Bobe's ancient tale

Two Lybian Jewish girls, ca. 1910s.

Challah cover from Volhynia, western Ukraine (left) and from Kurdistan (right), 19th century

Jewish traditions in Warsaw, Poland, ca. 1906

Post stamps depicting Ukrainian Jews, 2017. From the series "Minorities of Ukraine"

On 1st July 1941, Ukrainian Nationalists organised a pogrom against the Jewish community of Lviv - one of Eastern Europe's oldest and largest. While around 150 Jews could be rescued by the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Lviv, Andrey Sheptytsky, thousands were rounded up on the streets, beaten, humiliatied and killed, with the remaining Jews dying in the notorious Janowska camp. In the course of the war, most of the architecture and infrastructure that sustained Jewish existence and culture was obliterated. Afterward, Soviet authorities demolished, commandeered or left to decay what was left over at the war's end.

Jews in Sa'dah, Yemen, October 1983

Jewish peasant family after the mushroom harvest, Russian Empire, 1920s

As Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews living in Ottoman and British Jerusalem wouldn't have been able to survive speaking just Yiddish (their native language), many learned Arabic to communicate with the local Arabs and Arabic-speaking Jews. They started to create new phrases that combined Yiddish and Arabic, thus developing an own dialect. And while most of these fusion phrases have died out, some Hasidic communities in Jerusalem are still using them - there is "svoye svoye", derived from "shway shway" which means "a little bit" or "chill out" in Arabic, or "dzubbe", derived from "jubbah" which is the Arabic word for a man's festive overcoat.

The Jewish community of Afghanistan, ca. 1960.

Burial in the Jewish Cemetery of Veszprem, Hungary, 1986

Radical Zionist scouts (Betar) with Joseph Trumpeldor’s picture, Kovno, Lithaunia, 1925

Jewish blacksmith in Ukraine, 1911

Albania has had a Jewish presence since 70 CE during the Roman period. Jews continued to settle in the country throughout the Middle Ages and Ottoman rule, erecting Castilian, Catalonian, Sicilian, Portuguese, and Apulian synagogues and eventually constituting one-third of the total population in the port city of Vlora. Most Albanians were not hostile toward the Jews and actively helped to hide them during the war, thereby risking their lives. Thus, Albania was the only Nazi-occupied territory to experience an increase in Jewish population during the Holocaust.

"Seven sisters" from Orgiev, Bessarabia, 1909