Jewish Holidays Research Articles

A Permissible Sin: Perceptions of Smoking Among Haredi Men in Israel

This essay deals with perceptions of smoking among Haredi men in Israel. Though trends in smoking within the Haredi society have been quantitively examined, no qualitative research has ever focused on the motivations and mindsets stimulating individuals’ choices to take health risks despite religious precepts to the contrary. Israeli Haredi men sometimes start smoking in their early childhood and are unmotivated to quit, and such circumstances should be examined. We interviewed 20 Israeli Haredi male smokers and overviewed the Haredi daily press and rabbinical attitudes toward smoking. Our findings indicate that Haredi men typically consider smoking as either permissible or, at worst, a minor sin. From childhood they view smoking as an expression of maturity, and moreover one which is associated with Jewish holidays and particular religious practices. Such perception relies on the Haredi establishment's normative exclusion of smoking from the Halachic commandments that aim to protect health. Finally, we illustrate key points to consider in paths leading to an intervention process to change these norms and practices.

A Hermeneutic Approach to the Formation of a Secular Culture in Modern Israel

ABSTRACT The creation of the state of Israel was the outcome of the Zionist movement, which originated in Europe and was itself inspired by fundamental European ideas—Enlightenment, national self-determination, democracy and socialism. From its earliest days Zionism was primarily a secular movement that rejected the religious establishment and religious way of life of the Jews in the Diaspora. In many respects, however, the founders of the state and the principles on which they founded its institutions—the political, judicial, economic, social, and educational—were rooted in the ethical values and cultural practices of the Jewish tradition which they had apparently rejected. To explain this complex process of secularization of a very ancient religious and cultural tradition—which many see as an unresolved or unresolvable conflict between two opposing systems of thought—I draw on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and especially on his Truth and Method (1960). Culture, according to Gadamer, is a continuous flow of tradition within what he called “the horizon.” People, he argued, create and live within a given cultural tradition, but they are at the same time its interpreters, enlarging it by adopting elements from various cultures and ideologies, or “horizons.” From this hermeneutic perspective, the founders of modern Israel and their successors were the active interpreters of the Jewish tradition within the larger historical context of the European Enlightenment. I illustrate this process of cultural interpretation by focusing on the secularization of the Jewish holidays, specifically on the way the Kibbutz movement, a leading symbol of the new Israel, re-interpretated Jewish holidays like Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost) and Yom Kippur, and gave these religious festivals a secular-Israeli content. However, this dynamic pioneering stage of secularization may be said to have ended by the 1980s. From then on, the secular identity of Israeli society has been undergoing a variety of radical changes.

Jewish Diversity in Israel

Abstract This article explores complementary dimensions of Jewish diversity in Israel. In the past two decades Jews have evolved in polarising directions: whereas the fringes of ultra-Orthodox and the secular widened, the traditional middle narrowed. Within each sector, religious identification across an individual's life cycle is dynamic, with the ultra-Orthodox and religious bolstering their religiosity and the secular and traditional moving away from any religious patterns. Alongside some significant differences among the religious sectors in attitudes and behaviours, such as the importance of being Jewish or the observance of ongoing rituals, there are broad consensuses on matters of belonging to the Jewish people, the importance of remembering the Holocaust, and the celebration of the major Jewish holidays. Still, Israeli society sees disagreements over values and institutions that the state should maintain, and over tension between Judaism and democracy. The discussion assesses differences in religious identity between Israel and Europe and the implications of this for European Jewry.

Intertextuality and Its Different Facets in the Narrative Analysis of the Book of Esther and 3 Maccabees

While the interpretation of the book of Esther has posed many challenges in the past, a key and well-recognized aspect of this text is that it presents a narrative behind one of the most important Jewish holidays, namely, Purim. As such, it also strongly influenced Jewish culture, including similar texts written to cultivate Jewish traditions in the diaspora. In this article, an analysis of possible intertextual connections between Esther and the apocryphal book of 3 Maccabees is presented. The latter was likely written for Jews living in Alexandria. While this topic has been studied in the past by several authors, in this article emphasis is laid on narrative similarity between both books. In particular, five key elements of this similarity have been identified, and additional parallel fragments have been presented. Their distribution and their likely origin from different versions of the book of Esther support claims about the possible origin of 3 Maccabees from a mature version of Esther.

