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Sarajevo Jews celebrate a second Purim. For centuries, they weren’t alone.
(JTA) — Starting tonight, many Jews around the world will celebrate Purim in the same ways: by reading the story of the heroic Queen Esther, dressing in festive costumes and drinking alcohol.
For many of the 900 or so Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it will be the first of two annual Purim celebrations.
Since 1820, locals have also observed the Purim de Saray (Saray being a root of the word Sarajevo) early in the Hebrew calendar month of Cheshvan, which usually falls in October or November of the Gregorian calendar.
In that year, the story goes, a local dervish was murdered, prompting the corrupt Ottoman pasha of Sarajevo, a high-ranking official, to kidnap 11 prominent Jews, including the community’s chief rabbi, a kabbalist named Moshe Danon. The pasha accused them of the murder of the dervish — who had converted from Judaism to Islam — and held them for ransom, demanding 50,000 groschen of silver from the Jewish community.
But the pasha, who was a transplant from elsewhere in the Ottoman empire, deeply offended the multiethnic populace of Sarajevo, who considered the Jewish community — then around one-fifth of the city’s entire population — an essential part of their home. So local Jews, Muslims and Christians rebelled together, storming the pasha’s palace and freeing the imprisoned community leaders.
Ever since, Bosnian Jews have celebrated that story by visiting the grave of the Sarajevan Jewish historian Zeki Effendi, who was the first to document it. Dozens also take part in a pilgrimage every summer to the grave of Rabbi Danon, who is buried in the south of Bosnia, not far from the Croatian border, where he died on his way to what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine.
For centuries, several other Jewish communities around the world observed their own versions of Purim based on stories of local resistance to antisemitism, inspired by Esther and her uncle Mordecai, who in the original holiday story save all of Persia’s Jews from execution in the 5th century BCE.
Here are the stories behind some of those traditions.
Ancona, Italy
An aerial view of Ancona in 2006. (Wikimedia Commons)
Jews settled in and around Ancona on Italy’s Adriatic coast in the 10th century, and by the 13th century they had established a flourishing community, which included figures such as the Jewish traveler Jacob of Ancona — who may have beaten Marco Polo to China — and famed poet Immanuel the Roman, who despite his title was born in a town just south of Ancona.
Though the city’s Jewish community was largely spared by the Holocaust, it has slowly declined over the years and is believed to have fewer than 100 members today. What it is not short on, however, are local Purim stories — the city is known for multiple celebrations that were established over the centuries.
The first, marked on the 21st of the Hebrew month of Tevet (usually in January) was established at the end of the 17th century and marks an earthquake that nearly destroyed the city.
“On the 21st of Teveth, Friday evening, of the year 5451 (1690), at 8 and a quarter, there was a powerful earthquake. The doors of the temple were immediately opened and in a few moments it was filled with men, women and children, still half-naked and barefoot, who came to pray to the Eternal in front of the Holy Ark. A true miracle then took place in the Temple: there was only one light, which remained lit until it was possible to provide for it,” wrote Venetian Rabbi Yosef Fiammetta in 1741, in his text “Or Boqer,” meaning “the light of the morning.”
Other Ancona Purims were established a half and three-quarters of a century later, respectively. The story for the first commemorates fires that nearly destroyed the local synagogue but miraculously did not, and the next tells of a pogrom that nearly destroyed the community as Napoleon marched through Italy during the French Revolutionary Wars.
Today, these stories have largely faded into memory. But a few centuries ago, Italy had a high concentration of communities that celebrated local Purims — including in Casale Monferrato, Ferrara, Florence, Livorno, Padua, Senigallia, Trieste, Urbino, Verona and Turin — some into the 20th century.
“It would be hoped that the local Purims are not forgotten or that they are restored in the communities that have not completely died out,” the late Italian Rabbi Yehuda Nello Pavoncello once wrote, according to the Turin Jewish Community, “so that the memory of the events reconnects us to the infinite links of the chain of the generations that have preceded us, who have suffered.”
North Africa
An illustration shows King Sebastian of Portugal being fatally wounded at a battle in Morocco in 1578. (Bettmann/Getty Images)
The extra Purim phenomenon was not confined to Europe.
In Tripoli, Libya, local Jews established the so-called Purim Barghul after the deposition of a local tyrant in the late 18th century. Ali Burghul, an Ottoman officer who was installed after the downfall of the Qaramanli dynasty, ruled the region brutally for two years, treating minorities particularly harshly. After factions of the Qaramanlis were reconciled, Burghul was driven out. Jews would go on to celebrate that day, the 29th of Tevet (usually in January).
