I’ve always found it fascinating to contrast and compare how the Jewish holidays are celebrated in different countries around the world. Even within a particular country, old traditions sometimes fall by the wayside and new, contemporary ones evolve.
In modern times, the celebration of Purim has remained essentially the same everywhere: besides the mitzvot associated with the holiday – reading the megillah and delivering mishloach manot – it’s a time of great celebration, even silliness, when Jewish children (and many adults) dress up, wear masks, and hold masquerade parties and public parades.
The following are some unusual items and associated stories involving the celebration of Purim in pre-state Eretz Yisrael.
Shown above is a first-day cover of the Wolfgang Von Weisl stamp issued by the Israeli Postal Authority on September 19, 2014. The tab reads “Graf Zeppelin, Tel Aviv, Purim 1929” . . . and therein lies an amazing tale.
The Most Unusual Place for a Megillah Reading
Writer, journalist, physician, military strategist, and world-renowned expert on Islam, Binyamin Ze’ev (Wolfgang) Von Weisl (1896-1974) was one of the most colorful and important, albeit generally unknown, figures in the history of modern Zionism. He was among the founders of the Revisionist movement and helped lead the Zionist struggle for the establishment of a Jewish state but is perhaps best known for famously reading the Scroll of Esther on Purim while a passenger aboard the legendary Graf Zeppelin on a trip from Berlin to the Mediterranean.
On Purim, March 26, 1929, over 80,000 Jews from all across Eretz Yisrael and from neighboring countries gathered in Tel Aviv to celebrate the city’s famous Purim carnival. When the airship flew over the city, the crowds, who cheered enthusiastically at this new technological wonder, were greeted with over 65 pounds of celebratory confetti that Von Weisl dumped out them. He then proceeded to read the megillah and, pouring from his bottle of Caramel Mizrahi wine for the five German ministers aboard the zeppelin, proposed a toast to “the state of the Jews” while flying over the Dead Sea.
Von Weisl manifested his Zionist philosophy as early as age 11, in 1907, when he published his first political article, a call to transport Yemenite Jews to Eretz Yisrael. In 1914, in the midst of his medical studies, he served as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, earned the Iron Cross, and established a Jewish corps to defend the Jewish quarter. His Jewish National Fund work brought him in contact with Jabotinsky, then a Keren Hayesod leader, and he proposed to transport 30,000 pioneers and to conquer Eretz Yisrael. He also led the struggle for the Kotel Ha-Maaravi, served as a delegate to several Zionist conventions, and founded and edited a number of Zionist newspapers.
After completing his medical studies in 1922, Von Weisl made aliyah and served as the first instructor in the Haganah’s officer course. Traveling through Arab countries, he was welcomed everywhere by Arab royalty, kings and sheiks whom he sought to persuade to recognize Zionism. He was on the verge of a monumental contribution that would have changed the entire course of Jewish history involving what would later become the Israeli Palestinian conflict: he somehow received the blessing of King Faisal of Iraq to transfer Arabs from Eretz Yisrael to cultivate his vast unpopulated lands, but British objections killed the deal.
Von Weisl was stabbed by an Arab during the bloody disturbances of August 1929; eulogies were published around the world and trees were planted in his memory, but he survived. On the eve of World War II he was among the first to understand the Nazi threat and, proposing illegal emigration to Eretz Yisrael, urged Jews to save themselves. He almost single-handedly raised the funds for the first illegal immigrant ship, Af Al Pi and, arrested by the British and jailed in Latrun, his 28-day-fast in jail turned him into a national hero.
During Israel’s War of Independence he led battles to liberate the Negev. In one incident, a column of Egyptian tanks was threatening to cut off the Negev from the rest of Israel and Von Weisl, commanding a small artillery battalion, repelled the Egyptian advance, promptly recited the Shehecheyanu blessing, and wrote to his wife, “I aimed; God hit.”
Late in his life Von Weisl was asked by the Austrian ambassador to Israel why he had never returned to his beloved Vienna. In a classic example of both his fierce dedication to Zionism and his biting humor, he responded: “When I was a medical student in Vienna, graffiti on the walls and doors of the toilets called `Jews out,’ and I always read toilet literature seriously.”
Purim at the Levant Fair
“Come Visit Eretz Yisrael in the Spring.” Exhibited here is a rare 1932 card inviting visitors to participate in “Purim, Maccabiah, and the Levant Fair.” Some 831 foreign firms exhibited and 285,000 people attended. It was the first Levant Fair in which foreign governments – including Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and Germany – officially participated. Besides Purim, other events advertised by the card include the “Adloyoda,” the famous annual Purim carnival in Tel Aviv, and the first Maccabiah, the “Jewish Olympic Games,” held in commemoration of the 1,800th (the “hundredth chai”) anniversary of the Bar Kochba revolt.
The Levant Fair (Yerid Hamizrach) began in 1924 when a group of Tel Aviv entrepreneurs organized a small trade exhibition in Neve Tzedek. The purpose of the fair was to boost the developing industry and trade of the Jewish community; to encourage immigration to Eretz Yisrael, then still under the British mandate; and to display the friendly relationship between the Jewish settlements and the Arab countries surrounding it. The fair, which became one of the most famous trade fairs in the world, was held every year or two until it was incapacitated by Arab pogroms in 1936.