Anatomy of Torture by Ron E. Hassner

Reviewed by: Anatomy of Torture by Ron E. Hassner Ryan M. Welch (bio) Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture (Cornell University Press 2022), ISBN 9781501762031, 200 pages. Torture works (sometimes). That rather non-committal declaration might risk me being labelled pro-torture by some. At least, that’s the feeling I get from my past experiences. For example, early in my graduate school career, a heavy-hitter scholar visited our department. He graciously took a few graduate students to coffee at our campus café. There he told a story detailing the impossibility of publishing a paper that showed state torture levels correlated with fewer terror [End Page 347] attacks in the future. Reviewers and/ or editors, it seemed, could not bring themselves to publish something that empirically showed torture may be in any way efficacious. This anecdote meshed well with my experience in a graduate seminar the following year with the rather uncomfortable title, the Ethics of Torture, where I found myself wondering aloud to the class about torture’s ability to compel people to divulge information they would rather keep secret. The looks on the students’ faces in the decidedly anti-torture class made me wonder if I had become a torture apologist just for considering it. If only Ron E. Hassner’s Anatomy of Torture had been available a decade sooner. In the book, he sets out to answer a fundamental empirical question: Can torture work? Anecdotes abound, but, due to both ethical and national security considerations, until now, we have had no way of systematically answering that question. Or so we thought. Instead of patiently waiting decades for governments to declassify material, Hassner devised a rather creative solution—look to the past; so far into the past, that the present government has no political reason to oppose the research. To that end, Hassner relies on centuries-old archives of the Spanish Inquisition. For all of the gore-filled reality of torture, the Inquisition kept decidedly tidy books of the practice including: the victims, what the Inquisition knew prior to the torture, what the victims divulged, and what the Inquisition uncovered after the torture. Voilà! Systematic data on torture and its effects. Over the course of seven chapters, Hassner paints a picture of the Spanish Inquisition as a strategic actor that learns over time. He wisps us from fifteenth-century Spain to seventeenth-century Mexico, introducing us to the human beings that would become the (future) victims of the Inquisition’s torture practices. Over these two centuries, and across several victims, the Spanish Inquisition learned a great deal about the most effective ways to wield pain for the purposes of acquiring information. In what follows, I review this brazen book by giving a short description of what Hassner finds and his methods for doing so before, then, posing several questions, that, without the book would not have occurred to me. As I’ll make clearer throughout this review, although I have several questions on main points of the book, the intellectual conversation it kicks off is invaluable for both ethical and policy reasons. Chapters 3 through 6 represent the main empirical contribution of the book. In Chapter 3, Hassner uses archival evidence to perform a sort of comparative case study between the Inquisitional courts in Ciudad Real from 1484–1500, and those same courts during the years 1500-1515. This period represents the earliest years of the Inquisition and Hassner uses it to present the Inquisition as a strategic actor capable of learning over time. From 1484-1500, the Inquisition uses a rather scattershot strategy, haphazardly deploying its tools in the service of identifying and eliminating the underground Jewish networks populated by what it called “conversos.” In this exploratory phase, the Inquisition did not know much about who belonged to these networks much less the specific religious crimes they were committing (i.e., various Jewish customs such as keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, refraining from eating pork, funeral rituals, and celebrating Jewish holidays). What it did know came from an attempt at initial information collection that came mostly from a grace period the courts instituted that offered individuals absolution for informing on [End Page 348] others. This, in...

