Routes

Twelve points that carry the whole of Jewish history: Creation, Abraham, the Exodus, Sinai, the two Temples, exile, the Talmud, Spain, the Shoah, and the State of Israel. Walk it once and you have the skeleton of the timeline; after that every other event has somewhere to hang. No prior knowledge is assumed — each step explains itself.

Twelve names repeated in the Torah more often than any others — and of each most people remember a single line. This route walks the tribes in order of birth: whose son he was, what Jacob said of him before his death, where the portion fell and who came out of that tribe. By the end the twelve names stop being a list.

Abraham lived 175 years and spent most of them on the road: Ur, Charan, Canaan, Egypt, Canaan again, Moriah, Hebron. This route follows those places in chronological order and shows how a people grows out of one man who left home. Along the way it becomes clear why tradition calls him the first who found the Creator by himself.

"Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it to Joshua" — the opening mishnah of Avot describes a chain passed hand to hand. This route walks its links: prophets, the Men of the Great Assembly, the pairs of sages, Yavne, the Mishnah, the academies of Babylonia, the Talmud. You will see how an oral tradition twice came close to vanishing and both times was saved by being written down.

Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, Spain — five exiles, each with its own mechanism and its own ending. This route shows how they differed: from where people returned and from where they did not, and why the ten tribes disappeared while the Judean community in Babylon flourished. It is the key storyline for understanding Jewish history between the Destruction and the modern age.

Three and a half thousand years of one land: whose rule stood over it in each age and what it meant for the people. The route follows the same strip as the track 'Who ruled the land' on the timeline, but step by step, through events: judges, kings, Babylon, Persia, Greece, the Hasmoneans, Rome, Byzantium, the caliphate, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, Britain, Israel. In all that time Jewish rule over the land stood three times.

One date that keeps returning: the spies in the wilderness, both Temples, Betar, the expulsion from Spain. This route follows those coincidences in order and shows how a people learned to fold different catastrophes into a single day of memory. It is not only about grief — by the end you see why the tradition keeps such a date at all.

The Tanakh is not one book but a library assembled over roughly a thousand years: Torah, Prophets, Writings. This route runs from Sinai to the Men of the Great Assembly, showing when each part appeared, who wrote it down, and why the canon was eventually closed. Along the way it becomes clear how a prophet differs from a sage, and why nothing was added after Malachi.

From a portable tent in the wilderness to the Western Wall — nearly three and a half thousand years of one idea: worship needs a place. The route passes through the Mishkan, Shiloh, the purchase of Aravnah's threshing floor, both Temples and both destructions, and ends with what remains. You will see how the notion of "God's house" outlived the house itself.

In half a century a new movement swept half of Eastern Europe — and provoked the sharpest internal conflict of the modern era. This route shows what Hasidism grew out of (Lurianic Kabbalah, pogroms, the trauma of false messianism), what exactly outraged the Vilna Gaon, and why in the end both sides won. It is a story about an argument that enriched a tradition instead of destroying it.

There are more than two hundred Hasidic courts in this database, and nearly every one is named after a town that is long gone. This route shows where they all come from: the Baal Shem Tov left no heir, and the movement went out not as one line but as a bush, through the disciples of the Maggid of Mezritch. Twenty steps along the roots: Lizhensk, Chernobyl, Karlin, Chabad, Lublin, Peshischa, Kotzk, Ger, Vorka, Breslov, Kosov, Belz, Sanz, Ruzhin, Siget. The branches are named in the notes and can be opened by search.

Two centuries from the first organised resettlements to a state and the great waves of aliyah. The route passes through pogroms, Herzl, Tel Aviv, the Balfour Declaration, the Shoah, 1948, and the mass immigrations from Arab lands, Ethiopia and the USSR. You will see that "return" was never one decision but dozens of different ones — religious, political and forced.