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2,144 records
Avraham ben Avigdor
(d. 1542), rabbi. The inscription on Avraham ben Avigdor’s tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague states that he was a chief rabbi and head of Prague’s yeshiva for more than 20 years. Avraham ben Avigdor is also …
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Avraham Trebitsch of Mikulov
(ca. 1759–1837), scholar and chronicler. Born in Třebíč (Ger., Trebitsch), Moravia, Avraham Trebitsch was the son of Re’uven Ḥayat and his wife, Fradl. He studied at yeshivas in Mikulov (ca. 1771) and Prague (ca. 1775). …
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Avraham Yehoshu‘a ben Ya‘akov Heshel
(1596–1663), rabbi and halakhic authority in Poland–Lithuania. Born in Brest Litovsk, Avraham Yehoshu‘a Heshel moved with his father to Lublin when the latter was appointed rabbi of the community and head of the yeshiva.…
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Aḥi’asaf
Hebraist-Zionist publishing house. Aḥi’asaf was founded in Warsaw in 1893 by Hebrew writer and publisher Avraham Leib Shalkovich (known as Ben-Avigdor, who soon left to found the rival publishing house Tushiyah), Eli‘eze…
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Ba-Derekh
Hebrew-language newspaper published in Poland between 1932 and 1937. Ba-Derekh (On the Way) represented the last in a series of attempts by the Polish Zionist Organization to establish a daily newspaper in Hebrew. Effort…
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Babad Family
Leading wealthy rabbinic family in Galicia. Beginning in the seventeenth century, many members of the Babad family served in rabbinic posts in Poland and Lithuania; others were quite wealthy and held a variety of leaders…
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Babad, Yosef
(1801–1874), Galician rabbinical scholar. Yosef Babad was born in Tarnopol to a family of rabbinical scholars; from his earliest years he devoted his life to the study of the Torah. As an adult, he was introduced to Hasi…
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Babel, Isaac
(Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel’; 1894–1940), Soviet Jewish short-story writer and playwright. Isaac Babel was born in Odessa and brought up in the Russified middle-class family of a dealer in agricultural machinery. Odessa w…
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Babi Yar
Site of the murder of Kiev Jews by the Nazis in 1941. On 19 September 1941, the Germans occupied Kiev, after approximately 70 percent of a total Jewish population of 225,000 (as of 1939) had managed to flee. On 29–30 Sep…
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Bacher, Simon
(1823–1891), Hebrew poet and community leader. A branch of the illustrious Bacharach family settled in Hungary around the last third of the eighteenth century. The Bachers (the shortened form of the family name was used …
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Bacher, Vilmos
(1850–1913), Talmudic scholar, orientalist, and rector of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. A descendant of the eighteenth-century German rabbi Ya’ir Ḥayim Bacharach, and a son of Hebrew poet Simon Bacher (Bacharach),…
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Bachmann, Jacob
(1846–1905), cantor and synagogue composer. Jacob Bachmann was born in the town of Berdichev, Volhynia province (present-day Ukraine). His early music education came as a meshoyrer (Heb., meshorer), an apprentice choir s…
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Bacău
Town in northern Moldavia, at the confluence of the Bistrița and Siret Rivers. Oral tradition claims that the first synagogue was erected in the late fifteenth century, but the oldest documentary reference to the existen…
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Bader, Gershom
(1868–1953), author, playwright, editor, and journalist in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Polish. Gershom Bader was born in Kraków and was a representative figure of the mid-nineteenth-century East European Haskalah. He wa…
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Badkhonim
Like many traditional societies, Jewish communities had their singers, popular writers, and entertainers. Such figures, known as badkhonim (sg., badkhn), appeared at domestic celebrations, primarily weddings or holidays …
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Bagritskii, Eduard Georgievich
(1885–1934), Russian poet and translator. Bagritskii, whose nom-de-plume was derived from the Russian for crimson, was born Eduard Godelevich Dziubin, to an Odessan family in which Judaic traditions were respected, but t…
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Baia Mare
Town in northwestern Romania, on the Săsar River at the foot of the Gutâi Mountains. Baia Mare, a mining town, was known in German as Frauenbach and Neustadt, in Latin as Rivulus Dominarum, and in Hungarian as Asszonypat…
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Bak Family
Printers active in Hebrew and Yiddish publishing. The Bak family apparently originated in Venice, where Ya‘akov ben Gershon Bak (1574–1619) followed his father, Gershon ben Mosheh, in training as a printer. After Ya‘akov…
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Bakst, Léon
(1866–1924), Russian artist. Of the many artists of the Russian Silver Age, Léon Bakst (Lev Samoilovich Rozenberg) deserves the highest acclaim for his achievements in studio painting and the applied arts. He was especia…
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Bal-Makhshoves
(1873–1924), literary critic. Bal-Makhshoves (“Man of Thoughts”; pseudonym of Isidor [Yisroel] Eliashev) was born in Kovno, Lithuania, to a wealthy family. His father, Shloyme Zalkind Eliashev, had been a maskil in his y…
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