The Revolt of Job : Salvaging the Lost World of Rural Hungarian Hasidim

Although the 1983 movie Jób lázadása (The Revolt of Job) garnered an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, it has fallen into relative obscurity outside of its native Hungary. Reflecting co-director Imre Gyöngyössy’s sympathy for marginalized minorities, gratitude to a Jewish couple who sheltered him during World War II, and Catholic humanism, the movie salvages the memory of the Hasidim in rural Hungary by depicting their customs, referencing biblical stories, and employing imagery from the paintings of Imre Ámos. Sensing they are doomed in Hitler’s Europe, an elderly childless Hasidic couple adopt a Christian boy to assure they will have an heir to remember them and their Jewish heritage. They educate him by celebrating Jewish holidays and endowing mundane activities with spiritual meaning, introducing him to Christianity to protect him from persecution, and modeling cordial relations with their gentile neighbors. Their sudden deportation personifies the decimation of rural Hungarian Jewry and implicates Hungarian fascists and gendarmes in this egregious injustice. As the only feature film to portray how Hasidic Jews lived before the Holocaust, The Revolt of Job merits renewed scholarly attention.

The Wise One, What Does She Say? Gendering and Queering Passover Symbols and Customs in the Reform Jewish Seder

The ritual feast known as the Seder on the eve of Passover is one of the most family-oriented Jewish holidays observed in Israel. Rich in symbolism and narrative, it invites a wide variety of discussions, study, and intergenerational mentoring and supervision. In this article I demonstrate how the Seder can serve as a representational performance that includes gender and sexual identities normally omitted from Jewish liturgy and society at large. A Reform community workshop in preparation for the Seder Night, exposes congregants to alternative versions of the traditional Haggadah text and introduces new ritual gestures that allow for the "presencing" of gay and heterosexual life-stories. Old patterns and family traditions are undermined; special additions are added to the Passover plate and the Haggadah itself. Thus, the narrative of national redemption is reconstructed as gender redemption, marking the Israeli Reform Jewish community as an egalitarian agency of contemporary conflict for gender equality.

Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature ed. by Miriam Udel

Reviewed by: Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature ed. by Miriam Udel Veronica Schanoes (bio) Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature. Edited and translated by Miriam Udel, New York University Press, 2020, 323 pp. Miriam Udel's Honey on the Page is a beautiful book and of great interest to fairy-tale scholars and aficionados. While the book does not focus on [End Page 325] fairy tales specifically, there are wonder tales found throughout the volume, and they offer provocative questions to our definitions of "fairy tale" as well as insight into the world of Yiddish literature, which thrived for seventy-five years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book opens with a foreword by Jack Zipes, who reflects on the political and ethical themes woven throughout the various stories. This topic is taken up in Udel's own introduction to the volume (the one directed at adults), where she gives the reader a very capable and informative overview of the development of Yiddish literature for children and the cultural and ideological milieus that gave it life. It is here she writes also of her decisions regarding the structure of the volume, which is modeled, she writes, on "early Yiddish anthologies, which tended to progress from the narrowly Jewish to the broadly humanistic," in an effort to "strike a sustainable balance between expressions of particular Jewish identity and gestures toward universal human belonging" (5). The book is divided into eight sections by theme: Jewish Holidays; Jewish History and Heroes; Folktales, Fairy Tales, Wonder Tales; wise Fools; Allegories, Parables, and Fables; School Days; In Life's Classroom; and Jewish Families, Here and There. Thus the volume begins with tales of Jewish holidays. Here can be found at least three tales that I would classify as fairy tales, such as Yaakov Fichmann's "A Sabbath in the Forest," which tells of a tailor who never fails to keep Shabbas, lost in the woods as the sun sets on a Friday night, before whom a magical palace, warm and full of food and wise fellowship, appears, so that he might observe the Sabbath properly. It is followed by Yankev Pat's "The Magic Lion," in which a rabbi, abandoned by his caravan while crossing a desert because he insisted on stopping to observe Shabbas, is sent a magic lion who helps him reach his destination. This section also contains Levin Kipnis's "Children of the Field," a retelling of "a legend very briefly related in the Talmud" having to do with Exodus (40). It might be argued that these stories concern divine miracles and so are not true fairy tales, but I would point to the often quite Christian literary tales of the late nineteenth century in response, such as those of Oscar wilde. A wonder tale can also be found in Part II on "Jewish History and Heroes," in which Rokhl Shabad's "Gur Aryeh" tells a tale of Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, in which the rabbi throws a miraculous feast for the king and becomes his most trusted advisor. The volume continues with Part III, "Folktales, Fairy Tales, wonder Tales," in which Solomon Bastomski's "The King and the Rabbi" presents us with another wonder-working rabbi, this time one who saves the Jews of the king's realm from a wicked advisor. This trope, of the rabbi who advises a king, speaks to one of the realities that separate a Yiddish wonder tale concerning royalty from a gentile one: if the protagonist is Jewish, his reward cannot be [End Page 326] marriage into the royal family and incorporation into the larger community. That "reward" would mean the abandonment of Judaism, and of course such an ending would be no happy ending at all, at least from a Jewish point of view. Being trusted as an advisor, then, is the highest material reward possible. Two other tales in this section, Judah Steinberg's "Roses and Emeralds" and David Ignatov's "The Red Giant" recall to me the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar wilde in their lyricism, but with gentler moralizing. Further sections of the book...

Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism by Sarit Kattan Gribetz (review)

Reviewed by: Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism by Sarit Kattan Gribetz Deborah Barer Sarit Kattan Gribetz. Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 391 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000179 Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism examines how the demarcation of time plays a role in identity construction. Structurally, the book progresses from the broad to the particular, moving from a study of the yearly calendar to the weekly cycle (with an emphasis on the Sabbath) to different ways of marking time within a single day. That trajectory is paralleled by a shift in focus from the external to the internal; while the first two chapters examine how time is used both to construct and reinforce distinctions between Jewish and non-Jewish communities (both Greco-Roman and Christian), the latter two chapters focus on the construction of difference within a Jewish framework (between women and men, as well as between humanity and God). These two progressions are closely related: when the focus is external, Kattan Gribetz emphasizes structures of time that would be visible to all participants, since the rabbis were aware of Greco-Roman holidays and vice versa, but when the focus is internal, her analysis shifts to less visibly time-based rituals, such as the way a woman's daily checking of her niddah status creates gendered experiences of time. The first part of the book, which looks at how time is used both to construct and to reinforce distinctions between Jews and non-Jewish Romans, as well as between Jews and Christians, offers a rich comparative historical analysis that will be of interest to many students of late antiquity, not just those who study rabbinic culture. The first chapter, "Rabbinic and Roman Time," provides an accessible explanation of the Roman calendar and its festivals, while also providing a rich analysis of the ways that rabbis reimagined those festivals and their significance. As Kattan Gribetz persuasively shows, the rabbis were deeply embedded in Roman society, even using Roman festivals to demonstrate the truth (and superiority) of Jewish holidays. The evidence demonstrates direct intercultural awareness and engagement. In the second chapter, "Jewish and Christian Time," Kattan Gribetz wades into more highly disputed territory, arguing that from as early as the third century, rabbinic discussions of Shabbat are in implicit dialogue with Christian writings about (and against) Jewish Sabbath observance, although they do not engage with Christian texts or thinkers explicitly. [End Page 442] Such a claim is, by its nature, more difficult to prove, but Kattan Gribetz advances a plausible and nuanced argument through her study of the Mekhilta's treatment of Shabbat and acknowledges possible alternative explanations, noting that the text repeatedly "struggles with ideas firmly based in second- and third-century anti-Jewish Christian theological works, though it is difficult to definitively conclude whether it was responding to such claims" (117). The second part of the book, which looks at how time is used to construct distinctions within the Jewish community (predominantly between men and women) and to understand the relationship between humanity and God, shifts to focus exclusively on rabbinic sources, and thus will be of particular interest to students of rabbinic literature and culture. The third chapter, "Men and Women's Time," draws a novel comparison between the daily practice of reciting the Shema, which comes to be gendered as male (although women may also recite it), and the daily practice of checking one's bodily purity status, which comes to be gendered as female and associated specifically with menstrual purity. This comparison is especially provocative because the recitation of the Shema is halakhically categorized as a time-bound commandment, a category of obligations that are triggered at specific times of day and from which women are considered exempt under Jewish law. Why, then, is the process of checking one's niddah (menstrual purity) status, which also happens every morning and night, not considered a time-bound commandment? Kattan Gribetz argues that although "it is not clear why rabbinic sources do not understand menstrual purity laws also as positive timebound commandments," the effect of this category and its gendered distinctions was "the bifurcation of time for men and women, as...

