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Welcome to the New Posen Library

Here you’ll find texts and images spanning more than 3,000 years of Jewish history and culture. Our free site aims to ensure that thought leaders and scholars of Jewish history can represent Jewish life holistically and with a multiplicity of voices.
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Our Curated Collections

On this site you can explore our curated collections, which demonstrate how our text and image sources can be used to illuminate, inspire, and engage, providing unique opportunities to create conversations about Jewish history and culture across time and geography. Register for free access to the sources in these collections.

Painting of men cutting cloth and women sewing.

Gender Roles
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Engage with the gendered dimensions of Jewish life and discover lost voices of Jewish women. 

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Featured Sources

Text and image sources now available on the site represent about half of the full collection, with more coming soon. They include ancient Israel's beginnings (up to 332 BCE) and the period from 1750 until 1973. 

Manuscript page with Hebrew writing on top and illustration below of three central figures in hats and holding swords, next to a horse, camel, dogs, and two tents, with people in the left background and mountains beyond.
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Haggadah

This page from a Haggadah produced in Amsterdam is an example of the work of Joseph Ben David Leipnik, a prominent eighteenth-century scribe and artist known particularly for his illustrated Haggadahs…
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Passover Letter

To my brothers Jedaniah and his colleagues the Jewish Troop, your brother Hananiah. May the gods seek the welfare of my brothers at all times. And now, this year, year 5 of Darius the king, word has…
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Wood wall piece with bold Hebrew letters and flowers
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Omer Calendar

This omer calendar, marking the days between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot, is still used at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. The letters stand for H=Homer (Ladino for Omer); S…
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Page of Aramaic text with illustrations of figure on left side of text holding tablets and figure on right side of text with hat, tents above text, and animals and burning bush below text.
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Ketubah for Shavuot

In the Sephardic tradition, a “marriage contract” (ketubah), a symbolic betrothal of God and Israel, is read before the Torah reading on the first day of the holiday of Shavuot
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Just Published!

Volume 7: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918, ed. Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss, offers over 1,000 texts and images from Arabic to Yiddish, from mystical visions to revolutionary poetry—an essential starting point for understanding the Jewish 20th century

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volume 7 book cover jewish culture and civilization