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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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‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
Perhaps you, like me, have had a very specific earworm for the last week. It’s not a song, though there is a sing-song-y element to it. It’s a chant: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior — Knicks in four!”
If you hadn’t heard, the New York Knickerbockers are in the finals for the first time since 1999, on a 13-game streak and looking good to win a championship NBA title they haven’t gotten since 1973. The city is going nuts. I am not a big sports fan, but even I have been caught up in the fever, watching the first two games of the best-of-seven finals pitting the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs at sports bars where fire codes are being flagrantly broken and attendees have brought drums to assist in leading chants.
The newest chant was born from the mouth of a rabid fan featured in a surreal supercut of fan reactions that went viral. (The video also features a dancing robot wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Kalshi logo, the online predictions market that lets users bet on the NBA, sure, but also on what day the U.S. will bomb Iran.)
It pretty much instantly caught fire; my city councilman Chi Ossé posted a video with the slogan, while watching the second game’s nail-biter of a win. Shekar Krishnan, a city councilman from Queens, walked onto the main stage at Gov Ball to lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the chant.
Beyond the rhyme scheme — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit difficult to nail — what made this chant catch on so fast is its ability to capture a certain ineffable quality of New Yorkiness. There’s diversity, there’s humor — I’m sorry but it is very funny to name two of the major Abrahamic religions with pride and then ignore the one practiced by the majority of Americans in favor of a fashion designer — and there’s a sense of unity as the city rallies behind its long-losing sports team.
And, at a time of rising antisemitism and just generally bad PR for the Jews, I am heartened to see the city embrace its Jewishness.
Bagels have long been a metonym for the city, and a source of great pride and snobbery for its residents, a food not incidentally rooted in Jewish history. Jews run some of the city’s most beloved neighborhood institutions. They have represented New York on the page and the screen — think Nora Ephron, Fran Drescher, Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen (for better or for worse). Jews have imparted a Jewish humor, sensibility and even accent that have so shaped the city that they are now basically synonymous. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve met who are not Jewish, but feel as though they are by virtue of growing up in the city.
This hasn’t always been a positive thing. Sometimes equating New York with Jewishness has been used as a sort of racist dogwhistle; Mitch McConnell, for example, asked voters whether they really wanted “somebody from New York” to “set the agenda” as a way of signalling that Chuck Schumer is too Jewish, too liberal, too out of touch with real Americans — in short, the same antisemitic “rootless cosmopolitan” stereotype that has long motivated hatred against Jews.
Of course, the chant isn’t magical, and many of the now-familiar political dynamics came into play. Some communities of Jews are at odds with the way the city is shifting, particularly with the election of Zohran Mamdani, and some posts of the chant have comments from Jews annoyed at being lumped into the same cultural moment as a mayor they see as their enemy. (“Hi, we’re actually humans, not baked goods,” wrote one user. “We’re currently experiencing the highest rate of hate crime in the city. This isn’t cute.”) And, on the flip side of the political spectrum, other commenters accused those spreading the chant of doing “full on genocide rehab,” seemingly for merely mentioning Jews in a positive context.
But however online commentators want to spin the chant, the reality on the street is pure hype. As the rapper Fat Joe put it when interviewed at Madison Square Garden after the game: “I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.” (Video proof bears this out.) Somehow, even the local Hare Krishna gathering got in on the Knicks mania.
That’s the true beauty of the city’s diversity — everyone lives together regardless of their political disagreements. And they can still unite in a common cause: the Knicks.
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West Point graduated more Jewish cadets this year than ever before, official says
The very first class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802 consisted of two graduates, one of whom was a Jew named Simon Levy who served briefly in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before passing away at the age of 33. Levy was accepted into the academy based on his skill in mathematics and the strength of his ”good conduct” at the Battle of Maumee Rapids, one of the last skirmishes in the Indian War in Ohio in 1794.
This year on May 23, according to Col. Benjamin Wallen, a lay Jewish leader involved in the West Point Hillel chapter and the academy’s Jewish choir, 30 Jewish cadets graduated from the academy. Though West Point’s Public Affairs Office said it couldn’t confirm the number of Jewish cadets because the military academy “does not track or maintain official data on cadets’ religious affiliations, Col. Wallen said the Class of 2026 had the most Jews in West Point’s 224-year history.
Asked what accounted for the upsurge in Jews at West Point, Wallen said the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the rise in antisemitism are likely factors.
