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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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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Attacks on Mamdani test Jewish efforts to confront Islamophobia as 9/11 anniversary nears
The image was vintage AI slopcraft: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his trademark black suit, holding a sealed cardboard package labeled 9/11 MEMORIAL.
“Honey,” the cartoon Mamdani calls, “where’s my box cutter?”
The cartoon, shared Sunday on social media by the Orthodox Jewish comedy account Heimish Humor and referencing the weapon used in the 9/11 hijackings, reflected an increasingly caustic attitude toward Mamdani, Muslim elected officials and Islam itself in some Jewish spaces as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approaches — with much of the charged rhetoric tied to Sept. 11.
Jewish groups that staged an anti-Mamdani protest in downtown Manhattan Tuesday invoked the mayor’s religion on a flyer for the event, which was sponsored by the Lawfare Project, the Israeli-American Council and a slew of other Jewish groups. The flyer depicted Mamdani with his eyes blotted out and read, “Islamist ideology was not defeated. It was normalized. In 2001 they needed planes. Today the DSA hands them a platform.” One speaker at the event said Mamdani believed law enforcement was “haram,” Arabic for forbidden.
To some who saw it, the poster — and many of the Jewish attacks against Mamdani — contained anti-Muslim dog whistling, if not downright Islamophobia.
“This is coded language to smear all Muslim leaders as terrorists to hold them accountable for 9/11,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “The same way that we as a community rightfully push back when we hear people using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative — that’s what’s happening here. We should be calling it out if we expect people to call it out when it happens to us.”
The wave of antagonism in the Jewish community comes amid a broader Republican backlash to high-profile victories for Muslim elected leaders. Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, called incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is Catholic, “tone deaf” for wearing a hijab at a mosque so close to the 9/11 anniversary. Islamophobic posts targeting Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, surfaced by The Washington Post, found copious 9/11 references.
But no politician has attracted as much vitriol as Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor. His antagonism toward the Israeli government and his leftist politics have made him a target for many pro-Israel New Yorkers. Some have used his religion as a cudgel in joining calls for him to skip Friday’s memorial service at Ground Zero.
Spitalnick said such rhetoric was coming from a small, non-representative portion of the Jewish world that wanted to advance a conservative political agenda — but that Jews “should be concerned that this is ostensibly being done in our name.”
“We can be concerned for multiple reasons,” she added. “One, bigotry is wrong regardless, and two, it actually makes our work to fight the real and rising antisemitism our community is facing that much harder.”
Yet posts like the cartoon also revealed the resistance to growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Jewish spaces. Heimish Humor’s post drew a number of critical replies from Jewish accounts. “Incredibly racist, you should delete this,” wrote one. “Not funny,” said another. As anti-Muslim rhetoric escalates, Jewish voices are among those fighting hardest to combat it.
Echoes of history
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the rise in Islamophobic rhetoric has resurfaced old memories of its aftermath.
The end of 2001 was a dangerous time for Muslim Americans, who faced being conflated with the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the hijackings. Despite President George W. Bush’s admonition that the attacks were committed by extremists who did not represent the religion, anti-Muslim violence spiked across the U.S. A number of mosques were burned in arson fires, and eight Arabs or Muslims were killed in the three months following 9/11 in what some believed to be Islamophobic murders.
Relations between Jewish and Muslim American communities, already strained by the Second Intifada, bottomed out in some places after 9/11. But in the ensuing years, Jewish-Muslim relations took a surprising turn. By 2006, news media were describing an “unprecedented swell of interfaith activities” — including dialogue groups, “peace walks” and joint Israel trips — even as agreement on Middle East politics remained elusive.
And while the 2010 proposal for a mosque and Muslim community center at Ground Zero reignited some old tensions — with the Anti-Defamation League headlining the opposition — broader trends of Muslim-Jewish mutual aid held: When a St. Louis Jewish cemetery was defaced in 2017, Muslim groups raised tens of thousands of dollars to repair it. Jewish groups anchored the opposition to President Donald Trump’s 2017 immigration ban targeting Muslim countries. And in 2021, the ADL apologized for its earlier stance on the mosque near Ground Zero.
The day everything changed
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, however, caused many Jewish-Muslim partnerships to collapse. Israel’s response in Gaza only deepened resentments, as opposition to the war on college campuses and in public protests coincided with an increase in antisemitic incidents.
Then in 2025, Mamdani rode into office on the back of the pro-Palestinian movement. Mamdani vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was reluctant to disavow the slogan “globalize the intifada” — a phrase many see as calling for violence against Jews. Though Mamdani has repeatedly condemned antisemitic violence in the city, some Jewish New Yorkers say his anti-Israel invective has nevertheless exacerbated a dangerous environment for the city’s Jews.
“The DSA is a movement of hate, pro-terror anti-American and anti-minority ideology,” said Brooke Goldstein, the founding director of the Lawfare Project, which organized Tuesday’s anti-Mamdani protest. She said it was the DSA and the mayor who were promoting division, extremism and racism — not groups like hers, who were holding the mayor accountable.
The prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America is one key difference between today’s political environment and that of late 2001.
