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Scallion fights, soft matzo and other Passover traditions live on around the world
Indian Jews smear animal blood on their doors. Ethiopian Jews gorge on chickpeas. Iraqis dump wine after the meal. And matzo might be soft and squishy, depending on where in the world the recipe hails from.
Adapting Passover to the cultures and conditions of the places where they lived is a practice Jews have sustained for centuries around the globe. Today, even as many of these communities live far from their countries of origin, these regional traditions continue in the diaspora. Here are some of them.
India: Blood on the door, rice in the tandoor
On Passover in India, members of the Bene Israel community mark their doorposts with blood.
Traditionally, families slaughtered cows or goats and pressed bloody handprints onto their homes, echoing the biblical commandment in the Exodus story. While some Indian Jews continue that tradition, it has adapted over the 20th century. Today, a kosher butcher in Mumbai saves papers stained with the blood of animals he ritualistically slaughters and distributes them to community members so they can continue the tradition.
“It’s the commandment to put the blood on the door,” said Yael Jhirad, a Mumbai-based member of the Bene Israel community, who called the practice a “hallmark” of their tradition.
For Indian Jews, the food eaten during Passover looks entirely different than the usual fare, Jhirad said. Bene Israel Jews avoid dried spices, a staple of Indian cooking, out of concern that they may contain chametz, the leavened grain products forbidden during Passover, which can result from even small amounts of fermentation.
Rice flour is also central to Indian Passover traditions. Until the modern era of commercial food manufacturing, its preparation was labor-intensive: A month before the holiday, rice would be washed, dried in the sun and ground in mills used exclusively by the Jewish community to avoid contamination. Women gathered for weeks to prepare the milled rice, eventually turning it into flatbread. Before gas stoves, families even constructed clay tandoor ovens specifically for Passover.
Today, only about 3,500 Jews remain in India, most of them in Mumbai. Many now celebrate at communal Seders held at the city’s five active synagogues. “It becomes a great way to meet the community and be together,” Jhirad said.
Ethiopia and Yemen: A Passover time capsule
Because Jews in Ethiopia and Yemen were geographically isolated for centuries, many of their Passover traditions developed with little outside influence.
Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, practice a form of Judaism rooted primarily in the Torah, without later rabbinic additions. Because of this, they do not traditionally use a Haggadah to tell the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt. Instead, in Ethiopia, the Jewish community gathers outside the local synagogue on Passover to hear the story of the Exodus recited by religious leaders known as kesim. Today, Ethiopia is considered to be home to the largest Seder in the world, where 4,000 Jews congregate in Gondar, Ethiopia, to hear the Passover story told.
According to Brhan Leibman Worku, an Ethiopian Jew who lives with her family in Israel, preparation for the holiday in Ethiopia takes around three weeks. Many fast before the holiday and immerse themselves in water, often at a nearby river, to “enter the holiday with a sense of purity and intention,” and “become spiritually ready to receive freedom.”
Before the holiday begins, Worku said Ethiopian Jews consume a strict diet of chickpeas, which, in Ethiopian Jewish custom, were thought to purify the gut and digestive system.
Ethiopian Jews maintained the biblical tradition of animal sacrifice during Passover. But when many immigrated to Israel in the 1980s and encountered rabbinic Judaism, Worku said, Ethiopian Jews were shocked that other Jewish communities no longer practiced the custom. “They were like, we’ve been doing this for thousands of years,” she said.
Today, approximately 13,000 Jews remain in Ethiopia, with most having immigrated to Israel. Many of Israel’s 150,000 Ethiopian Jewish citizens purchase and share a cow or sheep between several families to eat during the holiday to commemorate that earlier practice.
Ethiopian matzo also differs from the crisp, cracker-like version familiar to many Jews and was instead baked fresh daily to maintain a soft texture. In Ethiopia, only post-menopausal women prepared it, a practice tied to concerns about ritual purity. That tradition is still kept by many Ethiopian Jewish women in the diaspora.
In Yemenite communities, too, matzo is soft, warm and flexible, resembling a laffa bread. It is traditionally mixed, shaped and baked in clay ovens, all in under 18 minutes to ensure kashrut. ”In Yemen, the community did not settle for pre-holiday baking; instead, they insisted on baking fresh matzo every single day of the festival,” said Shai Naggar, an expert on Yemenite Jewry. The Yemenite matzo is said to be most similar to what the Israelites might have eaten during their escape from Egypt.
