[Music] Live from the J.E.L.E. in London, you're listening to History for the Curious, the podcast. 20 minutes with Rabbi Al-Briherch hosted by myself, Men Up Reisner. Join us as we cross continents, sail through the centuries, tracing lives, uncovering events, and following epic journeys to reveal the untold stories and the mysteries that have impacted our history and shaped us into who we are today. Welcome back, Rabbi Hersh, you have been around the world since we last spoke. It's been New York and somewhere in Europe. But the past, yeah. Well, in the last week, was that business or pleasure? It depends how you define them, but in Budapest I went to speak to the Kihilah there. In New York I went for a. It's the Kihilah Budapest. Yep, yeah. In English? In English. And then in New York I went for a wedding of a close friend. But for a couple of years. 35 hours. Wow. Okay, so welcome back. There was fantastic feedback. We received a lot of emails and comments, questions as well in the last series where it was featuring Rabbi Tats and judging by its success, perhaps we'll feature other guests in the future. Yes. We're welcome to suggestions. So welcome back to a brand new series. This is going to be a two part on Pesach. There's going to be a particular look at history and the Haggadah. So yes, look at unusual Haggadahs, forged personal, but perhaps start with an interesting seder or sedorim. As mentioned, I was in New York last week and I picked up a history book on the Jews in America. And there were letters from soldiers in the United States who fought during the American Civil War in the 1860s who had run a seder. Now Jews fought on both sides of the Civil War, even religious Jews, both with the Southern Confederates and the Northern Union. So the first letter shows how communication was still given to some snags, I guess. It starts dearly a nori who's writing to his sister. No doubt you were much surprised on receiving a letter from me dated the 21st, which was the first day of Pesach. We, all under the impression in the camp that the first day of Pesach was the 22nd. So obviously he didn't have a first night seder. Indeed he has under right Zik, whose his brother kept in Zikul Levy, was somewhat astonished on arriving in Charleston on Wednesday afternoon to learn that that very night was already the first day of Pesach. He bought goods sufficient to last us for the week, including Mutsus and had himself transported back to our army camp. The cost of Mutsus, so that's clearly not just something that people complain about in the 21st century, is somewhat less than enrichment being $2 a pound. Although as a footnote, Mutsus at that time in New York cost $6 cents a pound, so they are spending 30 times the price. So it was costing them a small fortune to keep Pesach. We are observing the festival in a truly orthodox style, no news on the war present, troops from Florida passing over the road on route for Richmond, although he would go on to participate in a number of battles. The second letter from the Union side is a little more amusing. I enlisted from Cleveland in the Union cause to sustain intact the government of the United States, so it's a very patriotic, and became attached to the 23rd Regiment in West Virginia. Being a prize of the approaching feast of Passover, 20 of my co-religionists belonging to the regiment, united in a request to our commanding officer for a relief from duty in order that we may keep the Holy Days. As the paymaster had lately visited the regiment, he had left us plenty of greenbacks and all those plenty of money. Our next business was to find someone suitable to buy our requirements. The morning of Eref Pesach, a supply train arrived in the camp, and two hour delights, there were seven barrels of Mutsus. Interesting we were packing them either way. On opening them, we were surprised and pleased to find enclosed two huggods and prayer books. We obtained two kegs of cider, a lamb, several chickens and some eggs. More or we couldn't obtain, but we found a weed whose bitterness I apprehended, exceeded anything our forefathers enjoyed. The necessary for the "horusus" we couldn't obtain, so we got a brick, not to digest, but to remind us by looking at it for what purpose it was intended. So very resourceful. At Dark we commenced the service. The ceremonies were passing off very nicely until we arrived at the part where the bitter herb was to be taken. We all ate a large portion of the herb when horrors ensued. The herb was very bitter and very fiery like keying pepper. An excited hour first to such a degree that we forgot the law authorizing us to drink only four cups and the consequence was that all the cider was drunk. Those that took too much of it became excited, one thought he was Moses, another Aaron, and one had the audacity to call himself Pharaoh. The consequence was a skirmish. With nobody hurt, only Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh had to be carried to the camp and left to sleep things off. This