From Spain to Amsterdam to Germany…

V

ery few 15th-century handwritten manuscripts have survived the years. Some were destroyed by fire, some by water, some by neglect — and some
by exile….

The NLI owns one rare Megillas Esther that was written in 1465, less than 30 years before the catastrophic end of Spanish Jewry and the destruction of innumerable Jewish seforim. Miraculously, the megillah is still very readable, its beautiful black lettering clearly telling the story of our people’s salvation.

The first column of the scroll, however, is torn and badly damaged. The brachos said before the Megillah are almost unreadable. Is it simply the effect of time, or perhaps a deeper symbolism of of the destruction of a thriving, blessed Jewish community? And is it my imagination, or does the rip at the heart of the brachos look eerily like Eretz Yisrael?

IN

1492, most Jews left Spain. Many escaped to Portugal, only to be exiled a few years later. The Jews who remained in Spain were forcibly converted. But many of these conversos remained secret Jews, risking torture and death to cling to their Jewish identity.

The NLI holds a chilling reminder of the perils the conversos faced — not a Megillah, and it’s more connected to Pesach than Purim. It’s not even from Spain or Portugal. The postal markings on the back of a colored postcard in the NLI collection reveal that it came from Russia,but surprisingly it graphically shows Spanish or Portuguese Inquisition soldiers raiding a secret Pesach Seder. A picture of soldiers attacking Jews unfortunately could come from many places and times in history, but this one definitely captures a moment of horror in Spain or Portugal at the time of the Inquisition. The clue is a picture of Don Yitzchak Abarbanel,hanging on a wall in the picture, looking down on the chaos as Inquisition soldiers break into the secret Seder. Rav Abarbanel chose to be exiled from Spain with his people though as King Ferdinand’s treasurer he was given permission to stay in Spain. (Legend has it that Ferdinand even offered to allow nine men to stay with him so he could have a minyan.) The postcard isn’t dated, but postcards became popular in Russia in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. The picture itself shows a young man who seems about to hurl a lit candelabrum at the curtains as soldiers march into a Pesach Seder.

Was he trying to hide evidence? Did he prefer to die by fire than  face the Inquisition’s torture? While it’s unclear, the flames in the postcard certainly evoke memories of the auto-da-fé, public Inquisition trials where Jews were burned alive. In the middle of the 16th century laws about conversos leaving Portugal were eased. Many left for Amsterdam. Descendants of those conversos wrote two megillahs that somehow reflected the horrors their ancestors faced 200 years before — and that an anonymous postcard printer in Russia graphically illustrated for reasons lost to us today.

The Spanish Megillah

Listen closely to the baal korei chanting Megillas Esther. You’ll hear a number of references to many languages: An edict by Achashveirosh demanding that wives speak the language of their husbands; Haman’s evil decree sent to 127 lands, each in its own language; and then there’s the famous midrash recounting how Mordechai’s proficiency in 70 languages allowed him to uncover the plot of Bigsan and Seresh.

That said, of course, Lashon Kodesh is the one and only language in which we read the Megillah on Purim.

Unless, perhaps, you’re a 17th-century descendant of Spanish conversos living in Amsterdam….

The NLI owns a unique megillah, written entirely in Spanish, in Latin letters — what we would call the abc’s. Except for the language, it adheres to the halachos and details of a kosher megillah scroll, suggesting an educated sofer. Some examples: The sofer follows the minhag of writing certain letters either bigger or smaller than the other letters — only in this case, the letters are Latinate. The brachos chanted by the baal korei before and after reading the megillah are also included in this unusual scroll.

Aliza Moreno, an NLI Judaica librarian, suggests that the Spanish Inquisition of two centuries earlier lies behind this one-of-a-kind scroll. The conversos had a special affection for the story of Esther — a Jewish heroine who, like them, was forced to hide her Jewishness but who kept her connection to her people. The Spanish megillah may have been created for descendants of conversos who had lost their Hebrew but who wanted to stay connected to their Jewish heritage.

Amsterdam, 17th Century

Another 17th century megillah also suggests deep memories of the trauma of the Inquisition. This one is written in Hebrew. Like the Ferrara megillah, it illustrates the Purim story, though not in color. What stands out in this megillah is the sheer brutality depicted in some of the pictures.

In one graphic illustration, one box of text is flanked by two parallel pictures: Vashti on her knees, about to get her head chopped off on one side, Esther on her knees, being crowned queen on the other.

Bigsan and Seresh, Haman’s ten sons, and Haman himself are all depicted swinging eerily from enormous gallows. And the gruesome pictures of battle scenes in which the Jews destroy their enemies would probably be given a trigger warning today.

Therapists suggest that intense trauma can be handed down for generations: They call it intergenerational trauma. The violent pictures in this 17th century megillah might well reflect the anger of descendants of Spanish Jewry at their ancestors’ tormentors — and reflect, as well, the intensity of their rejoicing as they celebrate their return to their people.

From Amsterdam to Germany…

Megillas Esther tells a joyous story: Mordechai triumphant, the Jewish people saved, our enemies destroyed.

And yet, there is a somber note amid the rejoicing, as we think of Queen Esther, who sacrificed her chance of returning to Mordechai and her people by going to Achashveirosh of her own volition to plead her people’s cause.

In more recent memory, our people were saved from the destruction of the Shoah, and b’ezras Hashem, we have miraculously rebuilt. But the Holocaust doesn’t have the perfectly happy ending of the Megillah; six million Jewish souls murdered can attest to that.

