents that Professor Bar Asher has identified:

• Ta’anug ve-simhah: This is a unique manuscript of an unknown work whose title is “Ta’anug ve-simhah” by Yehudah ben Avraham El-’Asry from Ksar-Es-Souk, southeastern Morocco (Metaghra, currently known as Tafilalt), copied by his nephew Avraham ben Moshe El-‘Asry in 1916. The manuscript has many colophons, one on the first page and a few others on different pages of the manuscript. All of them indicate the name of the copier and the date. The Manuscript consists of exegesis and novellae on the portion of the week from the Pentateuch and other subjects. The language is mostly Hebrew, however, a few texts are written in the Judeo-Arabic of Ksar-Es-Souk. Rabbi Yehudah was born in the first part of the 19th century and died in 1905. Rabbi Avraham was born in 1902 and died in Jerusalem in 1988.

• A manuscript recording a series of halakhic (legal) decisions by different rabbis of Fez, primarily from the year 1882-1883. Among the rabbis listed are Ya’akov Khalfon, Yosef Samun (d. ca. 1768), Shelomoh Ha-Kohen, and Yuhudah Moshe Aflalo. Many of the decisions are concerned with the collection and distribution of charity for needy Jews living in Fez.  More than 125 decisions are included in the collection.

• A group of manuscripts bound together and copied in Fez, most probably in the 19^th century.  The texts were composed, however, in the beginning of the 18^th century. They include decisions made by Yehudah ben ‘Attar, Ya’akov ibn Tsur, Yehudah ‘Uzziel,  Sa’adia ‘Akiba ben Danan , Shaul ben Danan, and others.  Most of these rabbis were the religious leaders of the city of Fez at the end of the 17^th and the first part of the 18^th century. The scribe is Yitshak Kohen. Many of the texts are queries with detailed answers to various Jewish legal questions (responsa). In addition, one finds in this collection a homily on the subject of establishing fixed times for prayers

These are but a few examples of the manuscripts; there are literally thousands more to be examined. With the assistance of Professor Bar Asher, we hope to get a better understanding of the contents of this important collection.

–Nanette Stahl, Judaica Collection Curator

The largest of our manuscript collections are the Jewish community registers from Europe. These registers, known in Hebrew as pinkase kehilah, were produced by synagogue congregations, study societies, charitable societies and burial societies (the hevra kadisha).  The pinkasim in Yale’s collection originate primarily in Eastern and Central Europe (mostly Hungary and Romania).  The contents consist of proceedings of meetings, regulations and by-laws, records of monetary contributions, and the recording of births and deaths.  The title page of many of them are elaborately written and decorated.  They are an excellent primary resource for the study of the economic, social and religious life of  Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. They originated in the large centers of Jewish life but also in small out-of-way communities.  They thus shed light on  Jewish life in geographic locations where there is precious little other information available.  There are pinkasim in the collection that contain records that go up to the early 1940s, the point at which these communities were destroyed by the Nazis.

The community register collection serves as a complement to Yale’s large collection of yizkor books, memorials to the destroyed Jewish communities of Europe during the Sho’ah.  These are works that were by-and-large compiled by survivors of those towns.  Those that remained alive at the end of the war attempted to evoke the towns of their birth in earlier times when those towns were still vibrant and active.  In addition to the many essays concerning the village, town, or city found in these books, the compilers also included photos of members of the various Zionist groups, sports clubs, school graduations, family outings, socialist or Bundist gatherings, and other events in the life of their community. The yizkor books celebrate the life of European Jewish communities that were brutally destroyed; the community register collection serve to shed further light on many of those communities. A complete list of Yale’s holdings can be found here.

Another group of manuscripts that we have assembled over a period of several years is the rabbinic emissaries collection.  In Hebrew they were referred to as shadarim, an acronym for shilluhe de-rabbanan.  The Jewish community living in Palestine under Ottoman rule was both poor and pious.  Its members lived off the charity of Jewish Diaspora communities that sent funds to the Holy Land to support the Jews living there.  The rabbinic academies, old age homes, orphanages, and hospitals thus sent on an almost regular basis men to various parts of the world to raise money.  In order to prove that they were legitimate representatives of the institutions that sent them, these emissaries carried letters of introduction which they presented to the rabbis and notables of the Jewish communities to which they were sent.  The letters shed light on Jewish life in Palestine before the secular immigrants from Eastern Europe began arriving in large numbers.  Up until the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Jewish community in the Holy Land was composed of Sephardic Jews (of Spanish origin) who had been there for several centuries, and the ultra-orthodox Jews who had come from Central and Eastern Europe (known as Ashkenazim) who had come  in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  Both these communities, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, lived primarily in what were known as the four holy cities: Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberius, and Safed.  And both sent emissaries to members of their respective communities in the Diaspora for the purpose of collecting funds.  Many of the emissaries were important rabbis and Talmudic scholars and some even stayed on in the communities to which they were sent as rabbis and preachers.  The economic, social and religious inter-connectedness between Jews in Palestine and those in the Diaspora is a subject for exploration and study and Yale’s collection provides a rich resource for research in this area.   They can be found in Manuscripts and Archives at the Sterling Memorial Library.

Over the last few years, we have also built a collection of mizrah and shiviti plaques written and decorated by hand. Though they are used for somewhat different purposes, they are often combined into one.  The shiviti plaque is inscribed with the Hebrew verse “I have set the Lord always before me” (Psalm 16:8). It is hung in a synagogue in order to exhort the congregation to greater devotion in its prayers. The mizrah (“east” in Hebrew) indicates in which direction to turn in order to face Jerusalem during the Amidah prayer.  Both are usually composed of prayers and graphics and are more often than not one and the same. The plaque is meant to be both spiritual and decorative and thus various religious symbols appear on it. The seven-branched menorah usually is at the center.  On some plaques, kabbalistic images may appear.  And still others may contain images of holy places or utensils associated with the Temple such as the incense burner or the Eternal Light.  Often micrography (design with tiny Hebrew letters) is an aspect of the decoration.  Shiviti and mizrah plaques can be found in synagogues all over the world; they are not unique to any particular Jewish community.  They serve as examples of both religious and folk art and have much to teach us about the cultural and material milieu of the communities that produced them.  They are housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

–Nanette Stahl, Judaica Collection Curator