light incident did not take away our appetite and after doing justice to our lamb, chicken and eggs, we resumed the second portion of the service without anything occurring worthy of note. Are you sure you didn't just pick up a joke book there? No, no, this is very skillful writer. Yeah, he was writing to the Jewish messenger which was a newspaper in the States. There is actually one other association between Pesach and the Civil War because on the night of the fifth day of Pesach in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot and died in the early morning of April 15th. That day had actually already been scheduled as a national day of prayer to mark the end of the Civil War and Jews across the country were gathering in shawls to give thanks. And when news of Lincoln's death arrived, the beamer in the shawls were draped in black and instead of Pesach, Tfilus, they said "Piutim" from Yom Kippur. That was on Pesach in 1865. Onto Haggardas. So going somewhat back in time, I wanted to mention a particular handwritten illuminated Haggarda. The Haggarda appears as a separate book rather than as part of a cedar from 1280 onwards. Shortly afterwards, they start creating very elaborate illustrated Haggardas long obviously before the era of printing. And there are some very famous ones. They all have a specific title which is either relates to their place of origin like the Barcelona Haggarda or the Darmstadt Haggarda. Sometimes it relates to design, golden Haggarda, the sister Haggarda, or to where they are currently held. You have the Rylans Haggarda in Manchester, the Cincinnati Haggarda. Sometimes it's known by the owner, Kaufmann Haggarda, Macata Haggarda. So they all have a particular title. And one famous Haggarda is, or perhaps was called the Birds Head Haggarda. Which was written around 1320 and it's so named because Birds Head replace human faces throughout the Haggarda. Now, no one quite knows what pushed the illustrator to do so. That's probably based on the prohibition of drawing the image of a human being. But all adult Jewish males have a beard and a Jewish hat as well as a bird's face. Children are bareheaded as is the image of Yesafe as the ruler over Egypt. And non-Jews are there with blank circles instead of faces. So you can tell the difference between the two very obviously, very immediately. Now in the scene of the Egyptians pursuing the Jews immediately after coming out of Egypt, the pursuers are therefore all faceless. But there are two figures with birds heads, meaning that they are Jewish amongst the people pursuing the Jews. And it is suggested that these two are Dussam and Averum since they have whips in their hands, which may relate to their role as Jewish taskmasters. What is the benefit of the system?
ground of the Sagada, what's the history there? So it has quite an interesting 20th century history rather than history as to how it survived. We are not quite sure where and when it got to safer shores from the time it was written, obviously it had to survive 600 years of European occupation in order to make it to Erich Israel, but it is the 20th century which stands out because it was bought by the Israel Museum for $600 in 1946, which is obviously very little, from a German Jewish refugee called Herbert Khan. 70 years later in 2016 the ears of the family that had owned the Sagada before the war asked for compensation. They said that the Sagada had been sold without permission and no one knows exactly how much they asked for but it was understood or rumored to be a few million dollars which would still be substantially less than its actual value and they asked the manuscript to be renamed the "Morum" because that was their family name. Now the museum considers itself a caretaker of any Ehrlich Judea that was once owned by Holocaust victims. So they acknowledged that the family had owned it at some stage pre-World War II but they wanted documentation for the period between 1933 and 1946-45 which obviously was difficult to come by but the Morum family managed to get hold of more than a thousand documents which show that Khan was a low paid school teacher and what the family said was that he somehow obtained the Haggoda in 1939 after the head of the Morum family was deported. They don't believe that he stole it more likely that the book ended up in a Jewish school in Germany where Khan was teaching where it was placed in a library to avoid it being confiscated by the Nazis and subsequently the museum did settle with the family and they still hold that Haggoda in Jerusalem but there are two features of note in the Haggoda. The first is it contains a drawing of a man pointing to his wife when he declares this is the bitter herb. Well, she's the morrow. Because he writes so valuable now. It's actually not the first Haggoda with this in there is a Haggoda called the Hylik and Billik Haggoda which is nowadays in the bibliotech national in Paris and they're both spouses pointed to each other when the husband picks up the morrow and there