Since the creation of the State of Israel, the Israel Folktale Archives at The University of Haifa, Israel (IFA) has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown.
Each of the 71 folktales (from Eastern Europe's Ashkenasic culture) is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's provenance. There is also an introduction that describes the Ashkenasic culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. This series is a monument to a rich but vanishing oral tradition. The tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the IFA, a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now.