Yemenite Jews do not use a formal Seder plate; instead, the entire table becomes one large display, with greens arranged around the edges and symbolic foods placed at the center. The Haggadah, which arrived in Yemen 350 years ago, is not read in turns but “recited in a loud, communal chant by all participants,” according to Naggar.
The only solo of the night comes when the youngest child recounts the story of Exodus in Judeo-Arabic: “Ma Khabar Hadha Al-Laylah” — “What is the story of this night?” It is often told through folk tales, one of which is “the story of an Egyptian elderly woman whose dough-made idol was eaten by a dog.” It is intended, said Naggar, to illustrate the futility of idols.
Iraq: an Seder in Arabic
While only three Jews remain in Iraq today, Iraqi Passover traditions continue in the diaspora — often in Arabic.
Iraqi Haggadot frequently include Hebrew text alongside translation and commentary in Judeo-Arabic. “In the old times, the women and children didn’t know Hebrew or Aramaic,” said Lily Shor, an Iraqi Jew. “So they translated it into Arabic for them to understand.” Several of the songs in an Iraqi seder are also sung in Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, an endangered language only spoken natively by 6,000 people in the world, including “Ha Lachma Anya” (“This is the bread of affliction”).
Unlike many Ashkenazi Seders, where fingers are dipped into wine and then back on plates to symbolize the plagues, Iraqi families pour the wine from one cup to another and then discard it outside the home — sometimes down the street — to ensure the plagues remain far away. Children are told to close their mouths during the recitation, and the food on the table is covered, all to ward off bad luck.
At the end of Passover, Iraqi Jews traditionally ventured out into wheat fields, placing the green stalks over their shoulders, eating them, and blessing one another with “santak khdhra” (a green year) to call in a prosperous year ahead. “I still remember the taste,” said Shor, who continues the tradition today with her family in Israel, using myrtle branches instead of wheat. Many diaspora families use leafy greens to continue the tradition as well.
Moroccan Jews go out with a bang
For Moroccan Jews — most of whom now live outside Morocco, especially in Israel — one of the most distinctive celebrations comes at the moment the holiday ends, known as Mimouna.
In Morocco, Muslims and Jews came together to close out the holiday together. Because Jews had no flour or other chametz ingredients in their homes as the holiday ended, Muslim neighbors would bring over chametz-filled ingredients for their Jewish neighbors to cook with. Joseph Pool, a Moroccan Jew, recalled his Rabat-born grandparents describing Muslim neighbors bringing over “fresh flour, fresh butter, fresh eggs, and the Jewish neighbors would make traditional pancakes and sweets. You would go from house to house, enjoying the food.”
Now in the diaspora, Moroccan Jews continue the Mimouna celebration by hosting parties to commemorate the holiday’s end. Traditional Moroccan dance music is played, and an anise-flavored Middle Eastern spirit called Arak is served along with an assortment of fried Moroccan treats. “Moufleta,” a yeasted pancake drenched in butter and honey, and “sfenj,” a Moroccan-style sugar-covered fritter, are classic Mimouna desserts.
The Persian seder gets physical
In Persian Jewish households, the Seder takes a physical turn.
During Dayenu, family members hit one another with bunches of scallions and herbs, symbolizing the whips used during slavery in Egypt. “All of the courtesy and politeness of Persian culture is washed away,” said Tannaz Sassooni, an Iranian Jew who lives in LA. “Grandkids go at their grandparents, parents get their aggressions out on their kids, cousins, aunties, everyone gets into it.”
The origins of the custom are unclear, though some suggest it may stem from the abundance of greens and herbs in Persian cuisine.
Many Persian Jews also refrain from eating dairy during Passover out of an abundance of caution that it may have been contaminated with chametz, since dairy products in Iran were often handled by non-Jews. At the end of the holiday, known as Shab-e Sal, families celebrate with a dairy-rich meal, including yogurt dishes and a cold rice porridge.
For Sassooni, the tradition remains deeply personal — a reminder that in the diaspora, Passover customs are preserved even when the conditions that shaped them no longer apply. When she once asked her mother why they continued avoiding dairy in the United States, where kosher dairy options are readily available, her mother became emotional. “Because that’s what my dad did,” she said, teary-eyed.
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Marilyn Monroe would be 100 today. Are we making too much of her conversion?
Back in 2019, Marilyn Monroe’s menorah, a gift from her former in-laws, sold at auction for more than $112,000. The candle in the wind jokes wrote themselves, but how exactly the tragic actress lived her life has long been a point of Jewish fascination.
The effort to make Monroe a Jewish icon is almost certainly strained, though not baseless.