is a dialogue with speech bubbles and each spouse makes the accusation that the other is the real morrow. So that's quite interesting and then there is the hunting scene. It is reproduced in many Haggodders but it really only belongs in those that were aimed at a Yiddish or German-speaking audience because it is the hunt of the hairs which is called Jagenhaz and that is a reminder of the nomonic Yuck Nahaz which is the order of making Kiddush on a Saydenight which occurs on Motsashabus as the second Saydenight will this year of Yain Kiddush, Nair, Havdala and Zman, Rhecheanu. So Yuck Nahaz is the equivalent of this Yagenhaz and in fact in the British Library there is an old illustrated Haggoda where the hunt for the hair appears on the same page as Havdala. Why do you think there was so much comedy put into these Haggodders? Do you think it's just to keep the children awake or to make them more alive? Yes, what they are doing is they are making sure that the Haggoda is read with interest because I don't know that the kids would necessarily have come anywhere close to what would have been even at the time a very valuable manuscript but for the family. Then there is a Haggoda with an English twist, one of the oldest in fact, the 12th century. It's passed part of Ashkenazi Siddha which is in the Corpus Christi College in Oxford and Rabayli Braggman writes that it is handwritten on parchment which obviously would have been very expensive but there's no record in the manuscript of the date that it was created. Although on the last page there's a list of debts to English bishops and other people and a number of these people and I was over these debtors lived in England during the reign of either Richard I or John which I mean somewhere between 1189 and 1216 and since one of the debtors mentioned died in 1202 obviously the manuscript has to have been written by then or earlier than then and the interesting thing is that there are a couple of differences between this so to speak English Haggoda and what we do nowadays. Firstly, most Ashkenazi communities make a brocher over each one of the four cups of wine whereas most sardim only make two brochers for the first and the third cup. This Haggoda does neither. It instructs us to make the brocher after three of the cups of wine, numbers one, three and four and this is actually an N Ashkenazi opinion. It's the view of both the Raviyar and the Mahsavitri. It's just not what Ashkenazi do nowadays and I guess I refer listeners to the podcast on Ashkenazi identity as to why that might have been the case. They know it all by heart. Right. Okay. So it appears that early English minhag was just these three brochers and then there's another difference in Shwechamascha which he said just after benching just as we pour the fourth cup of wine so the literally pour out your wrath on the Jews and the non Jews or other who refuse to acknowledge God and the standard version is for verses two from Tehilim, two from Eichar although the earliest sida of Rapsadjikhan only has two psukkim. In this Ashkenazi sida there are eleven and they elaborate on this vein of God so to speak taking revenge on those that refuse to acknowledge him and the possible reason for the difference in length may well have to do with the date of the manuscript meaning that a pre-Crucade 10th century Jewish world when the sida of Rapsadjikhan was written was a very different place to the 13th century where there were times of great distress mostly due to the impact of the Crusades on Jewish life and the regulations against the Jews from the third Lateran Council. So that might account for why there was more hope and even prayer for an end but that it should come at the expense of those who were the sworn enemies of the Jew and of God. So these were all the handwritten ancient haggodders when did the printing start we have records? Printing the first printed haggoda that we have was made in Spain prior to the expulsion in 1482 and there is only one copy of it left it's in the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem and obviously a second copy would be worth millions although having said that in 1988 another copy did appear on the market this is over 500 years after that first one was originally printed and two Judea cadealers were offered leaves pages from it and they paid $60,000 but a friend in the business in the trade told them that he'd also been offered leaves from a similar haggoda so they become quite suspicious you know two haggodders turning up when there is only one in existence and within a short time so the dealer a guy called Aaron Berger took the book to Jerusalem for authentication and experts there told him that the purchase was a fake but surely before they paid $60,000 for it they checked that was old paper. So the paper was authentic 15th century the writing was not and I guess that was harder to distinguish in fact it was neither of these that tripped up the forges it was the fact that the copy was so perfect of the existing one that it was too perfect and what gave it away was that the wormholes