The NLI owns a 19th century Megillah in book, not scroll, form. If you flip through its pages, you can almost hear the haunting strains of Megillas Eichah.

The book, printed in 1867 in Amsterdam, includes the Hebrew words of the Megillah with a parallel column translated into Dutch. This volume was given as a school prize in 1886 to a Dutch girl, Vroutje Bloomist, Faygeleh bas Yuda, for being, “A diligent student, praised for her effort and excellence above others her age.” The book is part of the NLI’s large Otzar haGolah, Treasures of the Diaspora Collection, works that miraculously survived the destruction of the Shoah and were afterward brought to Israel.

Daniel Lipson, an NLI researcher, tries to trace the owners of these remnants of pre-Holocaust Jewish bookshelves. He researched the original owner of this thin volume and found that although her prize survived — sadly, she did not. Lipson found her name on a list of those who died in the last weeks of the war on “The Lost Train.”

In 1945, in the last weeks of the war, three trainloads of Jews from Bergen-Belsen were sent by the SS to Theresienstadt, possibly to be exchanged for German POWs. One train was liberated by the Allied armies. A second made it to Theresienstadt. And a third… was lost.

The Lost Train, as it’s now known, got stuck in transit because tracks had been destroyed. The German guards fled, and the train became a death trap for passengers who didn’t manage to escape. When the Russian army came across it some weeks later, they found hundreds of Jews dead of malnutrition and disease.

Faygeleh was one of them.

We know the fate of our prize-winning schoolgirl, by then a married woman close to 60 years old, because of an extraordinary list kept by a Jew named Yosef Weiss. Weiss, who had fought for Germany in World War I, left Germany for Holland when the Nazis came to power. The Nazis caught up with him in Holland, and he ended up in Bergen-Belsen. There he was given administrative duties, and he made a secret list of prisoners, including their dates and places of birth — and death.

In the last weeks of the war, Weiss and his family survived The Lost Train, though his wife died soon after liberation. In the nightmarish weeks on the train, Weiss continued to make lists, which he typed up and organized after the war. (The lists can be found in the archives of the Ghetto Fighters Museum.) And on that list Faygeleh appears, as Vroutje Pront-Bloomist, a Dutch woman born in 1873.

Weiss included approximate places of burial in his list. Faygeleh was buried near the train tracks between the German towns of Finsterwalde and Schipkau. We don’t know if she had children and if so, if any survived. She has no gravestone.

What she did leave as a legacy is this thin volume of Megillas Esther that she’d won almost 60 years before. That prize, now stored safely in Israel’s National Library, is a kind of marker for her life and her death. The story of the Megillah that she won, and of the survival of our people despite losses and pain, remind us of the eternity of the eternal people; though we hear the somber tune of Megillas Eichah in a Megillah saved from the Holocaust, we also know that ultimately the joyful melody of Megillas Esther will triumph.

From Germany to Morocco

Persecution in Italy. Inquisition and exile in Spain. Death in Europe….

Can reading Megillas Esther be so depressing?

The answer, of course, is no, because of the miraculous salvation at the end of the Megillah, and the promise of the eternity of our people.

Which brings us to a much more cheerful Megillah — though with a much more chilling name:

Megillas Hitler [yemach shmo v’zichro].

The NLI has a copy of this very unusual megillah. It’s a printed paper scroll, written by a Hebrew teacher and sofer named Asher Prosper Hassine from Casablanca. Morocco had been under the control of Vichy France, which collaborated with the Nazis, until November 1942. Hassine (who eventually made aliyah and became a member of the Knesset) wrote this “megillah” in 1944 to celebrate the liberation of Morocco from the Nazis.

Hassine obviously knew his “real” Megillah well. His megillah parallels the language of Megillas Esther. The famous opening lines, “vayehi bimei Achashveirosh…,” becomes “vayehi bimei Hitler, the painter and the corporal, who rules Germany and 17 countries….”

Shushan habirah becomes Berlin habirah. Achashveirosh appoints Haman as his second-in-command; Hitler appoints Himmler. Achashveirosh can’t sleep — and in Megillas Hitler, it’s President Roosevelt who suffers from insomnia and decides to save the world. In Megillas Esther we rejoice as the ten sons of Haman are hanged; in Megillas Hitler we cheer the imprisonment of 12 Nazi officers in Africa.

Hassine includes the traditional brachah — without Hashem’s name — at the end of the Megillah. Cursed be Haman… cursed be Zeresh… blessed be Mordechai… blessed be Esther — so says the traditional Megillah. In Hassine’s work, the ones cursed include Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Himmler, Goering… and all the evil ones. And the blessed? Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin (!), De Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek… and, like Charvona, General Catreaux (a Free French general involved in liberating North Africa) zachur latov, is mentioned for good.

At the end of this strange scroll, Hassine explains that he isn’t writing a Purim parody as a joke. First and foremost, he feels gratitude for the salvation of the Jews of his country. He suggests that the Jews of Morocco celebrate a “Purim Sheini,” a second Purim, every November to mark their liberation. By using the style of the Megillah, Hassine places the victory of the Allies over the Nazis in his own time and place into the template of Jewish history set out by Megillas Esther.

Hassine adds that his Megillah should be chanted to the traditional Megillah tune. But, he adds, it shouldn’t be read with joy and celebration — for at the time he wrote it, Jews all over Europe were still being murdered. In what might be the most “Purimdig” theme of all, Hassine demonstrates the understanding that only when Jews care for each other and come together — as Esther says, leich knos es kol haYehudim, go gather all the Jews — will there be true salvation.

And that, as they say, is the gantze megillah.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1052)