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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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Greta Thunberg Released From Custody After Arrest at UK Anti-Israel Protest
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg speaks to a police officer during a pro-Palestinian protest as she holds a sign that says she supports prisoners linked to Palestine Action, an organization which the British government has proscribed as a terrorist group, in London, Britain, Dec. 23, 2025. Photo: Prisoners for Palestine/Handout via REUTERS
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was released from custody after being arrested on Tuesday in London at an anti-Israel protest, police said.
UK-based campaign group Prisoners for Palestine said Thunberg was earlier arrested under the Terrorism Act for holding a sign that said “I support the Palestine Action prisoners. I oppose genocide.” The British government has proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist group.
City of London Police said Thunberg had been bailed until March.
Police said earlier two other people had been arrested for throwing red paint at a building. A spokesperson said 22-year-old woman later attended the scene and was arrested for displaying a placard in support of a proscribed organization.
Prisoners for Palestine, which supports some detained activists who have gone on hunger strike, said the building had been targeted because it was used by an insurance firm which they said provided services to the British arm of Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems.
The insurance company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thunberg, 22, became prominent after staging weekly climate protests in front of the Swedish parliament in 2018.
Last year, she was cleared of a public order offense in Britain as a judge ruled police had no power to arrest her and others at a protest in London the year before.
She was detained along with 478 people and expelled by Israel in October after joining an activist convoy of vessels, the Global Sumud Flotilla, that attempted to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Israel has consistently denied genocide allegations, noting it has targeted Hamas terrorists with its military campaign and taken measures to try and avoid civilian casualties.
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When Famine Vanished: How the Media Repeated a Claim, and Never Reckoned With Its Collapse
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
CNN delivered the update quietly and inaccurately, with much less gravity than it once used to amplify the warning.
“Gaza no longer in famine,” read a CNN post, citing a UN-backed hunger monitor.
Reuters and the Associated Press followed with similar headlines.
What is striking is not that the unreliable IPC, which has been criticized in the past for faulty methodology, revised its assessment.
What’s really upsetting is that much of the press treated the reversal as a weather update, not as a reckoning.
Only months earlier, these same institutions helped cement a very different narrative.
In late July 2025, UN agencies issued a high-profile warning that key indicators in Gaza exceeded famine thresholds, citing IPC data and describing hundreds of thousands facing famine-like conditions. The IPC alert itself stated that famine thresholds had been reached for food consumption in most of Gaza and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
In August 2025, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) announced that famine was confirmed for the first time in Gaza, again anchored to IPC assessments.
Those claims ricocheted through global media coverage with little visible skepticism about methodology, access constraints, or incentives baked into a wartime information environment.
The result was a widely accepted narrative that Israel was causing famine, a narrative that shaped diplomatic pressure and public outrage long before the data could be stress tested.
Now the IPC’s latest assessment says no area has ever been in famine, attributing improvements to increased humanitarian and commercial food deliveries after the ceasefire, while warning that the situation remains fragile and could deteriorate again if access is disrupted or fighting resumes.
IPC’s latest fraudulent Gaza report implies 1,700+ starvation deaths this December 2025—even TODAY we should see 57 such deaths! But even Hamas reports only 475 total starvation deaths for the ENTIRE WAR. The math exposes how detached from reality all these models are. 1/ pic.twitter.com/wOvIohWTt2
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) December 19, 2025
The AP at least gestured to the whiplash, noting that months earlier, the IPC said famine was occurring in Gaza City and was likely to spread without a ceasefire and an end to restrictions.
Reuters likewise framed the change as a shift from earlier IPC findings, while stressing continued emergency-level needs. But what was largely missing was the one ingredient journalism owes the public when an apocalyptic claim collapses or is materially revised: responsibility.
No media outlet interrogated the underlying assumptions when famine warnings were treated as settled fact. None explained what changed in the inputs and thresholds. None revisited the earlier certainty with the same prominence as the original alarm.
This matters because narratives do not stay on paper.
In the United States, the ADL has reported that anger at Israel during the war has been a driving force behind antisemitism, underscoring how the information ecosystem around Gaza can translate into real-world hostility toward Jews. When famine claims are amplified uncritically, they do not just inform. They inflame.
The new UN-backed update does not erase Gaza’s suffering, and it does not vindicate anyone’s politics. It does, however, expose a core media failure: outsourcing verification to a single authoritative label, and then moving on when the label changes.
If famine was once a front-page certainty, the correction cannot be a footnote.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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US Heritage Foundation Think Tank Staff Quit Amid Antisemitism Controversy
The Heritage Foundation’s logo is displayed during the 2025 Joseph Story Distinguished Lecture in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
Over a dozen employees have left jobs at the Heritage Foundation or were fired in recent days, according to the influential right-wing US think tank, as it grapples with allegations from former supporters that it has aligned itself with those accused of antisemitism.
In a statement about the resignations and firings on Monday, Heritage Foundation chief advancement officer Andy Olivastro said a handful of staff had chosen “disruption” and “disloyalty.”
He said the think tank “has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are non-negotiable.”
The foundation has been caught in a firestorm of accusations and counter-accusations that began when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, a self-described Christian nationalist, in October. The interview focused on their mutual opposition to US support of Israel, a view at odds with that of many conservatives.
Some supporters of the foundation have said it should distance itself from Carlson, characterizing the journalist’s views as antisemitic. But Kevin Roberts, the foundation president, has continued to personally back Carlson, who he says is a friend. Carlson strongly rejects accusations of antisemitism.
One of those who resigned this week was Josh Blackman, a law professor who contributed to Project 2025, a right-wing policy initiative overseen by the Heritage Foundation. In a letter posted online, he blamed Roberts for making Heritage‘s brand “toxic.”
“You aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right,” said Blackman, who edited the group’s Guide to the Constitution publication.
In an Oct. 30 video defending Carlson, Roberts said a “venomous coalition” was attacking the prominent podcaster over his interview with Fuentes. Roberts said conservatives should feel no obligation to support any foreign government no matter how great the pressure from “the globalist class.”
He later apologized for his use of the term “venomous coalition,” which he said Jewish colleagues understood to be an antisemitic trope.
Speaking at a November staff townhall meeting, Roberts said his intention was not to endorse Fuentes, who he called “an evil person,” but to “convert” some of his audience of several million people.
Advancing American Freedom said on Monday the three former leaders of Heritage‘s legal, economic, and data teams had joined the conservative advocacy group, along with 10 of their staff. The group led by former Vice President Mike Pence is critical of US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
Three Heritage Foundation board trustees have also resigned since November.
Chief US Circuit Judge William Pryor, a conservative jurist who contributed to Heritage‘s 800-page Guide to the Constitution, said in an interview he did not attend a promotional event for the book due to Roberts’ “totally inappropriate” language in the Oct. 30 video.
For some remaining Heritage employees, recent staff departures were driven by Republican Party jockeying rather than antisemitism or Israel.
“These resignations have a lot more to do with 2028 than it does with anything else,” Heritage fellow Robby Starbuck posted online. “One group wants a return to the Pence/Ryan GOP and the rest want to MAGA with @KevinRobertsTX.”