In other words, the holes that bookworms had made over the past 500 years were in exactly the same places in these Newha gods being offered for sale, you know, and the likelihood that they had eaten through exactly the same amount of the exact same page was, put it mildly, quite unlikely. Amateurs. Well, the seller was an unusual guy. His name was Frank Podd. He had been a priest in Italy and converted to Judaism. And he and his brother-in-law had sort of dressed in a way so as to not appear Jewish and therefore, as if, you know, that they had something that they had no idea of the value. And that's how they passed it off and they were arrested in March of 1988 and they faced up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to a million dollars. But it was so stringent, so strict. I guess forgery of ancient pieces of older pieces and there was wire fraud. There were various different counts that they were being accused of and they pleaded guilty. Where is the fake now? Because that's quite a story behind that itself. Right, so as I say, he created two or at least two, but I think he created two. I don't actually know because at least one of the fake copies was actually sold at an auction. As a fake, obviously, but sold in auction because it was still written on 15th century paper and it did very much resemble the original. So, you know, I'm not quite sure where it is. I wanted to add a more contemporary story about Pesach, which I came across. This one concerning of Dove-Berich Videnfeld, known generally as the Chabinerov, who was a rove in pre-World War II Poland when the Nazis invaded. So, the Chabinerov's picture, along with those of the Rebels of Gare and Bells, appeared in the anti-Semitic Nazi tabloid Asturma and his caption read The World's Greatest Talmudist, but this was not a positive that they were noting and he was being hunted by the Nazis. So, he fled to Levolve or Lemburg as it was then known. And unfortunately, much of what he wrote before the war, nine out of ten volumes of his response were lost and he was subsequently deported to Siberia by the Soviets to forest 45 in Sverdolovsk. Now, when he got to Siberia, he was exempted from actual slave labor, so, you know, dropping down trees to a quota because of his advanced age, who's already in his, I think, mid-60s, but he was still obviously victim to the terrible conditions of deprivation, deporation of food, and the extreme cold. Now, he was careful to make sure that the Soviets didn't find out that he was a rabbi because they were all considered parasites by the USSR and he spent his days learning from memory, who's a genius, he would learn through Talmud, Shukhanarach, and he would record his chidushim on scraps of cement bags and occasionally on pieces of wood, many of which were somehow smuggled out of Siberia at one stage. And he had one safer with him. It was a copy of Nefesh Hachaim, which is a philosophical, important work on the learning of Torah, and he would learn it again and again. And one of the non-Jewish prisoners said, "How often can you read the same book?" Because, you know, if you just read it, you know how it ends. And he also taught young children the al-Aufbees because their parents were away at work. And he became a focal point for Jews in the area, they turned him for guidance, especially in areas of Kushras, and there's one very evocative letter that he wrote, which we still have the original of, a letter to a prisoner in a nearby camp in Hebrew, responding as to how to Kushra their utensils for Pesach. And there's also an answer to the question of two people who only have between them a small amount of Mutsa I Kuzayis, should one person eat it to fulfill the Midsfa, or should both taste it even though neither will carry out the biblical commandment, and he is inclined to opt for the one person over two, bring sort of various proofs. He also writes instructions for baking Mutsas where they had factories with heat. But just to understand who he was, one story, I think illustrates this, he would occasionally receive extra food from Jews, from prisoners, and he divided this food up with others. Now in the 1950s, when by then he'd already reached Jerusalem, he was one of the notatalachic authorities in Israel, a student of his, Rubenachem Goldberg, tells how he saw a non-religious Jew turn up outside the Tribina Rob's house, put on a kippah, and walk inside for what turned out to be an extended period of time. So his curiosity is very much aroused, and he asks the Jew what the reason for the visit had been. And the Jew answers, "You think you know Rabbi Weedenfeld, and I can assure you that you don't. I was in Siberia with my wife and children. We suffered like everyone else from a lack of food. One day I discovered two potatoes outside my door. I was sure they'd been dropped by someone, but when night came and they were unclaimed, I brought them in and we feasted that night. This happened