(Centuries later, in 1970, dictator Muammar Gaddafi established his own holiday, the Day of Revenge, which celebrated the expulsion of Italian officials from Libya; some say it also celebrated the exodus of Jews since the formation of the state of Israel. Within a few years after Gaddafi’s decree, Libya’s Jewish community had dwindled to less than two dozen, effectively ending the nearly 3,000-year history of Jews there.)
In northern Morocco, Jews commemorated the defeat of a Portuguese king, Don Sebastian, who attempted to take over parts of the country but was defeated in a battle in August 1578. Jews had believed that Sebastian would have tried to convert them to Christianity if he had prevailed.
Today only around 2,000 Jews remain in Morocco, but some Moroccan communities marked the day into the 21st century.
Saragossa
A view of an 11th-century palace in Zaragoza, Spain. The Purim of Saragossa story is set in either Zaragoza or Syracuse, Italy. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Scholars still debate which city was the origin of the Purim of Saragossa story — it could have been Zaragoza in Spain or Syracuse in southern Sicily, which was often referred to in the medieval era as Siragusa. Both cities were part of the Spanish empire in 1492 and were depopulated of Jews following the Inquisition.
Either way, Sephardic descendants in places around the world, including Israel and the Turkish city of Izmir, observed their own Purim story by fasting on the 16th of the Hebrew month of Shevat — generally in February — and feasting on the 17th.
The story tells of an apostate named Marcus who slandered the Jewish community to a non-Jewish king, putting their status in jeopardy. But at the last minute, Marcus’ deception is revealed, and he is executed while the community is saved.
The story could have been entirely fabricated. According to Jewish historian Elliot Horowitz, the establishment of this second Purim story may have been a way for the descendants of Saragossan Jews, whether they are originally Spanish or Sicilian, to maintain a unique identity in the larger Sephardic diaspora.
“The Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean in the early modern period were often composed of émigré subcommunities, each of which was distinguished by the customs and liturgy of its place of origin,” he wrote in his 2006 book “Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence.” “The ‘Purim of Saragossa,’ the earliest manuscript evidence for which dates only from the mid-eighteenth century, may well have been ‘invented’ by former ‘Saragossans’ eager to maintain their distinct identity in the multicultural Sephardi Diaspora of the eastern Mediterranean.”
Regardless of its origins, the Megillah of Saragossa text continued to be published through at least the end of the 19th century. It was well known enough that an American Reform rabbi from New York would publish a stage play based off of it in the 1940s.
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Selective Outrage and the Silence Over Iran’s Dead
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
In recent weeks, thousands of Iranian citizens have been killed amid widespread internal unrest. Some casualty reports even reach into the tens of thousands.
Iranian men and women took to the streets to protest economic collapse, systemic repression, and a theocratic regime that has ruled through fear for more than four decades. They were met with bullets, mass arrests, torture, and executions. Yet beyond fleeting mentions and buried headlines, much of the international media has chosen to look away.
At the same time, global attention remains overwhelmingly fixated on Israel and the Palestinians. News panels, campus demonstrations, activist campaigns, and social media feeds are saturated with outrage directed almost exclusively at the Jewish State. This contrast is not accidental. It reflects a deeper moral and structural failure in modern journalism and activism.
The most common explanation offered for the lack of coverage is access. Iran is a closed dictatorship. Foreign journalists are monitored, restricted, expelled, or imprisoned. The regime routinely shuts down the Internet, blocks social media platforms, and intimidates the families of victims. Casualty figures are deliberately obscured, and firsthand reporting is dangerous.
But access alone does not explain the silence.
History shows that journalists have reported from some of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on earth. Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Afghanistan have all received sustained attention despite severe limitations. When there is genuine interest, creative reporting follows.
In the case of Iran, the problem is not merely a lack of footage. It is a lack of will.
Israel presents the opposite reality. It is one of the most scrutinized countries in the world. It allows foreign media full access, maintains a free press, hosts outspoken human rights organizations, and operates under an independent judiciary and parliamentary oversight. Journalists can move freely, challenge officials, and broadcast live from conflict zones.
When Israel defends itself after a massacre multiple times worse than the 9/11 attacks, every action is framed as a potential crime. When Iran kills its own citizens, it is described in sanitized language as unrest, crackdowns, or internal affairs.
This is not moral consistency. It is moral evasion.
Much of the international focus on the Palestinian cause relies on a simplistic and emotionally comfortable narrative. It divides the world into oppressor and oppressed, strong and weak, villain and victim. It requires little historical context and no serious engagement with internal problems, extremist violence, or rejectionism. It also offers a familiar and ideologically convenient antagonist: the Jewish State.
Iranian protesters disrupt this narrative. Their existence exposes an inconvenient truth that many commentators prefer to ignore — that the greatest source of suffering in the Middle East is not Israel, but authoritarian Islamist regimes that brutalize their own populations. The Iranian protestors undermine the claim that Israel is the region’s central moral problem, and they challenge the ideological frameworks upon which entire activist ecosystems are built.
