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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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The Central Synagogue attack had no clear connection to Mamdani. He’s still being blamed.
A stabbing outside a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Dozens of swastikas painted on a Brooklyn playground. A Queens synagogue desecrated with feces and motor oil.
Combined with an unprecedented call by New York’s mayor to protest Israel’s prime minister, the recent rash of crimes against Jews in New York City has the community on edge.
So after Larry Montes, 46, was charged with hate crimes for attempting to disrupt Central Synagogue’s Friday night Shabbat service, striking a congregant and spitting on a security guard, many online rushed to blame Mayor Zohran Mamdani for his rhetoric against Israel. The incident seemed to fit into the political narrative held among Mamdani’s fiercest critics.
“The attack at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue is a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement,” Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, posted to X Saturday morning. “I warned that words would turn into actions, and that is exactly what is happening.”
The details that have emerged about Montes complicate that conclusion. A Forward analysis of the attacker’s social media and statements from his family paint a very different picture of Montes: a pro-Israel Republican who wanted to convert to Judaism.
In June, Montes reposted two videos critical of Mamdani: one comparing the mayor to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and another accusing Mamdani of having “betrayed” the city’s Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. In 2024, Montes posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” He also reposted a video featuring Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
If anything, Montes may have believed that the Reform congregation was too progressive. After his arrest, Montes called the congregants “fake Jews” in statements to the police, according to the assistant district attorney on the case, Ali Fazal.
Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said in an interview that the suspect appeared to have a “a deeply, frankly, disturbing worldview when it came to Jews that was simultaneously both philosemitic and antisemitic.” Conflating the suspect’s worldview with Mamdani’s, she added, “harms the fight against antisemitism.”
Online influencers place the blame on Mamdani
The attacker’s background and stance on Israel didn’t stop influencers and longstanding critics of Mamdani from piling on. “Do you think your non-stop demonization of Jews could have anything to do with it?” said Brianna Wu, an activist who has become a vocal critic of the progressive left, on X in response to Mamdani’s condemnation of the attack.
“It’s your fault Mr. Mayor,” Loay Alshareef, an activist who advocates for the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel, posted to X on the night of the attack. “You allowed this to happen.”
Others didn’t name Mamdani but quickly attributed the attack to increasing animus toward Zionists — even as the attacker’s social media suggests he was Zionist himself.
“American politics has become so obsessively antagonistic toward ‘Zionists’ that even a synagogue is seen as fair game for disruption and desecration,” said U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, on X.
Why exactly Montes attacked one of New York’s iconic synagogues is still unclear. Montes’ aunt, Myriam Montes, told the New York Post he was “mentally traumatized” because of his desire to be Jewish — suggesting he may have wanted to convert to Judaism but was rebuffed.
Mental health may also have been a factor. Montes was arrested three times for violent robberies between 2019 and 2023, police said, and he was a known “emotionally disturbed person.”
Some have argued that outsized attention on Israel can make Jews a natural target especially for people in the throes of a mental health crisis.
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York political consultant, said the suspects’ anti-Mamdani views don’t weaken the case against the mayor. “There are crazy people that take cues from what they hear and what they read,” Sheinkopf said.
Spitalnick disagreed. “There are absolutely things the mayor has done that further reinforce concerns about Jewish safety,” she said. At the same time, “it’s disingenuous and unhelpful to blame him for all antisemitism in New York, which long predates him and which, as the evidence in this specific incident shows, is far more complicated than that.”
All that’s to say Montes could have had any number of motives for attacking a congregant during Shabbat services, including but not limited to warped philosemitism, a mental health crisis and prejudice against Reform Jews.
Playing into Netanyahu’s campaign
Blaming hatred of Israel and local political rhetoric for the attack could have an ulterior motive and political consequences halfway around the world. As Netanyahu and the ruling Likud Party, of which Israeli Consul General Akunis is a member, face a tough reelection fight in the Israeli Knesset elections in October, Mamdani has become a campaign target.
Last month, Netanyahu incorporated Mamdani’s video address encouraging New Yorkers to protest the Israeli leader into his own political campaign. In a campaign clip, he portrayed Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. Mamdani had initially threatened to arrest Netanyahu in September when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly, but the city’s legal department determined the mayor did not have the authority to do so.
Footage of Mamdani’s call to protest has now expanded to billboards and digital clips to rally Israeli voters on the right.
“They want Netanyahu to lose,” the new Likud campaign reads, placing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem. “Don’t let them win.”