again a few days later and continued at sporadic times for weeks. Now you might think it was a great act of kindness, but in Siberia, this wasn't kindness, it was almost lunacy to share food. And we eventually discovered that it was Tribina Rob doing it. So therefore I say nobody who wasn't in Siberia can even vaguely appreciate what I'm telling you, and therefore you don't know him." "Well when did you arrive in Israel?" He got there literally just before Pesach in 1946 after 70 years of exile and he you know he realized the losses he had sustained, brother, sisters, daughters, sons. He wouldn't speak about the past because he felt it was his duty to rebuild Torah. And over the week of Pesach, he met the leading Torah scholars in Eratisra'al, the Briskharov, the Ponyvicharov, the Belzerreba, the Rbisalajalte and that gave him the ability to continue and to build. So finally the very first Haggadda to contain a commentary, the earliest art scroll, except this one was authored in 1496 and printed in 1505 by someone quite famous Don Yitzhak Abar-Brenel. Now he lived a very stormy life as many know. He served as finance minister both to the king of Portugal and then subsequently to the king of Spain. In 1483 he was forced to flee Portugal and leave everything behind and then nine years late in 1492 he fled Spain and once again he was forced to leave everything behind. In 1495 when he's in Italy in Naples he has to flee after a pogrom against the Jewish community there which nearly wiped out all the Jews and he travels to Kwarthu. He comes back to mainland Italy in 1496 and somehow he finds not just the time but the ability to write and in many ways it was a very personal Haggadda produced at a weary age of 58 which he called Zevach Pesach and the commentary is a reaction to his suffering in the introduction he reflects on the pain that he and so many Jews had recently gone through and he recalls the better times the happier Pesach celebrations in Portugal and in Spain when he was able to sit at a table with his wife and children and he therefore describes the inquisition and the expulsion in very a urban type terminology. It's not that appropriate for Pesach surely when we're sort of celebrating the freedom and. Okay so it's a good point and he actually mentions that because first of all his goal in writing the commentary is to say that despite the great suffering we need to focus on the fact that God will fulfill the
his promises just as he did in Mitzereyme an Egypt. And he sharpens the question you've just asked in the opening paragraph of Mugget. The aburbanal asks, why are we grateful that we are no longer in Egypt when it's very possible that the situation we are now in is worse. So, you know, how can someone who's currently in exile, he writes, feel as though he has left Egypt when for all meaningful purposes he is still in exile. And he answers with the three phases towards the beginning of Mugget, just after the Manish Tano. He says, (speaks in foreign language) We are now wise enough to see how unique our relationship with God is in all generations. That's one thing. (speaks in foreign language) We understand that the status that coming out of Egypt and the original settlement in Eritisrael gave us is ongoing. (speaks in foreign language) We realize how much receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai as the sequel to coming out of Egypt transformed us. And he then says, how do we experience Pesach in exile? If you are alive under any conditions and able to hold a seda and tell the story, you are an example of a miracle. And he adds that every individual survival in the Spanish exile is because of hidden miracles from God. And this is from somebody who knows, who had everything and was forced to become a refugee numerous times. So, perhaps a message to those from the Ukraine who are experiencing very difficult times at the moment that this should give them, this commentary speaks to them. And ultimately, he promotes a positive outlook and the fact that redemption will occur for us. - Oh, wow. I mean, even the text of maggots, we say, "Shabhoud-ovedar, omadalin al-halisaynu," we recount the many times throughout history that we still, and yet there will be a final redemption. - Right, but we are talking in theory and he is giving voice to the pain that he and many others went through, yeah. - Thank you very much indeed, Robert Hirsch. And we will see you, I suppose, next week on Colomode for around two of a. - Yes. - A piece of it. So, I wish you a wonderful Yomte of, I wish you all a little listeners a wonderful Yomte of. I hope this added a bit of richness to the seda. And when you open that Goddard to appreciate, maybe there's won't be any bird heads, but. - All people pointing out their spouses and calling them morrow. - I'm sure that will happen this year. So thank you very much and as usual, any comments feedback can be emailed to
[email protected]. Thank you, good Yomte of.
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