That is precisely why they are ignored.
There is also a strategic dimension to this silence. The Iranian regime has spent decades exporting violence while redirecting global attention outward. Through proxy terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and through relentless anti-Israel propaganda, Tehran ensures that outrage is focused anywhere but inward. Every international campaign condemning Israel serves as a distraction from executions, torture chambers, mass arrests, and the killing of dissenters.
Western protest culture plays an enabling role. Modern activism often favors symbolism over substance and slogans over substance. It gravitates towards causes that fit fashionable ideological molds. Iranian dissidents who oppose Islamist extremism, reject antisemitism, and openly criticize Western hypocrisy do not fit neatly into those frameworks. As a result, they are ignored.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is that Jewish suffering is endlessly contextualized, while Jewish self defense is reflexively condemned. That is why Israel is treated differently than the Iranian protest movement.
Thousands of dead Iranians should shake the conscience of the world. The fact that it does not should alarm anyone who still believes in universal human rights. Outrage cannot be selective. Journalism cannot be ideological. And moral concern cannot depend on whether a tragedy serves a preferred narrative.
Iranian lives matter, not when they are useful as political tools, but always. Until the media internalizes that truth, its credibility will continue to erode, one ignored grave at a time
Sabine Sterk is CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Syria’s Internal Unrest Is Spurred by Turkish Ambitions
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attends a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, Oct. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
“The Syrian Democratic Forces’ [SDF] insistence on protecting what it has at all costs is the biggest obstacle to achieving peace and stability in Syria.”
That’s what Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in early January, blaming Syria’s Kurdish-led SDF for some of the bloodiest fighting that Aleppo has seen since Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
But before Washington accepts Ankara’s indictment, it should ask a simpler question: why would Syrian Kurds compromise their political future when Turkey itself refuses to compromise with its Kurdish population at home?
Foreign Minister Fidan made Turkey’s position explicit in a recent television interview: Kurdish groups “only change [their] position when [they] face force. They either have to see force or face the threat of force,” he said. But this isn’t frustrated rhetoric — it’s Turkish doctrine. And recent fighting shows what that doctrine produces.
Beginning on January 6, 2025, Syrian government forces — backed by Turkish-aligned factions — established a template in Aleppo: evacuation orders, artillery strikes, and forced displacement. Over 140,000 civilians subsequently fled Aleppo. The “ceasefire” offered no protections — only withdrawal.
Damascus then replicated the model across northeast Syria. Within two weeks, Syrian forces took Deir Hafer, Tabqa, Raqqa, and Deir al-Zor, as SDF units retreated and Arab tribal allies defected. By January 21, the SDF had lost nearly half its territory and accepted a ceasefire that amounts to capitulation: individual integration into Syrian forces with none of the autonomy protections it had sought.
In other words: disarm first, trust later, rights never.
This is precisely the model Turkey has applied at home. In February 2025, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan — whose group is a US-designated terrorist organization — called for the group’s disbandment after four decades of conflict. By July, PKK fighters symbolically burned weapons in what they called “a step of goodwill.” Turkish military operations continued throughout — because for Ankara, negotiated settlement is insufficient. Only total victory will do.
Syrian Kurds have watched this closely. They have also watched Turkey’s record in Syria itself. In 2018, Operation Olive Branch displaced at least 150,000 people from Afrin; in 2019, Operation Peace Spring killed hundreds of civilians and drew credible accusations of ethnic cleansing and summary executions. When Turkish President Erdoğan threatened military action in 2019, Washington urged restraint. Turkey invaded anyway.
Now Fidan issues the same threats — and expects different results. He accuses the SDF of “maximalist attitudes” and “deceptive moves,” while demanding immediate, unconditional surrender. He warns that Kurdish resistance will push Turkey to use force. He has already delivered: Turkish drones have hit SDF positions on multiple occasions during the recent fighting, signaling Ankara’s willingness to back up threats with force.
This is not just a Kurdish problem. It threatens core US interests.
Washington’s Syria policy rests on preventing a jihadist resurgence, blocking Iranian expansion, and safeguarding Israel’s security. Each is threatened by Turkey’s coercive approach to Kurdish integration. Marginalized communities without legal protections become fertile ground for extremist recruitment. The collapse of Kurdish autonomy also weakens one of the last effective counter-ISIS buffers in the country. And assaults on minority communities — including the Druze — increase domestic pressure on Israel to intervene, raising the risk of escalation the United States has worked to prevent.
Turkey, meanwhile, gains leverage at America’s expense. By casting itself as the architect of Syria’s “reunification,” Ankara elevates its regional standing while embedding its proxies inside the Syrian security apparatus. Washington, by contrast, is reduced to issuing ceasefire calls while Syria’s post-war order is being written without it.