Born Norma Jean Mortenson, she converted to Judaism in 1956 ahead of her nuptials with Arthur Miller. That this detail still commands such attention can’t easily be divorced from certain stereotypes of their mismatched pairing: the beauty and the brain. He, balding and bespectacled, she, a peroxide paragon of bombshell beauty. Philip Roth didn’t need to write about it — Joyce Carol Oates did instead.
But Monroe’s attachment to Judaism, beyond leaving behind such effects as the menorah and an annotated siddur (sold for $21,000 in 2018), may be overstated, even as she continued to identify as a “Jewish atheist” after her 1961 split with Miller. That she engaged with her lessons with some seriousness, according to the rabbi who converted her, may be more a testament to her curiosity and intelligence than a true demonstration of faith.
In 2015, the Jewish Museum in New York offered a useful contrast. An exhibition hosted Andy Warhol’s portraits of Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor presented as a diptych. Taylor’s conversion came about after the death of a Jewish husband and remained important to her through the rest of her life, extending to pro-Israel causes and activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry. (Taylor was buried by a rabbi, Monroe by a Lutheran minister.)
Both women had their films banned in Egypt on account of their adopted faith — in the case of Taylor, this meant completing Cleopatra in Rome. Only one could be said to have lived a thoroughly Jewish life, though Monroe’s death is certainly a mitigating factor, the subject of so many “what ifs.”
When we look at Marilyn as a coreligionist, it may say more about us than her. I suspect the fact she didn’t “look Jewish” is what makes her affiliation matter to so many.
But the affiliations that truly matter are in the credits: Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Charles Lederer, Lee Strasberg. The work, or Avodah, is captured in celluloid: the way Sugar Kane takes a belt from her flask and tucks it in her garter or Lorelei Lee swats at her suitors with a fan.
It is Marilyn, not Norma Jean, not Miriam bat Sarah, who continues to have immense cultural cachet, already long exceeding her brief time on earth.
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Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew
I, A Wandering Jew. A Five-Century History of our Modern Condition
Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $29.95.
My father, an American-born son of Belarusian immigrants, bought the record when it first came out in 1960 and we enjoyed listening to it to no end. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s album The 2,000 Year Old Man featured Brooks as a somewhat laconic old man who responded in Yiddish-inflected English to Reiner’s guileless questions about his long life.
The improvised sketch had apparently begun 10 years earlier, when Reiner, who worked with Brooks on a TV show, turned to him, while testing a new tape-recorder, and asked, “Is it true you were at the scene of the Crucifixion, 2000 years ago?” Jesus Christ, Brooks quipped, was a “nice boy, wore sandals.” William Shakespeare, however, had “the worst penmanship” and when asked if he knew Joan of Arc, Brooks blurted out, “Knew her? I dated her!”
As a kid of 9, I didn’t think that their shtick was anything other than funny. But in retrospect, I can see that the Yiddishkeit tone and audacity of the conceit also answered something bigger and much more sinister. The Shoah had only just ended, the weekend before, as it were. So, the immortality and know-it-all comedy of Brooks’ hero expressed resiliency and social integration in the face of nothing less than genocide. “The 2000 Year Old Man” was, in a Borscht Belt voice, an affirmation of life. My fondness for Brooks resurfaced during the haze of high school, and remained in the back of my mind as decades went by, but it wasn’t until reading Yair Mintzker’s new book, I, Wandering Jew, that I came to appreciate another dimension of its significance, namely, its evocation of the figure of the Wandering Jew.
Originally, the Wandering Jew was an antisemitic trope Christians used to explain the marginality and foreignness of Jews in European society. A cobbler stood at the doorstep of his Jerusalem shop, according to the story, as Jesus labored by, hauling his burden to his death. Refusing his request for help, Jesus cursed the cobbler, who inexplicably came to be known as Ahasverus, the name of a Persian king, to live eternally in exile until the Second Coming. The Jews were thus condemned to a de-territorialized, homeless fate as Christ deniers.
Ahasverus appears and reappears in various forms over the course of European history — often as a tall, severe man who spoke several languages, never laughed and criticized people for moral failures. His story spread in ballads, poems and novels — and eventually in Nazi propaganda — to support the claim that Jews were not only alien to European culture and society but could never live together with Aryans.
Mintzker, a Princeton history professor, has written an intriguing book that traces the legend of the Wandering Jew over the centuries in reverse chronological order, eventually to arrive at the salience of the figure’s story in the author’s own life and times.