"You're My First Jew:" University Student and Professor Experiences of Judaism in a Small Indiana City.

There has been a Jewish presence in Muncie, Indiana since before the city was incorporated in 1865. Most people, however, do not even know that the city has a synagogue or where it is located. This study contextualizes this small Jewish community within small-town America. For this study, we interviewed 12 Jewish individuals, including college students and faculty members at Ball State University, about their Jewish religion, identity, and experiences with antisemitism in this East-Central Indiana community. The interviews were transcribed and hand-coded for elements of Jewish life and identity, including the frequency of terms related to Jewish holidays, Christian dominance, and antisemitic interactions. These transcripts were also used to create a word corpus that was analyzed using a text analysis tool that calculates the frequency of dominant terms and their context. From this analysis, we determined that many Jewish college students and professors in Muncie experience Christian hegemony, not only because of public religious celebrations, feelings of difference, and Christian evangelization on campus and in public spaces, but also because many of the people interviewed revealed experiences of being someone’s “first Jew,” or the first Jewish person they have met.

Zakladni filosoficke ideje spojene se sabatem

The basic ideas of Judaism are present throughout the year during important Jewish holidays. However, some of these festive motives repeat much more often - even every seven days on the Sabbath holiday. Shabbat integrates a theological, historical and educational dimension. Shabbat is also a fundamental expression of the philosophical principles of Jewish culture, which became the basis for European civilization. The celebration of this holiday is a reminder of the history of salvation, of covenant and commitment, but also of the joy that comes from God as a chosen one. The most important motives that appear in the celebration of the Sabbath and to which we pay attention are: creation (Rash Hashana), deliverance (Passau), covenants with God (Shavuot), upbringing and education of people who live near their God (Sukot) with an emphasis on social justice, peace and life.

British Jews, sport and antisemitism

This paper examines the nature and extent of antisemitism in community sporting environments in one British city. Drawing on interviews (n = 20) and focus groups (n = 2), we explore with participants their Anglo-Jewish identity in sports-related activities and settings. So as not to inflate the salience of antisemitism, we approach the issue obliquely through questions relating to their engagement in sport and identity. We consider the stereotype of the non-sporting Jew and find it is without foundation. Participants described limited but significant instances of antisemitism in sport and a decline in terms of the frequency and severity of antisemitic abuse encountered. We discuss the different responses of our participants when they encountered antisemitism and how sporting organisations were seemingly unaware of the Shabbat and the main Jewish holidays. Participants called for better education and awareness raising on what constituted antisemitic abuse.

“We are Already Dried Fruits”: Women Celebrating a Tu BiSh’vat Seder in an Israeli Reform Congregation

Jewish holidays have always been considered a sociocultural framework that designs the Jewish communal landscape. One such ritual is Tu BiSh’vat Seder, a ritual conducted annually by various Jewish congregations and social movements on the 15th of the month of Sh’vat. These communities conduct the ritual with its traditional festival symbols and infuse it with new social and cultural interpretations. This essay presents an ethnographic analysis of a Reform Tu BiSh’vat Seder in Israel in which the holiday’s spiritual narrative and symbols were related to the female congregants’ bodies and expressed their social interaction. Observing the women’s preparations for the Seder, participating in the performance of the ritual itself, and listening to the female Rabbi’s sermon allowed me to understand the diverse gendered meanings which are infused into the ritual. The Tu BiSh’vat Seder revealed the female congregants’ attitudes toward their own bodies and ages and even their attitudes toward one another. Furthermore, by participating in the Seder, they did not only produce sisterhood and feminine solidarity but also blurred the boundaries between their private homes and the congregational space. Thus, it can be said that the Reform congregation serves as a safe space that provides a viable Jewish theological framework and is an arena for gender discourses.

