Judaism Glossary Terms
shtetl
Shtetl is the Yiddish diminutive meaning “small town”. Shtetl refers primarily to the Jewish villages which existed in Eastern Europe starting in the 16th century and continuing until World War II. Though they varied greatly in size, the shtetls had a...
siddur
Siddur means “order,” and is the common term used for the Jewish prayerbook.
Simhat Torah
Simhat Torah, “rejoicing in the law,” is the holiday celebrating the Torah, as the Jewish year’s cycle of readings ends and the community begins the Torah reading once again. A part of Sukkot, and hence, the High Holiday cycle, it is widely observed by...
Sinai
Sinai is the holy mountain on which Moses is said to have received the Torah, and where the people of Israel once again entered into a covenant with God.
Spinoza, Baruch
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677 CE) was a Jewish philosopher from the Netherlands who is credited with establishing the foundation for the Enlightenment. In 1656, he was excommunicated by the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656 for “abominable...
Star of David
The Star of David is the six-pointed star known as the “shield of David” which has become emblematic of the Jewish tradition and community.
stereotyping
Stereotyping is the ascription of generalized characteristics to a whole group of people, thus describing individuals by the characterization, usually a caricature, of the whole.
Sukkot
Sukkot is a Jewish harvest festival, also known as the festival of “booths.” The booth or sukkah is a temporary dwelling in which the faithful take their meals during the festival. The booths recall the temporary shelters in which the people of Israel...
synagogue
Synagogue, shul in Yiddish, is the most widely used term for a Jewish house of worship. Meaning a “place of gathering,” it is the central institution of Jewish communal life. The structure and role of synagogues has changed through the centuries, but in...
tallit
A tallit is a large, four-cornered shawl with fringes and special knots at the extremities, worn during Jewish morning prayers. The fringes, according to the Bible (Numbers 15.38-39), remind the worshiper of God’s commandments. In many communities today...
Talmud
The Talmud is a compendium of many texts, a comprehensive legal code, including rabbinic disputation and other, extra-legal material. It is the most significant compilation of Rabbinic Judaism, dating from the 4th and 5th centuries CE, consisting of the...
tefillin
Tefillin are the small black leather boxes containing verses of the Torah that Orthodox Jews bind to the forehead and non-dominant arm during morning prayer, thus fulfilling the Biblical commandment to love God with heart, soul, and might and to bind...
tevah
A tevah is the platform from which the Torah is read in Sephardic synagogues. It is equivalent to a “bimah” in the Ashkenazi tradition.
tikkun olam
Tikkun olam means to heal or repair the world, interpreted in Judaism as the responsibility to take action to make the world a better place.
Torah
Torah, meaning teaching or instruction, refers in its most specific sense to the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch or books of Moses, and to the scrolls on which these teachings are written. More broadly, Torah refers to the whole of the...
Tu B’Shevat
Tu B’Shevat, or the Festival of the New Year of Trees, falls on the 15th of the month of Shevat. A minor holiday in the Jewish Ashkenazi tradition, it is celebrated in modern Israel as a tree-planting holiday. Sepharadim call the holiday the Feast of...
tzedakah
Literally “righteousness” or “justice,” tzedakah is the biblical mitzvah, or commandment, to give to the needy. Traditionally this is interpreted by Jews as 10 percent of one’s wealth.
Wise, Isaac Mayer
Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900) was the principal leader in the formation of America’s Reform Judaism in the 1870s. He participated in founding the Reform seminary, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati (1875) and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations...
yeshiva
A yeshiva is a traditional Jewish rabbinic academy for the study of Torah and Talmud.
Yiddish
Yiddish is the language of Ashkenazi or Eastern European Jews, based primarily on German with words taken from Hebrew and many Slavic languages, and written in the Hebrew alphabet.
Yom ha-Shoah
Yom ha-Shoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day has been added to the yearly Jewish calendar in order to remember the Holocaust or Shoah, and thus to insure that such a crime against humanity will not be repeated again. Most importantly, it is a day to remember...
Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur is the “Day of Atonement,” the holiest day of the Jewish year, a day of fasting and atonement. Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur are called the High Holy Days, ordinarily falling in early autumn.
Zionism
Zion is a sacred hill in Jerusalem and refers, by extension, to Jerusalem and the homeland of the Hebrew people. In this latter sense, Zion came to symbolize Jewish national-religious hopes of renewal and Zionism became the name of the 19th and 20th...