As I wrote on the introduction page about midwives - known in Yiddish as bobes or heybams - a crucial source on the role and importance...

Another short but sweet recollection of a real-life opshprekherke (healer through incantations) and feldmesterin (cemetery or grave...

Since it's the last day of Khanike, when, in some communities, the left over "dead thread" from Yom Kippur would be used to make khanike...

In the memorial book to the Jewish community of Volkovisk (Vawkavysk, Belarus), I found my second description of a real life...

Two years ago, in the first semester of my PhD program, I took a course with Prof. David Fishman on the history of the shtetl. In one of...

This is an extract from Sh. Leibovitsh 'A krankn a refue' - healing for the sick - in the Tomashover Yizker Bukh (1965.) Leibovitz...

Translation of an excerpt from Abraham Rechtman, Yidishe Etnografye un Folklor, p. 289-298. Rav Yokhanan had the habit of coming to sit...

From Rabbi Tuvia Gutman- Rappaport, ‘The biography of a generation’, Yizker-bukh Koriv, (1955) p. 674. Beyle Shoyver, who did charitable...

Among the professions listed in this memorial book from Kremenets, Ukraine, between "goose plucker" and "mechanic", is "cemetery zogerke"...

This is an excerpt from the memoirs of Rabbi Tuviah Gutman Rapoport, published in the memorial book of Koriv, Poland Here he remembers...

In the Yizker (memorial) book written by former residents of the shtetl Kletsk, now in Belarus, I found the following short description...

What follows is an excerpt of an ethnographic memoir - Yidishe etnografye un folklor (Jewish ethnography and folklore) – written in 1958...

According to the ethnographic study I posted recently, Yom Kippur candles made with threads that had been used to measure graves were...

This is a translation of a 1906 German study of Feld (cemetery) and Keywer (grave - from the Hebrew and Yiddish קבֿר) measuring by...