The impetus for the fair was the Fifth Aliyah, when many Jewish immigrants came with financial capital and business experience and therefore contributed profoundly to the industrial growth of the community. Moreover, some British commissioners, including high commissioner Arthur Wauchope, who was known for his pro-Zionist approach, expressed their willingness to assist the struggling Jewish settlements.
According to a lovely urban legend, the inspiration for the flying camel logo, which was selected at the 1932 Fair, was the Arab mayor of Jaffa who, mocking the fair’s organizers and their chances for success, is reputed to have said to Tel Aviv mayor Meir Dizengoff, “You’ll have your fair when a camel will grow wings!”
Another notable event at this fair took place when the first radio station in Eretz Yisrael, which came to be known as Radio Tel Aviv, went on the air under a special license issued by the British Mandatory Government. In its first broadcast, “Mayor Meir” (i.e., Dizengoff) expressed hope that the station would expand someday to reach a worldwide Jewish audience.
Purim Will Not Be Permitted
Rav Aryeh Levin (1885-1969) studied in the Volozhin Yeshiva, received semicha from Rav Chaim Berlin, and was one of the most beloved rabbanim of Eretz Yisrael during the Mandate period and through the initial decades of the state. He was famously known as “the Father of the Prisoners” for his visits to members of the Jewish underground imprisoned by the British in the Ventral Prison of Jerusalem in the Russian Compound.
In 1931, Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook appointed Rav Levin as the official Jewish prison chaplain; he accepted on condition that he receive no pay. For over 20 years he would walk on Shabbat and holidays from his Nachalot home to visit and pray with the Jewish prisoners, most of whom were members of the Palmach, Irgun, Haganah, or Lehi, and he set up Room 29 in the Central Prison in Jerusalem (now the Museum of the Underground Prisoners) as a synagogue.
In this March 12, 1947 correspondence on his Palestine Prisons letterhead, C.H. Bromfield, the commissioner of prisons for Palestine, writes to Rav Levin that a minyan for Purim will not be permitted:
As you are aware, religious tolerance is one of the outstanding features of the prisons Administration of this country and in all cases where the administration of the prisons is not affected by religious practice, every facility is readily granted; in fact, it could be fairly stated that the rules for the administration of the prisons are framed with especial regards to ritual religious requirements.
In the past, it would appear that Purim Eve prayer and celebrations had been allowed by the Superintendent of the Central Prison, Jerusalem, although this is not one of the officially recognised feast days. This year owing to a shortage of staff and other administrative difficulties it was not possible to allow collective prayer.
I am aware of and grateful for all the good work you have and are doing and assure you of my continued intention to extend to all prisoners every possible facility for their moral and spiritual welfare.
Rav Levin, known as the “Tzaddik of Jerusalem,” made a special point on Purim to visit the widows of rabbanim. When their husbands were alive, their homes were filled with people bringing mishloach manot, singing, and celebrating but now, with many of the widows forgotten, it was Rav Levin who took it upon himself to personally bring joy to them on Purim.
The Burial Site of Mordechai and Esther?
Exhibited here is a card, circa early 1900s, depicting the burial shrine of “Mordechai the Tzaddik and Esther the Queen:”
“This is the head of the grave commanded to be erected by the modest man, Avushafat the son of Ohed the Physician.”
Although it is undisputed that both Esther and Mordechai died in the Persian capital of Shushan, and while various monuments in Persia have been cited as their burial place, an alternative tradition holds that they were brought to Eretz Yisrael for burial.
Written tradition from the Middle Ages locates the burial place in the Galilean village of Bar’am, along Israel ‘s northern border with Lebanon, which was a Jewish village as far back as Mishnaic times.
Bar’am as the burial place of Esther and Mordechai is first mentioned in the journeys of Rav Shmuel ben Shimshon in a 1211 account of his visit to Eretz Yisrael. Menachem Peretz Hachevroni, who visited a few years later, relates that “I saw one rock and within it the grave of Queen Esther, who had commanded her son Koresh – while she was still alive – to bring her there.”
The 14th-century author of Totsaot Eretz Yisrael describes the burial place: “The mouth of the cave is on top and a large rock covers its opening.” Various epistles written from Jerusalem in 1454 tell of prayers held in several holy places throughout the Galilee, among them “The house of Esther the Queen.”
Rav Moshe Basola, visiting the area in 1522, depicts the grave he saw in Bar’am as “a mound of rocks, and a rovere [oak] tree to mark it.” This would seem to tally with the 1537 description by the author of Yichus Ho’ovos Vehanivi’im, who notes:
This is the shape of the monument on the grave of Queen Esther, of blessed memory. Arched on top of the building is a lone rock that looks like the hats that women in this land used to wear. And every Shushan Purim a minyan goes to her grave from Tzefat and reads the megillah there. They eat and drink and make merry.
There is no grave in the Bar’am area today that meets these descriptions because the Jewish settlement there was destroyed in 1762. Ruins of an ancient stone building in the Bar’am National Forest, more than a kilometer southwest of the ruins of ancient Bar’am, are currently cited as the graves of Esther and Mordechai and, since Purim 1949, groups of Jews have again gathered to read the megillah there.
A Confusing Purim Card
Finally, shown here is a beautiful micrograph of the entire Megillat Esther, on a Rosh Hashanah card bearing the pasuk that contains the Torah commandment to sit in a sukkah during Sukkot.
Someone – writer, proofer, editor, publisher? – must have been badly confused.
A happy and healthy Purim to all!