But the environment around Israel has also changed. “The response to 9/11, including from most Jewish organizations, was an American response,” said Jonathan Jacoby, president of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism — whereas the response to Mamdani today, he said, is “coming from a quote-unquote ‘pro-Israel’ space.”
Jacoby said Mamdani’s election in particular had elicited an unprecedented level of panic among some pro-Israel groups. He pointed to the ADL’s Mamdani Monitor as an example, saying that there was a throughline between the efforts to undermine his candidacy and the calls for him to not attend the 9/11 ceremony. (The ADL has not commented on whether Mamdani should participate, and declined to comment for this story.)
Some of the people who have pushed back against the anti-Mamdani rhetoric consider themselves among the mayor’s critics.
“I’m not happy with the atmosphere he’s brought into New York City since being elected,” Avital Levene, a Jewish influencer who called the Mamdani cartoon “not funny,” said in an interview. “However, he’s stood with the Jewish people since taking office. People literally call him a terrorist and use terms like ‘yemach shemo’ (may his name be erased). There’s a way to criticize someone’s political views without using racist slurs.”
Like Levene and Spitalnick, Jacoby said he disagreed with some of the mayor’s beliefs about Israel. But he said those disagreements “pale in the face of the danger of authoritarianism, neo-fascism and white nationalism in this country.”
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Argentine court orders return of Nazi-looted painting to Jewish collector’s heir
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A Dutch journalist hunting for art treasures belonging to an Amsterdam Jewish art dealer spent years trying to get answers from Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the Nazi financier who had made off with some of them, with no luck. So last year he went to her house in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
No one was home, but the journalist, Peter Schouten, noticed a “for sale” sign outside the property from Robles Casas & Campos, a local real estate agency.
Schoten went to the agency’s website, where the house was listed for $265,000. As he scrolled through the listing, he noticed something in a photograph of the living room. Schouten recognized the painting hanging above a sofa: “Portrait of a Lady,” most likely the work of the 18th-century northern Italian painter known as Il Pitocchetto.
On Friday, Argentine federal judge Santiago Inchausti authorized the restitution of “Portrait of a Lady,” which belonged to the collection of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, to his daughter-in-law and sole heir, Marei von Saher.
“The property had been listed for sale on a real estate agency’s website, and one of the photographs showed a painting in the living room that matched one of the works from Goudstikker’s collection that had been sought for years,” Inchausti wrote in his ruling.
Goudstikker was one of Holland’s most prominent Jewish art dealers before World War II. In 1940, he fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands with his wife and son, carrying a black notebook listing some 1,400 artworks. After his death during the voyage, his widow preserved it, and the notebook later became key evidence in the family’s restitution efforts.
His gallery and collection fell under Nazi control. Hermann Goering, a powerful deputy to Adolf Hitler, acquired hundreds of paintings from Goudstikker’s collection in a forced sale that Dutch authorities later determined was directly linked to Nazi persecution.
Herberto Robinson, von Saher’s lawyer who specializes in estate planning and asset protection, described what happened after Schoten’s sleuthing in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“At that point, the journalist contacted attorney Yael Weitz in Freedman Normand Friedland of New York where she specializes in art and cultural property law,” he said “She then contacted us and asked us to take on the case. The family’s sole intention was to recover the painting. They were not interested in pursuing those who had possessed it or in seeking financial compensation, they wanted the artwork returned.”
Kadgien is the daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a German financial official who worked for the Nazi regime and later escaped to South America. The elder Kadgien, who had close ties to Goering, fled Germany in 1945 to Switzerland, eventually making his way to Argentina, where he started a business and raised a family. He died in 1978.
Kadgien and her husband at first did not cooperate. The realtor’s listing was removed after the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad published its report. Argentine authorities then searched the property on Aug. 26, 2025, but the painting had been removed and replaced with another artwork, while an outline matching its dimensions remained visible on the wall.
Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were placed under house arrest for 72 hours while authorities searched the family’s other properties. They subsequently turned the artwork over to federal prosecutors and were charged with aggravated concealment.
Experts from Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts attributed the work to Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as Il Pitocchetto, and valued it at approximately €250,000. The local and national Jewish communities took a keen interest in the case.
“We are very pleased and hope this marks the beginning of many more restitutions, as we know there are undoubtedly other works out there that rightfully belong to families who suffered this tragic fate,” Clauda Beatriz Malamud, the president of Sociedad Union Israelita Marplatense, the local Jewish community body, told JTA.
Under an agreement Inchausti approved, the criminal proceedings against the couple were suspended for two years, subject to a set of conditions. They irrevocably renounce any right or claim to the artwork, clearing the way for its restitution. The painting will remain in the custody of Argentina’s Supreme Court until the restitution is carried out. They also agreed to pay 4.8 million Argentine pesos — approximately $3,180 — in 24 monthly installments to the support association of Mar del Plata’s Interzonal Specialized Maternal and Child Hospital.
According to well-placed sources at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, von Saher has expressed interest in lending the painting to the museum for a temporary exhibition, possibly for one or two years. The exhibition would help raise awareness of the systematic theft of Jewish-owned art under the Nazi regime and the continuing international effort to return such works to their rightful owners. No final agreement about this has been announced.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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