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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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Germany’s antisemitism czar says slogans like ‘From the river to the sea’ should be illegal
(JTA) — Germany’s antisemitism czar has urged a law to ban pro-Palestinian slogans such as “From the river to the sea,” renewing a fraught debate over the country’s historic allegiance to Israel and freedom of speech.
Felix Klein’s initiative would ban chants that could be interpreted as calling for Israel’s destruction. His proposal has the support of German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and is now being reviewed by the Justice Ministry, he told Haaretz on Wednesday.
“Before Oct. 7, you could have said that ‘From the river to the sea’ doesn’t necessarily mean kicking Israelis off the land, and I could accept that,” said Klein. “But since then, Israel has really been facing existential threats, and unfortunately, it has become necessary here to limit freedom of speech in this regard.”
Klein, the first holder of an office titled “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism” since 2018, added that he believed the law must be passed even if it is challenged in court for violating free speech.
Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and the subsequent and devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza tore at the seams of Germany’s national doctrines. The war triggered a sharp rise in antisemitic and Isalmophobic incidents across the country. It also exposed charged questions about when Germany prioritizes its responsibility toward the Jewish state, which became central to German national identity after the Holocaust, and when it upholds democratic principles.
The legal boundaries of pro-Palestinian speech are already far from clear-cut. Currently, courts decide whether a person chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in support of peacefully liberating Palestinians or in endorsement of terrorism. In August 2024, the German-Iranian activist Ava Moayeri was convicted of condoning a crime for leading the chant at a Berlin rally on Oct. 11, 2023.
Shortly after the Hamas attacks, local authorities across Germany imposed sweeping bans on pro-Palestinian protests. Berlin officials authorized schools to ban the keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian solidarity, along with slogans such as “Free Palestine.”
Jewish and Israeli activists were caught up in the crackdown. In October 2023, a woman was arrested after holding a poster that said, “As a Jew and Israeli: Stop the genocide in Gaza.” And police prohibited a demonstration by a group calling themselves “Jewish Berliners against Violence in the Middle East,” citing the risk of unrest and “inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations.”
Earlier this year, German immigration authorities ordered the deportation of three European nationals and one U.S. citizen over their alleged activity at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Three of the orders cited Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or “reason of state,” a doctrine enshrining Germany’s defense of Israel as justification for its own existence after the Holocaust.
But that tenet is not used in legal settings, according to Alexander Gorski, who represents the demonstrators threatened with deportation. “Staatsräson is not a legal concept,” Gorski told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in April. “It’s completely irrelevant. It’s not in the German Basic Law, it’s not in the constitution.”
Jewish leaders such as Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, have argued that anger toward Israel created a “pretext” for antisemitism. “It is sufficient cause in itself to fuel the hatred,” Knobloch said to Deutsche Welle in September.
In recent months, two German establishments made the news for refusing entry to Jews and Israelis. A shop in Flensburg, which posted a sign saying “Jews are banned here,” is vulnerable to German anti-discrimination law. Not so for the restaurant in Fürth whose sign read, “We no longer accept Israelis in our establishment,” according to anti-discrimination commissioner Ferda Ataman, who said the law does not apply to discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Klein said he has also initiated legislation to expand that law to protect Israelis and other nationalities.
He has a longstanding relationship with Jewish communities in Germany, starting with his Foreign Office appointment as the special liaison to global Jewish organizations. In that role, he helped create a “working definition” of antisemitism for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016. That definition has sparked contentious debate, as critics argue it conflates some criticisms of Israel with antisemitism.
Klein believes that anti-Zionism does largely fall in the same bucket as antisemitism. “I think in most cases it is — it’s just a disguised form of antisemitism,” he told Haaretz. “When people say they’re anti-Israel, what they really mean is Jews.”
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There’s something missing from John Fetterman’s memoir: Israel
There may be no senator who has committed more fervently to supporting Israel, at a greater personal cost, than Sen. John Fetterman.
In the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the Pennsylvania Democrat began taping hostage posters to the wall outside his office and wearing a symbolic dogtag necklace. He embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a pariah to many Democrats. As the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, he posted constantly on social media to defend the war.
The position has cost him followers, friends, staff and perhaps in the future his seat. But it has also made him a hero in parts of the Jewish community. He received awards from Yeshiva University and the Zionist Organization of America and he was brought onstage as a panelist at the national Jewish Federations of North America convention.
Given the centrality of Israel to his focus in office — he was sworn in only 9 months before Oct. 7 — and how often he posts about it on social media, one might anticipate Fetterman giving it a lengthy treatment in his newly released memoir, Unfettered. The title of the memoir, too, seems to promise candor.
Instead, Fetterman dedicates all of three paragraphs to Israel in a book that largely rehashes lore from before his time in the Senate and discusses his struggles with mental health. These paragraphs — which even pro-Israel readers will read as boilerplate — appear in the book’s penultimate chapter, which is about his declining popularity since taking office.
Some have suggested that the reason some of the media and former staffers turned on me was because of my stance on Israel. Others imply that my support of Israel has to do with impaired mental health, which isn’t true. My support for Israel is not new. I was quoted in the 2022 primary as unequivocally stating that “I will always lean in on Israel.”