There is still time to change course — but only if the United States stops outsourcing Syria’s political settlement to Ankara.
Washington retains leverage through its military presence, sanctions relief, reconstruction assistance, and diplomatic recognition. It should use that leverage to establish transparent, enforceable frameworks for minority integration — with international monitoring and public guarantees, not closed-door capitulation pushed for by Turkey.
First, the United States should demand formal negotiations between Damascus and Syria’s minority representatives, under international auspices — with public terms and third-party monitoring.
Second, continued American sanctions relief and reconstruction funds must be tied to measurable benchmarks: minority protections enshrined in law, parliamentary oversight of integration, and independent accountability mechanisms.
Third, Washington must make clear that Turkish military intervention — direct or through proxies — will trigger consequences under existing authorities, including Executive Order 13894, which targets actions threatening Syria’s territorial integrity.
Most critically, the United States must reject the premise that Kurdish communities can be bombed into accepting promises their neighbors have already broken. Fidan says Kurdish groups only understand force. But history suggests Turkey only understands leverage. Washington still has it — and should use it now, while integration is still being implemented, before Fidan’s doctrine of force becomes Syria’s permanent reality.
Jonah Brody is a policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).
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The Digital War Against the Jewish Community Is Raging, Perhaps Worse Than Ever
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
On Monday, the remains of Ran Gvili — a young Israeli police officer killed during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks — were finally recovered from a cemetery in northern Gaza. With his return, the hostage crisis effectively came to an end. There are no more Israeli hostages in Gaza.
This final milestone received far less international media coverage than the release of the last living hostages in October 2025, an event that had a noticeable impact on the digital landscape. As we found in a student-driven project at the Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, antisemitism dipped on X and TikTok the day those living hostages were released. But the respite was short-lived.
Social media has become a toxic environment for Jews. The sheer volume of hateful commentary on anything Jewish — from current events to the Holocaust — is staggering. But to view these platforms as merely “loud” is to miss the more dangerous reality: social media is today’s primary tool for disseminating antisemitism and, increasingly, for mobilizing it.
Our research shows that social media is being used to politicize antisemitism and coordinate action across ideological boundaries. What often appears as a spontaneous burst of passion — such as student activism on campus — is frequently the result of a highly networked digital infrastructure.
In our lab’s study on the “Rhetoric of Resistance,” we tracked the online networking of anti-Israel campus groups across the United States. The findings are a wake-up call for university administrators and policymakers: these groups are not operating in isolation. They have built a wide network of off-campus organizations and individuals, allowing them to synchronize messaging and amplify radicalized narratives at an unprecedented scale.
We are seeing a shift toward language that mirrors the rhetoric of designated terrorist organizations. Slogans that deny a people’s right to exist or that justify violence are no longer fringe; they have been moved into the mainstream of campus discourse through coordinated digital amplification, often expressed in snippets, coded phrases such as talk about “Jewish power,” “Zionist evilness,” or even slogans such as “Free Palestine,” which has become a battle cry.
One of the most troubling patterns our student coders identified is how specific types of political commentary function as “gateways.” While many users believe they are simply criticizing a government’s policy, our data shows that totalizing, categorical condemnations — framing an entire nation as “genocidal” or a “terrorist state” — are most strongly associated with antisemitism. In contrast, humanitarian-focused themes, such as the suffering of individual Palestinians, showed a much less consistent association with anti-Jewish hate speech.
Our central finding is nuanced and confirms other studies: negative views of Israel and antisemitism are strongly correlated. Approximately half of the posts we analyzed that expressed negative views of Israel were antisemitic, while posts with positive views showed zero antisemitism. The students’ diligent coding work allows us to demonstrate empirically how criticism can create a permissive environment for antisemitism without every post necessarily crossing the line into hate speech.
However, in the vast majority of the most vitriolic posts, the content was not just “anti-Israel”; it was fundamentally anti-Jewish, utilizing collective blame and dehumanizing language. This creates a “permissive environment” where hate speech is sanitized as political advocacy, making it difficult for platforms — and even trained human moderators — to draw the line.
The one-day dip in antisemitism we observed during the 2025 hostage release proves that the digital climate is sensitive to reality and human empathy. However, the immediate “snap-back” to hostility suggests that the underlying machinery of mobilization is always running.
If we are to protect the integrity of our campuses and our public discourse, we must confront the reality that some digital activism is designed not to persuade, but to ostracize and radicalize. We must support the right to vigorous political debate while refusing to tolerate the coordinated degradation of Jewish identity. The hostage crisis has ended, but the digital war against Jewish life continues. Recognizing the tools of this mobilization is the first step toward stopping it.
The author is the Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University.