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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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Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish
According to the 11th-century set of Irish texts known as Lebor Gabála Érenn, or The Book of the Invasions of Ireland, there once lived a man called Fénius Farsaid — “Irishman the Pharisee.”
If the weirdness of this name is not hitting home for you, it’s a bit like if I told you my name was “Jewess the Druid.” “Fénius,” a predecessor of the modern word “Fenian,” connotes an Irish person. “Farsaid” is the medieval Irish word for “Pharisee.” Though the term is now mostly reserved for insulting hypocrites in an obscure way, in biblical times it referred to a strict Jewish sect active in ancient Judea.
How did this early example of Irish-Jewish crossover earn his name? Lebor Gabála Érenn reports that he was one of the 72 chieftains who built the Tower of Babel. When it crumbled and God cursed humankind with multilingualism, he set up camp in the Tower’s remains and ordered his scholars to go out and study the babble of the world’s newborn languages. On his own, he explored Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets (hence the “Farsaid”). As a capstone project, Fénius blended together the best elements of all the world’s languages to make the perfect tongue: Irish (hence the “Fénius”).
Fast forward almost one thousand years after Lebor Gabála Érenn was written, and you get me, Fénius Farsaid in reverse: he was an Irishman interested in the Jews; I am a Jewish woman fascinated by the Irish. There are many ways to measure a life, but mine might as well be thought of as a 22-year-long montage of fanatical Irish-themed memories: as a child, reading Maeve Binchy’s Chestnut Street and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes; as a tween, writing a racy work of historical fiction called Ballyhill inspired by the Irish Rebellion of 1798; as a teen, shaking my computer in rage when 23 & Me reported I was 0% Irish; as a young woman, discovering Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Maggie O’Farrell; and as whoever I am now, writing this confessional essay.
I do not know when or how this obsession took root, though some evidence suggests that I have a genetic predisposition towards loving the Irish. The story goes that my great-great grandfather Barnett Shapiro did not know his birthday. But on his way from Poland to America, he passed through London, where he mixed with Irish immigrants in the East End. He found them so delightful that when he arrived at Ellis Island and was asked his birthday, he, a Jewish man whose first language was Yiddish, proudly declared he was born on St. Paddy’s Day, 1888.
This recessive shamrock gene skipped a generation and reappeared in my Grandpa Barry, or “Gramps.” When I was 12 or so, he presented me with a copy of Snow in August, a novel by the Irish-American journalist and novelist Pete Hamill, a man as tender as he was hard-boiled. According to the book’s back cover, I could expect a tale of an unlikely, Brooklyn-bred friendship between a young Irish-American lad named Michael Devlin and an Orthodox rabbi named Judah Hirsch. I admit I was skeptical. Gramps had already busted his credibility several times by hounding me to read his personal favorites like Young Visitor to Mars, Hardy Boys and back-issues of Flash Gordon. But against my better judgment, I read the book. And then I read it again.
It’s hard to say why this book etched itself into me so deeply. Maybe as a fifth-generation Brooklyn Shapiro, I was hard-wired to like it. But what I remember best about the book is not the plot or any particular line, but how I felt while reading it. Snow in August made me feel that magical realism was not exclusive to jungle climates like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, or Italo Calvino’s invisible cities. There were labyrinths of wonder built right under Brooklyn, like a subway system for the spirit. Pete Hamill taught me how to hear the rumble. In his Brooklyn, it was possible for a golem to rise up against your tormentors, for the dead to return for a final dance, for snow to fall in the middle of August.
Maybe you’ll be relieved to hear that in the 10 intervening years since I first read this book, I’ve tempered my admiration of the Celts by finding some Irish literature that enrages me. In my freshman year of college, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and wanted to clobber him with it. At the recommendation of my playful Bronxonian druid of an English teacher, Ted Cleary, I read Flann O’Brien’s experimental novel At Swim-Two-Birds and was wracked by alternating warp-spasms of amusement and fury. (As Oscar Wilde, another great Irishman-of-letters, would say, “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”)
But most recent and vivid among my Irish memories is the pilgrimage I made to peaty Erin this past March. I had been in Oxford for a term abroad, and when the “vac” (British for “vacation”) struck, my friends Cindy, Gemma and I set out for the stretch of western Irish coastline known as the “Wild Atlantic Way.” We walked the misty Cliffs of Moher, where we were attacked by angry winds. We took refuge in pubs and soaked up pints of Guinness, plates of beef stew and hours of foot-tapping fiddling sessions that gave enthusiastic tourists and taciturn locals a reason to engage with each other. We rode a see-sawing ferry to the Aran Islands and back, and learned that time works differently when you’re on the brink of barfing.
When I think of that week in Ireland, I remember the horizon at sundown. Behind the dark green hills, the clouds looked like silhouettes of other hills somewhere far away. The wind plunged down my collar and shimmied up my pant legs. I could see no end to the ocean, only the thin line where sky and water met in some unreachable place. I feared the vastness of the world, and loved it at the same time.
In a way, that wild Atlantic scene was repeating what many Irish writers had been trying to tell me for years: Life is immense, often surprising, and occasionally tragic. Still, why not hope? The words of Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Gravel Walks” provide a lodestar for living: “Walk on air against your better judgment.”
Poetic spirits in the Jewish world have come to uncannily similar conclusions. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once described himself as “an optimist against my better judgment,” a parallel with Heaney that might have delighted Fénius Farsaid. Even a central premise of Judaism — that the messianic age when “nation will not lift up sword against nation” will arrive someday — would be impossible without a commitment to walking on air against your better judgment until that day comes.
Nobody is born knowing how to walk, let alone knowing how to walk on air. But in his poem “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney describes how to take those first steps —
“So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.”