There’s a paragraph here about sticking to his morals even if it means defying his party, then:
There was no choice for me but to support Israel. I remembered the country’s history — how it was formed in 1948 in the wake of the murder of six million Jews. Since then, the rest of the Middle East, harboring resentments going back thousands of years, has only looked for ways to eradicate Israel. It took less than a day after the formation of the Jewish state was announced for Egypt to attack it. Every day in Israel is a struggle for existence, just as every day is an homage to the memory of the Jews shot and gassed and tortured.
It’s also clear that war in Gaza [sic] has been a humanitarian disaster. At the time of this writing, roughly sixty thousand people have been killed in Israel’s air and ground campaign, over half of them women, children, and the elderly. I grieve the tragedy, the death, and the misery.
Satisfied with this examination of the hypothesis for his growing unpopularity, Fetterman then moves on to another possible reason: his votes on immigration.
It’s strange to read the Israel passages in light of Fetterman’s full-throated advocacy on any number of issues related or connected to the Israel-Hamas war, including the hostages, campus protests, and rising antisemitism. Even if he did not reckon more deeply with his support for a war that brought about a “humanitarian disaster,” he might have talked about meeting the hostage families, or visiting Israel, or his disappointment that some voices within his party have turned against it.
The production of Unfettered was itself a story earlier this year, and may explain the book’s failure to grapple with a central priority.
Fetterman reportedly received a $1.2 million advance for it, roughly a third of which went to Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger to ghostwrite it. But the two apparently had a falling out at some point, according to the sports blog Defector, which wrote in June that “in the process of having to work with Fetterman, Bissinger went from believing the Pennsylvania senator was a legitimate presidential candidate to believing he should no longer be in office at all.”
Bissinger is not credited anywhere in the book, and does not appear to have contributed. (He refused to discuss the book when a reporter called him earlier this year.)
But the mystifying section about Israel may have nothing to do with a ghostwriter or lack thereof. It may instead be explained by a letter his then-chief of staff wrote in May 2024, in which he said Fetterman “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.”
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How a Russian samovar connects me to the old country — and my black market dealing great-great-grandmother
For as long as I can remember, the golden samovar — a Russian teapot of sorts — has rested somewhere high in our home. In our first house, it sat imposingly on a shelf above the staircase. In our current home, it tops the boudoir in our guestroom. When I was growing up, I didn’t actually know what it was and, until a few years ago, I didn’t think to ask.
Spurred by some unknown impulse — possibly a quarter-life crisis or my mom and dad entering their 60s — I decided to interview my parents on the origin of every object and piece of furniture displayed in our home, gathering information that would otherwise die with them. Some of my questions yielded three-word answers (“It’s a lamp”); others evoked longer stories, like that of my black market-dealing great-great-grandmother.
Rivka Silberberg brought the samovar with her when she and her family — including my great-grandfather — immigrated to the United States from the Pale of Settlement sometime before World War I. According to my grandfather, while Rivka’s neighbors were fleeing religious persecution, she was evading authorities after a neighbor ratted her out for illegally selling items — some say tea, others tobacco — without the proper taxation. My mom thinks it was probably a combination of antisemitism and legal peril that motivated Rivka to leave.
Samovars were an important part of Russian social life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jenna Weissman Joselit, a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University and former Forward columnist, wrote, “The samovar loomed large in Jewish immigrant culture” and “a hefty proportion of Russian Jewish immigrants … lugged the heavy and bulky contraption to the New World.”
They acted both as a comforting, familiar sight and as something that could be pawned when money was tight, Joselit wrote. Clearly, my great-great-grandmother valued her samovar enough to drag it across the Atlantic.
Learning about the items in my house has given me a new appreciation for the objects that were always just a part of my background. Since the samovar is one of the only pieces of my family’s old world life we still have, it’s imbued with a certain sacredness. This samovar is not simply a vessel for brewing tea; It is a symbol of my ancestors’ forced migration, a testament to their ability to make the hard choices necessary for survival.
I am the only grandchild on my mother’s side. My grandfather was also an only child, meaning I am the only great-grandchild of his parents. I alone carry this history. Like the samovar, I am a physical testament to my family’s survival.
It’s a lot of weight to have on your shoulders — or on your shelf.
Being an only child is what made me feel such an urgent responsibility to capture my parents’ stories; if I didn’t save them, no one else would.
But objects are impermanent. They tarnish (as our samovar has). They shatter. They get lost.
As these sacred objects become more enchanted, we also become more vulnerable to their loss. Any damage to them would feel like a devastating blow.
Since my grandmother passed away in 2020, I have been the owner of her wedding band. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve worn it, primarily on occasions when I want to feel like she’s near, whether on Rosh Hashanah or my college graduation. Otherwise, I keep it in my jewelry box where it can stay safe.
My mom takes a much more relaxed approach. One Passover, a friend set down one of our dessert plates with too much force, and it cracked. My mom, in an effort to reassure the friend, said probably the last thing one wants to hear after breaking someone else’s belongings: “It was my grandmother’s.”
After the friend panicked for a moment, my mom realized how the words had sounded.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I mean that it’s so old.”
Old things break. It’s part of their natural course of existence. For my mom, this was just an inevitable fact of life. Even without the dessert plate, she has memories of her grandmother to hold onto.
It’s taken me longer to accept the impermanence of objects. Only recently has the loss of a cheap earring not felt like the end of the world.
Luckily, because of its size and shape, the samovar would be a hard thing to misplace. In the future, if it needs to be moved, I’ll make sure I do so with care. But if for some reason something should happen to it, I am comforted to know that the story of Rivka and her smuggling ways lives on within me.
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