Vera u vaskrsenje iz mrtvih i stvaranje ex nihilo u 2Mak 7

The narrative of the martyrdom of a mother and seven brothers has had an enormous impact on the history of both Church and Synagogue. The cult of the Maccabean martyrs began to develop very early, so that in the fourth century at the latest, they were celebrated among the Christians. The story about them is to be found in the seventh chapter of the Second Book of Maccabees. Its canonical status has become the subject of debate in the last few centuries, both among the Orthodox and other Christians. The Synagogue rejected this book in its entirety, although it contains the oldest recorded testimony about the celebration of Hanukkah, one of the most important Jewish holidays today. However, the story of the mother and brothers remained preserved in Talmud in a certain form. Apart from the story of martyrdom, the seventh chapter hides one of the oldest, and certainly one of the most vivid descriptions of the early faith in the resurrection from the dead. In addition, the seventh chapter reveals the oldest explicitly expressed faith in God, who is the absolute Creator and who creates the world out of nothing. This idea will later become one of the central motives of Christian and Jewish cosmology.

Political socialization in kindergartens: Observations of ceremonies of the Israeli Jewish holidays and memorial days

AbstractThis study investigated political socialization in Israeli‐Jewish kindergartens. Specifically, it examined the scope of conflict supporting and peace supporting themes that Jewish‐Israeli kindergarten teachers transmit to children during ceremonies of national events. Sixty‐eight observations in 17 state‐secular and state‐religious kindergartens were conducted during five ceremonies: Passover, Holocaust Day, Memorial Day for Israeli Fallen Soldiers, Independence Day, and Jerusalem Day. The findings reveal that teachers transmit messages that comply with the conflict supporting themes to the children. The most dominant themes were collective self‐perceived victimization, justness of one’s own goals, positive collective self‐image, ingroup security, and patriotism. These themes were more dominant in state‐religious than in state‐secular kindergartens. Thus, we found that the kindergarten teachers serve as agents of political socialization who transmit the hegemonic national narratives to the younger generation.

'Avinu, Malkeinu, Kin(g) of All the Earth': A Yom Kippur D’var Torah

This talk explores the image of divine Kingship that is central to the liturgy of the Jewish High Holidays. The divine King is our sovereign and judge, and that image might even suggest a God Who is painfully transcendent and even austere. But the metaphor is much richer and multi-layered than that. The notion of divine Kinship emphasizes God’s immanence as much as God’s transcendence. It is a token of God’s engagement with the world and of God’s responsibility to the world. Moreover, in the Kabbalistic imagination, the attribute of “Malkhut,” divine Kingship, is associated with the Shekinah, the indwelling presence of God, the part of God that lives with us in exile, usually thought of as the feminine aspect of God. And it is at least worth noting that the Anglo-Saxon root of king – “cyning” – just meant “member of the kindred.” This text ends with a postscript that further explores the image of divine Kingship in the context of our contemporary sensibilities about gender hierarchies and the understandable aversion to employing apparently unapologetic masculine language about God.

Jewish Holidays from a Torah Perspective

Religious-legal relations is a unique in its kind component of any society. The relationship between religion and law is always reflected through the normative and institutional component of the legal system, and is also characterized by peculiar properties which are exclusively inherent for the Jewish society. The Jewish society is a vivid example of the fact when religious holidays give a special colouring to the Jewish religious-legal ideology and enhance the contrast in respect to other religious-legal systems of the world. Such identity is preceded by the history of self-determination of the Jewish people, the genesis of the formation and evolution of the legal system, as well as the type of the legal ideology of Jewish society. All of this collectively forms the general understanding of what constitutes the Jewish holidays and what content and idea is put into each of them. The object of the research is the social relations of the Jewish people, that reflect the order of keeping and celebrating the Jewish holidays established and regulated by the Torah. The article is devoted to the study of the genesis and process of the establishment of Jewish holidays as one of the components of the Jewish legal tradition with centuries-old history. Taking into account the object ofscientific research, the author has used general scientific and special-scientific methods. The main method which has been used in the research is – discrete method, with the help of which the genesis of Jewish holidays is revealed through the prism of Torah. The author has partially used the historical, system, comparative legal, hermeneutical methods and method of critical analysis. The historical method used is especially of great current interest, as far as the study of origin and formation of Jewish holidays requires a retrospective analysis and identification of the relevant developmental patterns. Also system method has been used - the application of it is due to the necessity of systematization of religious holidays. Was to be used a comparative legal method, with the help of which the Jewish days-off and holidays are compared with each other and partially with the holidays of other types of legal systems. The hermeneutic method is specified by the necessity of understanding and knowledge of the texts of Jewish laws - the Tories, the Talmud, and other Halachic sources of law. The use of the method of critical analysis as one of the basic in historical-legal studies had contributed to the analysis of scientific literature, which was used as the basis for the study. On the basis of the formal criterion, the content of Jewish holidays, which was initiated by the rules of the Writen Torah, is still open today. The peculiarity of Jewish holidays is illuminated through the prism of Halachic norms, including the Writen Torah, the Talmud, and the Halachic sources of the post-Talmudist period. Analyzing sources of Jewish law it was found that, taking into account the long history of Jewish law-making, the legal approach of halachists to the perception of Jewish holidays evolved and changed. This was due to the needs of the time and circumstances in which the Jewish people appeared. The author comes to the conclusion that the place devoted to religious holidays in the Jewish legal ideology is extremely important, confirmation of which is the preservation of the religious-legal values defined by Torah for more than 4 thousand years and their transformation into the religious legal system of the modern state of Israel.