Believe that snow could come next August.
The post Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish appeared first on The Forward.
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When does Shabbat end? This astrophysicist thinks we’ve been getting it wrong
Aster Taylor observes Shabbat on their own time — literally.
For the past year, Taylor, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the University of Michigan, has been keeping Shabbat according to a schedule they devised using astronomical data.
So this Saturday, when Chabad of Ann Arbor says Shabbat will end at 9:09 p.m., Taylor will observe for nearly 11 more minutes. Where does Taylor, 25, get the chutzpah to challenge longstanding Jewish tradition?
“We live in the modern world. We have computers, we have catalogs of all the stars, and especially in the 80s, the construction of more significant telescopes,” Taylor told the Forward. “We have a pretty good understanding of how the sky affects our vision. So we can now just calculate this, right?”
They might have a point. In true “two-Jews-three-opinions” fashion, there’s actually no universally accepted time that Shabbat ends. But most people can agree on this: Shabbat ends at nightfall, defined by the Talmud as when three medium-sized stars in close proximity to one another are visible to the naked eye.
But what defines a medium-sized star and how close is close enough? Whose eyesight should be trusted? Those answers are not clear, leaving it up to rabbis to impart practical guidance.
Since without astronomical expertise, determining which stars make the grade is pretty difficult for the “average Joseph,” rabbis rely on proxy criteria. Today, many Orthodox communities use a standard credited to the venerable Rabbi Yechiel Michel Tucazinsky, who in 1929 determined three stars are visible when the sun sets 8.5 degrees below the horizon. Others follow the teachings of the 12th-century Rabbeinu Tam, who places nightfall 72 minutes after sunset.
But those approximations didn’t satisfy Taylor, an aspiring professor currently writing their dissertation about giant planet formation. Taylor craved a more scientific approach.
So for a few nights over several months, Taylor went to a local park, sat at a picnic table and every two minutes measured the sky’s brightness with a light meter.
Taylor settled on a brightness standard for a medium star — between magnitude 2 and 3 — and determined that three stars of that brightness need to be within 10 degrees of one another, close enough that an observer could see all three stars without moving their eyes.
Taylor then built a computer model to determine when three stars that meet those conditions become visible, taking into account various atmospheric conditions. That model became a web app that calculates Shabbat times for any given location and elevation.
The results were striking. Based on Taylor’s calculations, Shabbat should often end around 10 minutes later than the time given by the conventional approximation — no small discrepancy for those who faithfully observe the Sabbath.
Taylor’s computations are intriguing Jewish scholars. Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism has agreed to publish Taylor’s research paper on the topic this winter.
The Forward also shared Taylor’s findings with two rabbis: Yaakov Hoffman of the modern Orthodox Bridge Shul in Washington Heights, who wrote a scholarly article about Shabbat’s end, and Jack Shlachter — who in addition to being a retired rabbi in Los Alamos, New Mexico, just so happens to have a Ph.D in physics.
Both were impressed. “There’s always room for science to enhance these practices,” Shlachter said. “This author is doing things in a very admirable fashion — trying to be fully aware of tradition, but also incorporating more modern, sophisticated techniques.”
Hoffman said it was “very impressive” that Taylor “was trying to research these things from a contemporary astronomical perspective, and to really put so much effort and passion into accurate determination of the time.”
If Taylor “wants to add a few minutes to Shabbat,” he added, “that doesn’t bother me.”
What if Shabbat never ends?
As any city dweller knows, the stars don’t exactly come out in force at night.
Once Taylor factored light pollution into their calculations, it produced a somewhat uncomfortable result. In New York City, Taylor said, light pollution is so intense that three medium stars in close proximity will never be visible this year. In Jerusalem, only a few months of the year offer enough clear visibility to see Taylor’s criteria.
“The conditions that end Shabbat are never met,” Taylor said, “which is obviously a problem.”
Taken literally, that would mean endless Shabbat. In his paper, Taylor wrote that such a scenario would “require most observant Jews to quit their jobs, refrain from cooking, and spend their time studying Torah.” That would be both “unrealistic” and “lessen the sanctity” of the Sabbath, Taylor wrote.
Fortunately, there is a rabbinic workaround that dates back long before the age of light pollution.
The 16th-century Rabbi Yosef Karo wrote that on a cloudy day, one should wait to end Shabbat until “the doubt leaves his heart.” In other words, wait long enough after sunset to be certain that the stars theoretically would have been visible on a clear night.
Taylor agrees that the same principle for clouds can be applied to light pollution. But they argue that it’s still worth knowing just how much the modern night sky has changed.
Light pollution isn’t the only factor messing with the Jewish clock. President Trump is urging the Senate to pass a bill that would make daylight savings time permanent — a measure which many Orthodox Jews oppose because a later winter sunrise would mean a later morning prayer service, making many Orthodox Jews late for work.
But it also would also push Shabbat an hour later, which could mean a less frantic rush to get home before sunset on wintertime Friday afternoons.
Those potential changes raise a broader question. As modern life becomes increasingly divorced from the natural rhythms of the Earth, to what extent should Jewish practice evolve?
Taylor, who attends a Conservative synagogue, said they’re in favor of maintaining Jewish tradition when possible — but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be improved.
“We should be using a calculation like this in communities in the future,” Taylor said. “It’s a strict upgrade to the way we’ve been doing things in the past, and so I’m hopeful that we’ll start using this more widely.”
Paradoxically, in Taylor’s case, they believe modern technology enabled them to get closer to the literal meaning of the traditional text. It was the ancient rabbis, lacking that science, who had to settle for the next best thing.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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