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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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Iran Was Never Just Israel’s Problem
Iranians take to the streets during nationwide rallies on Nov. 4, 2025, marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy by waving flags and chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Photo: Screenshot
Some criticism of this war is justified.
If leaders want Americans to support military action against Iran, they must explain clearly why the threat is not merely Israeli, but American. They must define the objectives honestly and explain why the costs are worth bearing.
When they fail to do that, skepticism is not a vice. It is common sense.
But much of the commentary around this war has not been serious skepticism. It has been historical amnesia.
Too many Americans now speak as though Iran were chiefly Israel’s problem, and that the legitimate threat from Tehran was mainly the product of lobbying, hawkish paranoia, or another foreign entanglement sold under false pretenses.
This view appears on parts of the Left and on parts of the Right alike. It is a genuine horseshoe: one side speaks in the language of anti-colonial grievance, the other in the language of “America First” suspicion, but both often arrive at the same lazy conclusion — that Israel is the primary author of the crisis and Iran’s own record is somehow secondary.
That is not realism. It is illiteracy (or anti-Jewish bias) masquerading as restraint.
The Islamic Republic of Iran introduced itself to the United States in 1979 not through diplomacy, but through humiliation and hostage-taking. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis were not a misunderstanding. They were an opening statement.
From the beginning, the Iranian regime announced that ideological confrontation with America was not incidental to its identity. It was central.
What followed only confirmed this. For decades, the regime paired annihilative rhetoric with action: terrorism, proxy warfare, hostage-taking, intimidation, and subversion across the region and beyond. Iran did not merely talk like a revolutionary power. It behaved like one.
Americans should remember what that looked like in practice. Some of us knew it through Iraq.
I remember the explosively formed penetrators used in catastrophic IED attacks against American forces. Those weapons were not an abstraction. They were part of the same Iranian model of deniable warfare that allowed the regime to bleed its enemies while pretending to stand one step removed from the violence.
Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. That’s not an Israeli “talking point” — it’s something that Americans need to hear.
Nor was Iran’s model of violence confined to one battlefield. Its partnership with Hezbollah, and the operatives who helped turn that relationship into a durable instrument of terror, showed that Iran’s strategy was never simply defensive. It was regional, ideological, and expansionist.
The nuclear issue tells the same story of denial colliding with evidence. Iran has insisted for years that its nuclear program is peaceful and civilian. But enrichment at levels far beyond normal civilian requirements tells a different story. Americans do not need a degree in nuclear physics to understand that.
One need not endorse every tactical choice made in this war to recognize that Tehran’s claims about its intentions have repeatedly collided with the evidence.
The missile issue is similar. For years, Iran presented supposed limits on its missile range as though they reflected meaningful restraint. Yet its actual capabilities and behavior have repeatedly revealed a larger reach and a more aggressive intent than its public narratives suggested.
This is why the old Waltz-Sagan political science debate still matters. Kenneth Waltz argued that nuclear weapons can stabilize rivalries because states fear annihilation and therefore behave more cautiously.
Scott Sagan warned that proliferation can make catastrophe more likely through accidents, weak controls, organizational failures, and the conduct of dangerous regimes.
In the Iranian case, Sagan’s warning is plainly the more relevant one.
The problem is not that Iranian leaders are cartoonishly irrational. The problem is that too many Western analysts assume every regime calculates risk, death, survival, and martyrdom in roughly the same way. They do not.
A revolutionary regime that has spent decades pairing annihilative rhetoric with proxy warfare, terror sponsorship, nuclear deceit, and regional coercion should not be analyzed as though it were simply another status quo state with ordinary preferences and ordinary inhibitions.
That is also why the phrase “regime change” should not be treated as morally disqualifying in itself.
Everything depends on the regime in question. When a government has spent nearly half a century brutalizing its own people, threatening its neighbors, sponsoring terrorism, and lying about capabilities that could turn regional war into mass destruction, its removal is not inherently a dark or reckless aspiration.
There is nothing morally sophisticated about treating the survival of such a regime as the default prudent outcome. This is not merely an external menace. It is a regime that terrorizes its own population as well.
At the same time, serious people should say plainly what force can and cannot do. Decapitation strikes and threat-reduction operations are not a political end state. They are, at most, an opening salvo. They can degrade command structures, reduce immediate dangers, and create opportunities that did not previously exist. They cannot by themselves produce legitimacy, restore sovereignty, or build a stable successor order.
That harder phase, if it ever comes, will depend above all on Iranians themselves — on brave people willing to reclaim their country from a regime that has held it hostage for nearly half a century.
This is the point too many critics still miss. Yes, there has been a communications failure. Americans were not told clearly enough, consistently enough, or persuasively enough why Iran is not just Israel’s problem but America’s problem too. And that failure created space for the horseshoe. On the Left and on the Right, anti-Israel fixation has too often displaced sober analysis of the regime itself. The language differs, but the impulse is similar: minimize Iran’s agency, magnify Israel’s, and collapse strategy into slogans.
But the communications failure does not make the danger unreal.
Nor does the war’s messiness. If the war had gone better — if it had produced a cleaner strategic result, a more visible collapse in regime capacity, or even the early signs of a successful internal uprising — some of today’s criticism would undoubtedly be quieter. That much is true. But it does not follow that the underlying threat was invented. It means only that strategic disappointment always gives selective memory more room to operate.
Iran was never just Israel’s problem. It has been an American problem since 1979. It has been a regional problem for decades. And it remains a wider strategic problem wherever revolutionary terror, nuclear deceit, long-range coercion, and genocidal rhetoric are treated as tolerable, so long as they are aimed at someone else first.
