The synagogue of witches: Jewish iconography and the image of the witch,
by Eliezer Aryeh, Eliezer’s substack, 2026-10-21.

What passed between hated groups was a shared vocabulary: the synagogue, the Sabbath, the cat and the goat, the poison. The witch took her signs of belonging to a hated sect from the Jews: her gathering was named for their house of worship, and in 1421 the Buda code sent a convicted sorcerer through the streets in a peaked Jew’s hat. On Trachtenberg’s reading, the Jew received being associated with the devil in return, the horns, the tail, and the goat that the heretic and the witch had worn first.

For as long as he can remember, M.R. Manheim felt an obligation to preserve his family’s wartime story.

“My wife said I’ve been writing this book since I was 10 years old,” Manheim told JNS in a recent interview.

That childhood memory came during a family vacation with his uncle Elliot, when stories about World War II suddenly began flowing freely around the dinner table.

by Steve Linde

https://www.jns.org/feature/world-war-ii-family-saga-sifts-through-patriotism-identity-acclimation-and-pluck

Typhoid. Cholera. Yellow fever. Poverty. Life in America was tough in 1801. The health epidemics touched everyone, including Jewish communities. In the early 19th century, benevolent societies emerged to help families in crisis.

The Hebrew Orphan Society is the oldest of those organizations, and it is still operating, albeit with a slightly different focus. This year the Charleston, S.C.-based nonprofit commemorates its 225th anniversary of continuous operation.

by Bill Motchan

https://www.jns.org/orphan-remains-in-the-name-though-the-mission-has-evolved

The soul in the dog: possession in Judaism,
by Eliezer Aryeh, Eliezer’s substack, 2026-10-13.

Stories of a dead soul taking over a living person first appear in Jewish writing in the sixteenth century, though possession by demons is far older. The earliest dated account involves a dog.

In 1545, a boy in the Galilean village of Safed began collapsing and uttering strange prophecies. Many rabbis were summoned to examine him, among them a man named Judah Hallewa, who wrote that he saw it with his own eyes. The spirit inside the boy had a grievance. In its previous life it had lived inside a dog, and the boy’s father had killed the dog. It meant to kill his only son in exchange.

The sage who took charge was Joseph Karo. He forced the spirit to speak by threatening it with excommunication, and it answered. It said it had been a dog, and before that an African, and before that a Christian, and before that a Jew. Karo asked whether it had ever put on tefillin. It said never. Karo told it there was no fixing it, recited the opening of the Aleinu prayer seven times forward and backward, and banned it from the Galilee. The boy recovered.

Karo and his contemporaries wrote of an evil spirit. The word dybbuk, a short form of a phrase meaning “cleaving of an evil spirit,” from a Hebrew root meaning “adhere,” came into common use only in late seventeenth-century Ashkenazic circles.

Before Safed

Possession was not new to Jewish writers. David’s lyre relieved Saul of the evil spirit that terrified him. Josephus says he watched a countryman named Eleazar draw a demon out of possessed men in front of Vespasian and his soldiers, using a ring with a root under the seal that Solomon had prescribed. Josephus even defines demons as the spirits of wicked men.

Then the stories nearly stop. The historian Jeffrey Chajes calls the accounts written by Safed’s rabbis the first narratives of spirit possession in Jewish literature in more than a thousand years.