Category: Curiosities

1) 2)RighteousT he righteous rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev was told that a seventy-year-old Jew has just converted to Christianity. Ribono shel Olam, (God in […]

In the 1880s, a so-called Eternal Jewish Calendar was widely circulated around the Malin, Berdichev, and Kiev Jewish communities. This calendar was calculated and compiled […]

Courtesy Hennady Onyschenko A half-legend has it that after the wedding ceremony of Honore de Balzac and Ewelina Hanska, an interesting conversation took place outside […]

MOYSHE NOTOVITSH May 22: Birth of the literary researcher and critic Moyshe Notovitsh in Berdichev (1912). A graduate of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, he taught […]

(Courtesy: The David Nowakowsky Foundation) David Nowakowsky (pronouced “Novakovsky”) was born in 1848, in the little town of Malin, Russia. At the age of eight, […]

(Courtesy: Oxford World’s Classics) Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), one of the great novelists of all literature and author of “La Comédie humaine”, came of Midi […]

(Courtesy: Jewish Virtual Library) Among religious Jews, talmudic scholars are regarded with the same awe and respect with which secular society regards Nobel laureates. Yet […]

(a real story) In the 1980’s, Rabbi Israel Aharon Ceitlin visited Russia. One day, in the synagogue in Moscow, he found a “Shojet” (ritual slaughterer) […]