This was not only a failure of statecraft. It was a failure of recognition. Too many Americans looked at the crisis and somehow forgot they were dealing with a regime that has spent decades announcing itself through terror, deceit, and exterminationist intent.
David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).
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Shabbat HaGadol and the Story of Elijah
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
“Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great awesome Day of God, and he will reconcile fathers to children and children to fathers” (Malachi 3:24).
This is part of the Haftorah for Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. But who exactly was Elijah? It is true that in terms of stature and his place in our tradition, he was the greatest of the prophets, even if no book is attributed to him. His public victory over the prophets of Baal during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel was his most famous triumph. But just as significant was the Chariot of Fire that took him up to Heaven when he died, which became the symbol of mysticism with which he was always associated.
In the Talmud, Elijah figures prominently in the debates about messianism and whether he was to be the messiah, or the pathfinder and precursor. Eventually, it was settled that Elijah would pave the way for a messianic era and instruct us what to do and what parts of our tradition would be revived or survive when it came about.
In the Talmud, there are many episodes in which Elijah is said to appear to rabbis and guide them, and he is associated with solving unresolved halachic issues.
Elijah has multiple associations with Pesach. The most obvious being when towards the end of the Seder, we dedicate the fifth cup of wine to Elijah, and we invoke his presence in asking God to remove our enemies.
Why is this fifth cup specifically Eliyahu’s?
Explanations range from the rational to the mystical. According to Maimonides, the coming of the messiah is a time in which oppression and hatred are removed, and we are free to explore our spiritual lives unimpeded. That’s the mystical.
Practically, there is a debate about if we should drink four or five cups of wine at the Seder. Those who advocate for four cups say it is done for the four terms used in the Torah to describe the process that gave us our freedom from slavery — “I freed you, I saved you, I redeemed you, I took you out.” But others believe “I brought you” counts as a fifth.
Are there four or five words, and should there be four or five cups?
The debate is left unanswered. Although we are obliged to have four cups of wine, we add an extra one just in case — and our tradition happened to dedicate that one to Elijah.
This year we have much to be sad about. So many beautiful young and not-so-young lives have been killed by our enemies. So many more lives have been injured or ruined. And yet there have been so many examples of deliverance, self-sacrifice, and heroism.
Is this the year the messiah will come? We can hope. But in the meantime, we have to do our best to reconcile and heal the chasms amongst us, and to come together to go forward united with pride and joy. Thank you, Eliyahu.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.
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Unreported: Palestinian Authority Brags It Killed More Jews in Second Intifada Than Hamas
Palestinians, including children, celebrating the Second Intifada. Photo: Screenshot.
The Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) had the largest number of terrorists in the Second Intifada, boasted a senior PA official.
PA Tulkarem District Governor Abdallah Kmeil bragged how the number of PASF members killed fighting Israel far exceeded the number killed by other terror organizations combined during the PA-led terror campaign of 2000-2005:
“Tulkarem District Governor Abdallah Kmeil: Let’s speak in a scientific language, in the language of numbers, which is the strongest language. There were 2,089 Martyrs from the [PA] Security Forces in the second Intifada … The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades of Fatah had 632 Martyrs, the Al-Quds Brigades of the [Islamic] Jihad had 415 Martyrs, and the [Izz A-Din] Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas had 378 Martyrs.”
[Tulkarem Governorate, Facebook page, Feb. 13, 2026]
By comparing PASF casualties to those of recognized terror groups, Kmeil showed that the PA Security Forces — who were trained and funded by the West to fight terror — were actually the leaders of Palestinian terror.
The Second Intifada was the PA-directed and controlled terror campaign, during which Palestinians carried out thousands of terror attacks, including suicide bombings on buses, in shopping malls, and on main streets, murdering more than 1,100 Israelis.
Last year, PA TV aired an interview with a PASF member jailed by Israel for terror offenses during the Second Intifada, who explained that the PASF “responded to this call” — to join the terror organizations in fighting Israel:
Released PA Security Forces terrorist prisoner Naji Arar: “I was a member of the Security Forces, of the security establishment. When we responded to the call of the homeland – we responded to this call through the Security Forces.
Do you remember the Al-Aqsa Intifada? The ones who resisted there were the Security Forces members, of course, in cooperation with our people and the factions.
I was arrested in Ramallah and sentenced to 18 years… It was shocking. But for Palestine, everything is insignificant. We were released… and met the security establishment through which we launched [our activity back then]. It welcomed us.”
[Official PA TV, Giants of Endurance, May 30, 2025 and Sept. 20, 2025]
Most importantly, the PASF leadership role in terror continues today unabated, as exposed in the June 2025 report by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) titled “Terrorists in Uniform.”
In 2023, after calling the killing of 12 Israelis that year “acts of resistance,” Fatah-run Adwah TV reported that “the members of Fatah and the Security Forces form the core and the arms of the resistance [i.e., terror] groups in the West Bank, together with the other Palestinian factions.”
PMW has likewise documented Fatah honoring dead PASF members who were terrorists killed while attacking Israelis.
Therefore, Kmeil’s words were surely no slip of the tongue. They were a public expression of what the PA and Fatah know: that PA Security Forces members take a leading role in Palestinian terror, a role that is a source of pride, to be celebrated.
This is all the more reason why any talk of parts of Gaza being handed over to the PASF to police the Strip is misguided and unacceptable, since it would be simply replacing one terror group, Hamas, with another — PA Security Forces.
Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Ahron Shapiro is a contributor to PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.