The political logic is straightforward. Portray Mamdani as the symbol of a hostile movement against Israel. Cast Netanyahu’s political survival as part of the larger fight against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
Both Spitalnick and Sheinkopf facetiously called Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu an “in-kind contribution” to the Netanyahu campaign. Spitalnick said the Israeli leader “thrives by being able to point to that as opposed to talking about his own policies and record.”
Jewish leaders and local politicians have called for lowering the temperature. Micah Lasher, the Democratic nominee for the 12th congressional district that includes Central Synagogue, told The New York Times after the attack that the political climate must be taken into consideration at a time like this.
“You can’t divorce the dramatic increase in violence targeted at the Jewish community,” he said, “from the political climate and the tone and tenor of the discourse around Jews and Israel.”
The post The Central Synagogue attack had no clear connection to Mamdani. He’s still being blamed. appeared first on The Forward.
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‘We are in a time of biblical proportions’: What survivors of past shul attacks want Central Synagogue to know
When Audrey Glickman heard about the Friday night attack at Central Synagogue, a prominent congregation on Manhattan’s East Side, she had a visceral, immediate reaction.
“My first thought with anything like this is: they’ve been invaded,” she said. “And I know how that feels.”
Glickman, 69, survived the October 2018 attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue — the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history that killed 11 worshippers. She was leading services when she heard the rat-a-tat of gunfire. She grabbed fellow congregant Joe Charny, then 88, and raced up the stairs into a small room filled with bags of clothes to be donated to those in need. Together, huddled and scared, they hid under their prayer shawls until it was over.
In New York City this weekend, an attacker struck a congregant and a security guard, then was arrested and charged with hate crimes. Police said no one was seriously hurt.
“You never shake that feeling that somebody came into your space and invaded your safety, and you can’t undo it,” Glickman said. “My heart goes out to them.”
The suspect in New York, Larry Montes, 46, was charged with felony hate crimes and told police afterward that the attack was religiously motivated, citing hostility toward Jews and Black people. Montes, who has two prior misdemeanors, was granted bail at his Saturday night arraignment and is due back in court Thursday.
The attack landed amid a citywide surge: New NYPD data shows anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York rose 8.5% during Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first seven months in office and made up 57% of hate crimes citywide, with July alone seeing a 53% jump from a year earlier.
Glickman said she hopes New York officials can eventually give the congregation answers. A federal jury sentenced the Tree of Life gunman, Robert Bowers, to death in August 2023.
“I hope they have the kind of investigators that we had here to figure out what went on,” she said. “When you can close up the case, it feels a lot better.”
But Glickman said every targeted congregation eventually has to answer a harder question: How do you stay open to strangers, newcomers and the unaffiliated, while keeping the people inside safe?
For that answer, she said, members of Tree of Life turned to a friend: the Rev. Eric Manning of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman killed nine Black worshippers during a Bible study in 2015.
Manning and then-Tree of Life’s Rabbi Jeffrey Myers leaned on each other. Myers invited Manning to speak at the funeral of Rose Mallinger, the oldest of the shooting victims, and the two clergy have stayed close in the years since. Manning’s advice to Glickman’s congregation has stayed with her: “You can’t close your doors.”
Nearly eight years later, Glickman still goes to shul most mornings, and still worships on Shabbat with Tree of Life, which continues to meet in borrowed space while its building is rebuilt.
Her message for the congregation in Manhattan: “We’re here, and we know how they feel,” Glickman said. “It’s not a good feeling, and we shouldn’t have to live with this. We are in a time of biblical proportions.”
‘The walls will never be high enough’
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, 50, has an unusually direct connection to Central Synagogue. In January 2022, a gunman held Cytron-Walker and three congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, after Cytron-Walker let him in from the cold and offered him tea.
The gunman, Malik Akram, had done his research, the FBI later found: He’d chosen the synagogue because it was the closest one to the federal prison holding Aafia Siddiqui, sentenced to 86 years for attempted murder and other felonies. Akram demanded her release and ordered Cytron-Walker to get America’s equivalent of a chief rabbi on the phone. He’d seen photos of Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, with President Barack Obama and insisted that Cytron-Walker call her.
Cytron-Walker didn’t know her personally; he tracked down a number and left her a voicemail.
The 11-hour standoff — caught in its entirety on the synagogue’s security cameras — ended with all the hostages escaping unharmed. Authorities shot and killed Akram on the scene.
“While it was sad to hear that there was an attack at Rabbi Buchdahl’s congregation, I was very grateful to hear that the security protocols they have in place minimized any disruption,” Cytron-Walker said.
He was struck by how quickly the congregation returned to prayer. “You always have to weigh, when there’s a disruption, what the community needs in that moment,” he said. “What the community needed was not to let what turns out to be a minor incident ruin the night — to be able to celebrate Shabbat as a community despite the disruption.”