The first of his five examples is set in Israel, just a few years after the nation achieved independence, when a mysterious man, known by some as Ben Shoushan, caught the attention of a journalist as he disembarked at the port of Haifa with a forged Moroccan passport that dated his birth in 1902. He seemed to be both middle-aged and ageless, perhaps mad or possibly a genius. The author Eli Weisel had met him at one point immediately after the war and also couldn’t quite make sense of who he was — perhaps a “Kabbalist, comedian and anarchist”? The mystery man, lacking an origin or an income, claimed to speak 30 languages and was said to love riddles.
He spent time in two religious kibbutzim near Tel Aviv. The kibbutzniks recalled him as a harsh, unbearable, eccentric man who lectured on the Talmud, rotating between the communities until he was expelled from both. Leaving Israel in 1956, he was spotted in a Jewish community in Uruguay, where he was regarded as a Wandering Jew, an identity he apparently embraced. In other words, Shoushan was at once a real person, in Mintzker’s view, who also seemed to project a post-Holocaust trope, as of the survival of the Jewish stranger but also the survival of the unconventional Jewish intellectual.
Another version appeared in The Nag, which was an allegorical, 1873 Russian novel by Sholem Yakev Abramovitch in which a broken-down, talking horse declares herself to be a “wandering mare” and demands justice rather than mercy from her tormentors. Abramovitch’s image of the Wandering Jew was somewhat veiled, although the reticent, pitiful animal does admit to being both a horse, passing from one harness to another, and something else. Unable to live or die, she says she wants only to belong — but is dismissed as not human.
In Jewish Memorabilia, Jacob Schudt, who was a Protestant scholar from Frankfurt, adopted the sort of doctrinal view of the legend that the eternal exile of the Jews from Israel was a punishment for having rejected Christ. The final installment of the four-volume work apparently brimmed with antisemitic views that criticized how Jews looked, their lack of hygiene, and purported greed, as well as their supposed penchant for self-flattery. Schudt dismissed the Wandering Jew as nothing more than a fable by which the lower classes could perceive and understand Jews. Yet he also recognized certain flaws in the story — that it contradicted Christ’s compassion, for one. Lacking historical support, Schudt went on to conclude that the story was probably of Catholic origin, or perhaps the result of nothing more than a publisher’s money-making scheme. The figure of Ahasverus, in other words, was a contradiction that featured a real personage who simultaneously never existed.
Mintzker then turns to the centerpiece of the story, an anonymous German broadsheet, the Kurtze Beschreibung, which was a wildly popular text that was first published in 1602 and then republished a dozen times throughout the rest of the century.
It cast Ahasverus as a strange man who met a Lutheran theologian and explained to him that he was a Jewish shoemaker who had been born 1,500 years earlier in Jerusalem, when and where he had refused to help Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and had been cursed to wander the earth until the return of the Messiah. The account included details of the Crucifixion, the deaths of the Apostles, and about Ahasverus himself — for example that he spoke German with a Saxon accent.
Mintzker strives to pin down the author of the pamphlet and how its contents changed over the course of the 17th century. He marshals quite a bit of detailed evidence that leads him to conclude that Paul von Eitzen, a leading a 16th century Lutheran official and contentious pastor in Hamburg who claimed to have met Ahasverus in the 1540s, must have written it. Readers of the pamphlet, Mintzker also notes, would certainly have been able to identify both von Eitzen and the man he called Ahasverus in this version of the story, who was likely a notoriously uncompromising anti-Calvinist named Tilemann Heshusius.
In the final chapter of his well-paced book, Mintzker turns his gaze upon himself — to the meaning of the Wandering Jew in his own life as a yored, an Israeli expatriate.
Mintzker was born and raised in an upper middle-class, progressive Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem, but eventually left the country to go study and then work in the United States. He had learned about Ahasverus from a close high school friend but only came to identify with him in New Jersey, where the image of exile, and of Jews as “eternal strangers,” haunted him and became more and more salient, particularly amid the violence of the past few years in Israel. With the rise of anti-Zionism, Mintzker admits, he came to “embrace the figure of Ahasverus … as a model for political life” but also for his own sense of self.
The 2,000 Year Old Man clearly echoed the legend of the Wandering Jew, in a chutzpadik voice that entertained diaspora American Jews during the immediate post-Holocaust years. But wasn’t this precisely Mintzker’s point? The trope’s meaning, as his book shows us, shifted across time and place. Thus, in this last expression, he comes to own it as an acknowledgement of his own disquiet and alienation, which he connects to his yored autobiography and recent events in Israel that have called Zionism into question. In doing so, the story of the Wandering Jew has shed its antisemitic, racialized roots, or justification for exile once again, to be read anew as a trope of Mintzker’s (and perhaps our) estrangement from contemporary Israeli society. A timely read.
