Posts

A Hebrew Book Travelling from Berlin To Baghdad

A Hebrew book printed in Warsaw, kept in a library in Berlin, probably immigrated to Mandate Palestine, shipped to Baghdad, and returned back to Israel.
A Mother’s Obituary for Her Fallen Son: The Pogrom of Orsha 1905

For fourteen years I had been a childless Jewess, I prayed God for a son, and he gave him to me in the fifteenth year of my marriage. It was my long-awaited yearned son. God has blessed me, for I had a pure and noble son, full with love for his family and passion for…
Who-is-a-Jew Algorithm

I present an algorithm that I developed to identify who was Jewish and who was not from among a population of immigrants who arrived in Ellis Island from the Russian Empire during the pre-WWI Age of Mass Migration. The algorithm has two main steps: Determine how “Jewish” were each first name and last name Determine…
Occupations of Jews in the Pale of Settlement

What were the occupations and trades the Jews were holding in the old country? The 1897 census of the Russian Empire tells us a lot about that, and in great detail. The summary data have been studied in the past, and the major facts are well known by historians. Based on my work on this…
Dudu Geva: A Childhood Hero and a Prophet

Great art remains relevant for years. Real masterpieces can gain relevance over time. But these two pieces by my childhood comic books writer idol, Dudu Geva z”l, that I clipped from Kol-Ha’Ir (Jerusalem’s local newspaper) as a child some 24 years ago, are nothing short of divine inspiration and prophecy.
A wild Encounter with a Zoroastrian Taxi Driver

Every time I do something good, something bad happens. I can’t be happy. I’m afraid to be happy because I know that something bad will happen. I’m not superstitious, but lately these things happen. I took in some guy, he was drunk, suddenly he started speaking crazy shit, then he banged the window. It broke,…
Edward A. Steiner: A Writer on Immigration

Steiner (1866–1956) was a professor of Applied Christianity, for what it means, in Grinnell College in Iowa. He was born to a well-to-do Jewish-Slovak-Hungarian family in a Carpathian village, and was educated in Vienna and Heidelberg, from where he made a pilgrimage to his venerated Tolstoy in Russia. This pilgrimage was followed later by five…
Most Common Jewish Names

I present here an analysis of the distribution of Jewish and non-Jewish names among immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a by-product of my work on the Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement. The first sections explain a few technical details about the data. It…
A New Map of Jewish Communities in the Russian Empire

This map shows the precise place of residence of over 4.3 million Jews at the time of the Russian census of 1897. The census enumerated over 5 million Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, the 25 western provinces of the Russian Empire in which Jews were generally free to reside. Together with the Jewish…