Cytron-Walker, now the spiritual leader of Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said Jewish congregations have to hold two values at once. “We have to live our values of loving the stranger,” he said. “Judaism has always been a part of the world, even when we try to isolate ourselves from it. The walls will never be high enough.”
At the same time, he said, “it is also a Jewish value to protect our own lives, to value our own lives. We should employ that with the rational part of our brain, not the emotional part. We shouldn’t panic, but we should be prepared.”
Just like Glickman, Cytron-Walker said he hopes Central Synagogue receives the kind of support that helped his own congregation heal.
“The Jewish people are not only receiving hate,” he said. “We’re also receiving love and support. It may not always be as much as we want, and when we do receive it, let’s offer gratitude and allow that to help with our healing.”
The post ‘We are in a time of biblical proportions’: What survivors of past shul attacks want Central Synagogue to know appeared first on The Forward.
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On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked
I don’t often go to synagogue. Outside of the High Holidays, it is not somewhere I would ordinarily find myself on a Friday night.
In the last few years, I have made a point of spending Shabbat with my grandmother. We light candles, eat together and let the week recede for a few hours. I don’t see it as an obligation so much as the comfort of doing something that has been done before, by people I love, in a rhythm that existed long before I did.
And yet, synagogues have a strange way of finding me when I need them.
Last summer, while travelling through Europe to visit two of my closest friends, I found myself in London, exhausted from weeks of constant movement. I happened to walk past a synagogue and realized that Shabbat was the following day. I reached out and asked if I could join their services. I remember thinking that perhaps this was exactly what I needed: a few hours to sit still, focus, and breathe.
And I was right.
There is something uniquely grounding about entering a synagogue in an unfamiliar place and discovering that the ritual is familiar. You may be thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met, but you know when to stand. You recognize the melodies. You open the same prayers. You know that somewhere else in the world, other Jews are doing some version of the same thing.
So when, only a few days after moving to New York, I was connected with a member of Central Synagogue through a potential landlord and they invited me to join them for Shabbat services, I thought: Why not?
I had just arrived in a city where I was beginning a new job at the Forward, a new life, one that, for the first time, was entirely mine to shape. That is a daunting task. What better way to spend my first Friday night than doing something that has always made the unknown feel a little more manageable.
Moments after services began, I was sitting in the sanctuary, allowing myself to take in the week that had just passed — my first week in New York — when a man entered and began moving violently through the congregation.
He knocked down the Shabbat candles that had just been lit. He moved through the rows of congregants. I watched him strike another person.
People around me ran toward the sides of the sanctuary. My own body went into the same instinctive state of shock and survival: Where is the danger? Where can I go? What do I need to watch for?
The security response was swift. The intruder was stopped, we re-lit the candles, and services continued.
Those around me who knew I was new to the synagogue immediately went into protection mode. They checked on me, expressing disbelief that something like this could have happened there, especially given the level of security they pride themselves on maintaining. They told me that in the nearly three years since October 7, nothing like this had happened.
The clergy, too, seemed to understand what the moment required. They gave us strength and courage, using the same voices that had moments earlier been leading us in song and prayer to restore some sense of calm. Throughout the service and again afterward in their online response, they returned to the same idea: it was our duty to keep joy alive.
Joy, one of the rabbis said, is itself an act of resistance.
I understood the sentiment. But my body hadn’t quite caught up.
Shabbat is one of the rare times when I allow myself to become completely uninhibited. I sing. I look up from the prayer book. I watch the rabbis and the people around me. I let myself become absorbed in something larger than whatever has been occupying my mind that week. For a few hours, I am not thinking about work, or apartment hunting, or navigating a new city. I am simply there.
That is also why the disruption was so jarring. I had come to Shabbat to let my guard down, and suddenly I found myself unable to do so.
I kept my eyes toward the front of the room, watching for movement. When it came time to turn around during Lecha Dodi, I felt a jolt of anxiety at the thought of putting my back toward the congregation. I could no longer surrender myself completely to the moment and what it required of me. I knew, rationally, that the threat had passed. But my body had learned something different: that even here, even now, even in this room, I might need to be ready.
For a moment, I considered leaving. But the people around me seemed to embody a quiet confidence that everything was going to be okay. They had chosen to stay, and I followed their lead. There is a certain strength in knowing that you are not standing alone.
I had come to Central Synagogue because I wanted to feel at home in my new city. Instead, on my first Shabbat in New York, I was reminded how quickly the simple act of practicing Judaism can become an exercise in vigilance. And yet, looking around the room that evening, I also understood that vigilance does not have to mean retreat.
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