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The mayor missed the Israel Day Parade. Many who went didn’t miss him.
(JTA) — The energy was palpable Sunday as thousands packed a dozen blocks of Fifth Avenue waving Israeli flags for New York’s annual Israel Day Parade. Organizers said the turnout was the largest in the event’s six-decade history.
The procession featured its usual mix of Jewish nonprofits, schools and synagogues marching to blaring Israeli music alongside parade floats sponsored by groups including Nefesh B’Nefesh, the UJA Federation of New York and the Maccabiah Games.
But this year’s parade, which was themed “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists,” unfolded amid growing political polarization over Israel and without New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who became the first mayor in decades to skip the event.
For all the criticism Mamdani has received over his campaign pledge not to attend the event, many of those who did turn out told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency they were glad he wasn’t there.
“He doesn’t like us,” said Andrea Roman, who attended the parade wearing an Israeli flag cape and thought it was “good” that Mamdani hadn’t come. “Why should you be some place where you don’t like? He does not promote peace. This promotes peace, but of course he’s not going to be here.”
Jeremy Bell, 39, also said wasn’t bothered by the mayor’s absence – and that there were many more who felt as he did.
“I don’t think that he was really wanted here,” Bell said, adding, “I don’t want to be here with someone who doesn’t believe in our right to exist and obviously associates with people that don’t have our best interests in mind.”
Despite Mamdani’s absence, the event, known as the largest pro-Israel parade in the world, featured a lengthy roster of political officials and lawmakers. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler were among those in attendance, as were former New York City Mayors Eric Adams and Mike Bloomberg.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who on Thursday said that security preparations for the parade would be “the most extensive” that the NYPD had ever put together, also joined the festivities as an honorary grand marshal.
While many paradegoers said that they never considered staying home because of security concerns, several said they appreciated the presence of thousands of police officers and extensive barricades that blocked the streets surrounding the event.
“We are grateful that tens of thousands of participants and spectators were able to gather safely and proudly in the heart of New York City,” Mitchell Silber, the CEO of the Community Security Initiative, said in a statement. “Today’s success reflects the extraordinary planning, coordination, and professionalism of the NYPD and our law enforcement partners.”
That number was boosted in some cases by participants who said the mayor’s decision to skip the event factored into their own decision to come.
Karene Hermon, 22, said that while previously she would have been more “neutral” about attending, hearing that Mamdani had chosen not to come drove her to “be with my people.”
“I think it sends the wrong message,” Hermon said of the mayor’s refusal to participate. “I think we’re trying to come together, not separate people, regardless of … how you feel about a cause.”
First-time paradegoer Luis Margules travelled to the march from Pennsylvania. He said that he had come because it felt like “a moment to be with Israel.”
“This is my first parade, but I think this year it’s one of the most important ones,” Margules said. “I think the world doesn’t understand the situation with Iran and the Palestinians, and everything is blamed on Israel.”
Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, said in a statement that the parade “delivered a resounding answer to all those who hate Israel.”
“This year’s parade was an unprecedented demonstration of strength by New York’s Jewish community and the people of Israel,” Akunis said. “It sends a clear and unequivocal message: We are here to stay, and we are not going anywhere.”
But not all of the spectators Sunday were there in support.
While there was no large-scale protest visible during the parade, roughly 25 people demonstrated along the route to oppose the inclusion of a record delegation of roughly 10 Israeli Knesset members, including far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and two members of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit party.
As the delegation passed the demonstration, which was organized by the progressive groups Israelis for Peace and Friends of Standing Together New York, protesters shouted “shame” and “war criminals,” according to Tamar Glezerman, an organizer for Israelis for Peace.
“We were there to protest against the Israeli Knesset delegation, the largest of its size of all of the parades, that sent members of the coalition and the so-called opposition to do hasbara and march victoriously up a New York avenue,” Glezerman told JTA in a phone interview Sunday, using the Hebrew word for public relations.
While the focus of the demonstration centered on opposing the Knesset delegation, Glezerman added that “a parade that very much champions unexamined, unchecked and non-critical support of Israel is perhaps important for people here. It is not good for Israelis. It sure as hell isn’t good for Palestinians.”
Margules, in contrast, said that seeing the Israeli Knesset members pass by had made him feel “proud.”
“It’s good to know that even in these dark times we can still be together without violence, and we can disagree on many things, but we have to agree on something,” Margules said. “We are here because Israel exists.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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