“This is one place that none of that has reared its ugly head,” Wallen said of the ubiquitous campus demonstrations against Israel. “Not a hint of it. Because that’s just not who we are. There’s no place for hate of any kind at West Point.”
Wallen, a Jewish officer with 30 years in the Army, is a civil and environmental engineering professor at West Point and also serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development. He called West Point “a wonderful place to be Jewish and to serve your country.”
Two of the grads in the Class of ’26 are twin sisters from Millburn, NJ. Catherine Brodsky is headed to Duke Medical School to become an Army surgeon. Her sister Claudia is bound for Anchorage, Alaska, where she’ll serve as a logistics officer.
“I had the most amazing time at West Point,” Brodsky told me over the phone from Budapest, where she and her sister are visiting. “I’m very grateful for it. I think it was really instrumental in challenging me and making me grow as a person and as a leader.”
The newly minted second lieutenant said the Jewish cadets had a deep sense of community.
“We had a lot of events that kept us close-knit, like choir and various trips,” she said. “Celebrating the holidays together was really important.”
Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff, a professor of Judaic Studies at Stern College for Women in Manhattan who conducts extra-curricular classes at West Point, hosted the Jewish cadets at his home in nearby Monsey during Jewish holidays and Shabbat.
“They really are the most remarkable bunch of men and women,” Hajioff said. “From my talking to the students, I’d say there’s definitely been a shift of young men and women wanting to protect this country.”
Rabbi Hajioff posted photos on Instagram of the baccalaureate service for Jewish cadets at which the Jewish choir performed. One photo showed him standing next to Ron Chajmovic of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in his dress whites.
Lt. Chajmovic, who attended Georgia Military College before arriving at West Point, is headed to helicopter flight school, Hajioff said. His older brother Yoni is in the Israel Defense Forces and is currently stationed in Gaza according to their grandfather, Paul Chajmovic. The elder Chajmovic, who is about to turn 80, served in the Israeli air force during the Six-Day War.
“I miss it, believe it or not,” he told me. “I would volunteer again but I’m too old.”
Chajmovic’s other grandfather came from Israel to West Point for the graduation ceremony.
West Point’s Class of ‘27 and Class of ‘28 both have 27 Jewish cadets, according to Col. Wallen, though he said that Jewish representation is down in the Class of ’29, which he said has 17 or 18 Jews.
The Class of ‘30 will include an 18-year-old graduate of a Jewish day school in Nevada. Yonah Mowery arrives at West Point on June 29 to start six weeks of basic training. Mowery is a graduate of the Adelson School in Las Vegas, which was started by the late Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish casino billionaire and Netanyahu supporter. Mowery ran cross country, played basketball and swam on his school team. He took 10 advanced placement classes and participated in Moot Beit Din, a student competition based on rabbinical court.
“I know that by being in the American military, I will be defending not just Jews in Israel but Jews around the world because the United States is a major world power,” Mowery told me in a telephone interview.
The Mowery family has a long history of military service. His paternal grandfather served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. His grandfather’s uncle, Mowery said, was among the American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau. And there were 13 Mowery men who fought for the Union and perished at Gettysburg.
“The more Jews we have in the American military, the less alone we all feel,” Mowery said. “It’s an honor to be in the United States military as a Jewish kid, especially since this country is founded on Jewish and Christian values.”
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The visionary Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust but not its aftermath
Paul Celan: A Life
By Anna Arno
Translated by Soren Gauger
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $35
During a 1969 poetry reading in Israel, Paul Celan’s audience requested “Deathfugue,” his most famous poem. With its hypnotic images of death as “a master from Deutschland,” prisoners drinking the “black milk of dawn” and smoke rising to “a grave in the clouds,” it remains one of the most powerful artifacts of the Holocaust.
But like a rock star weary of endlessly repeating his greatest hits, Celan declined. Instead, he offered other poems, scorned by some commentators as “hermetic, esoteric, divorced from reality.”
So we learn from Anna Arno’s intelligent, intricate biography, Paul Celan: A Life, ably translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger. Interweaving literary criticism with Celan’s life story, Arno quotes liberally from Pierre Joris’ English translations. Even so, she can’t quite do the work justice. In translation and wrenched from their poetic context, Celan’s innovative verses, credited with a radical remaking of the German language, come across as cryptic and impenetrable.
Arno covers Celan’s schooling, wartime experiences, work history, travels, friendships, psychiatric ordeals and overlapping romantic interests, at times departing from strict chronology. Though defensible, the narrative strategy renders the book somewhat convoluted.
