Featured Vilna Collection Artifacts
Beware of Cows Who Chomp on Backpacks
A Yiddish hiking manual from 1927 provides detailed instructions on how to take children on nature walks.
A Jewish Scholar Debunks Fears of Halley’s Comet
A self-taught mathematician and astronomer, Hayyim Zelig Slonimski sought to debunk popular fears associated with Halley’s Comet.
They Never Taught Us About This
The little-known history of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War.
A Long-Ago Scandal
A cartoon demonstrates the raucousness of Jewish communal politics before the war.
Journalist Charleston
A satirical ditty by two leading lights of the Jewish avant garde in interwar Poland.
Modern Hebrew Literature as a Product of Communal Conflict
The first Hebrew novel was an attack on Hasidism by a follower of the Haskalah.
Tales About Air: Popular Science for Yiddish Readers
A late 19th-century work on the properties of air, air pressure, and wind, published during a time when there was an increased appetite and audience for Yiddish books on secular subjects.
A Seamstress Wants to Learn Esperanto
An application to a course in Vilna hints at the appeal that universalism held for some young Polish Jews.