One thread is Celan’s intermittent, decadeslong involvement with the accomplished Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. That relationship, more passionate and enduring for Bachmann, preceded his mostly happy marriage to the French artist Gisèle Lestrange and continued during it. In an odd twist, Bachmann and Lestrange, bonded by both their love for Celan and their anxiety about his well-being, developed “a kind of impossible sisterly friendship.”
Despite Celan’s devotion to his wife, “other women,” Arno writes, “were always drifting through his life.” A chapter toward the end of the biography details some of Celan’s most important romantic relationships. Other chapters focus on his inventiveness as a translator and his worsening mental illness.
Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania (officially Cernăuți, and now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on the fringes of the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The French-sounding Celan is a pen name, an anagram of Ancel, a Romanian version of Antschel.
Celan’s parents were German-speaking Jews, and German was Celan’s native language. But he was a polyglot, a talent that shaped his poetry and enabled his career as a translator. Along with Romanian, in which he wrote some early poems, and French, the language of his postwar life in Paris, he learned Russian (under Soviet occupation) and English. He had at least “a passive knowledge of Yiddish,” picked up enough Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah and studied Italian, Latin and Greek. “His intellectual ease gave him a sense of superiority,” Arno writes.
World War II interrupted Celan’s medical studies in France, and back home he enrolled in Romance language courses. The Soviet occupation was brutal but, for Jews, the Romanian fascist regime that succeeded it was worse. Celan’s parents were deported and died in a Nazi labor camp. Celan, separated from them, survived forced labor, but remained “wracked with grief” over his parents’ fate. He would describe “Deathfugue,” written in 1945, as his mother’s epitaph and grave. The poem may have influenced Theodor Adorno, who famously described poetry after Auschwitz as “barbaric,” to modify his views.
After leaving a ruined Czernowitz for Bucharest, where Celan translated, wrote poetry, flirted with Surrealism and “bounced from one relationship to the next,” he traveled to Vienna. “Young, dashing, full of charm,” he eventually settled in Paris and became a naturalized French citizen. But he chose German as his poetic language, despite the emotional dissonance that entailed.
Over the years, he traveled to Germany to read his work and accept prizes. In the process, he developed relationships with leading postwar German writers, including Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. But the 1950s were a tricky time. “He could have crossed paths with a murderer at every step,” Arno writes.
Celan recoiled viscerally at what he saw as persistent antisemitic currents in German culture, which hadn’t yet reckoned with the magnitude of Nazi crimes. He interpreted bad reviews as instances of antisemitism, and Arno suggests that he wasn’t always wrong.
Even more traumatic were accusations of plagiarism leveled against him by Claire Goll, the widow of Yvan Goll, whose poetry he had translated. Arno describes the charges as both malicious and baseless, and “probably an act of revenge for her spurned advances.”
They nevertheless affected Celan’s reputation and threatened his health. “Claire Goll’s smear campaign was to become the main cause of the poet’s mental breakdown,” Arno asserts. It’s a strong statement. Certainly, he had endured other losses: the murder of his parents, the death of his day-old infant son, François, after a botched delivery.
On the cusp of middle age, Arno reports, Celan experienced bursts of paranoia. “He could not always separate justified precautions from obsessive mistrust, vigilance from a fit of persecution mania,” she writes. “His deeply buried despair, moral severity, and tempestuous personality all caused sudden and violent fits.”
In 1962, he had what Arno calls “his first bout of psychosis,” which included hallucinations and violent episodes. He was hospitalized and medicated and underwent psychotherapy. Insulin injections, a since-discredited treatment, damaged his motor skills. Even during his hospitalizations, he continued to write poetry. (His productivity in the throes of mental health crises calls to mind Sylvia Plath.)
Arno, noting that Celan’s medical records remain sealed and his journals unavailable, doesn’t offer a diagnosis. The hallucinations and paranoia suggest schizophrenia, but Arno also mentions mania and depression, along with numerous suicide attempts. He tried his best to stay connected to his only child, Eric. But his instability cost him many friendships and ultimately his marriage.
In 1970, the 49-year-old poet drowned himself in the Seine, joining a sad company of writers who survived the Holocaust but not its emotional aftermath. What exactly triggered Celan’s suicide is impossible to know. Arno says only: “He was no longer capable of supporting the weight of the past as it flushed to the surface.”
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