Digital host national identification among Filipino temporary migrant workers

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, social networking sites (SNSs) have revolutionized transnational immigrant social networks channels. SNSs have become a source for engagement within these migrant communities and facilitate a fervent discourse on their perceptions and overall engagement with host societies. In this study, we aim to examine this discourse as they play out over the SNS landscape. Specifically, we ask how does the use of SNSs shape the encounter between migrant workers and host societies? To explore this query we suggest focusing on the case of live-in Filipino caregivers in Israel and their manifestations of host national identification on Facebook. Through an extensive methodological design that incorporates over 800 Facebook postings, and supported by an extensive ethnographic research, the study identified cultural constructs that integrated Israeli cultural components into the local Filipino discourse were identified and classified by four thematic categories: exploring Hebrew performance, Israeli annual festivities and Jewish holidays, current affairs in Israel and discussing Israeli public places. These findings underscore an affinity between these migrant workers and the local culture in what we deem as ‘Digital Host National Identification’. The study suggests that understanding this development can be conducive to understanding (albeit partial) integration processes of marginalized communities, elucidating temporary migrants’ cultural encounter with their host society and the role of computer-mediated-communications in representing these encounters to both local and international publics.

Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Sephardim

This article highlights issues pertaining to the Sephardim ([-im] is the masculine plural Hebrew ending and Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Spain. Sephardim thus literally means the Jews of Spain) in Sarajevo from the time of their arrival in the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century until the present day. I describe the status quo for the Sephardi minority in post-Ottoman Sarajevo, in the first and second Yugoslavia, and in today's post-Communist Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The objective is to shed light on how historic preconditions have influenced identity formation as it expresses itself from a Sephardic perspective. The aim is moreover to generate knowledge of the circumstances that affected how Sephardim came to understand themselves in terms of their Jewish identification. I present empirical findings from my semi-structured interviews with Sarajevo Sephardim of different generations (2015 and 2016). I argue that while none of the interlocutors conceive of Jewish identification as divergent from halachic interpretations of matrilineal descent, they moreover propose other conceptions of what it means to be Jewish, such as celebrating Shabbat and other Jewish holidays, and other patterns of socialization. At the same time, these individuals also assert alternative forms of being Bosnian, one that includes multiple ethnicities, and multiple religious ascriptions. This study elucidates a little-explored history and sheds light on the ways in which historical conditions have shaped contemporary, layered framings of identification among Sarajevo's current Jewish population. This article is relevant for those interested in contemporary Sephardic Bosnian culture and in the role and function of ideology in creating conditions for identity formation and transformation.

Romans, jedzenie i zbrodnia. Nawiązania do tradycji seder w filmach Woody’ego Allena

Passover is one of the most important Jewish holidays. It starts with dinner - Seder. Family gathered on this day drink red wine as a symbol of freedom and happiness. They eat matzo - flat bread to remember that Hebrews left Egypt grabbing unready bread leaven. The central place of the table is taken by the Seder plate with zeroa – shank bone, beitzah – roasted, hard – boiled egg, karpas – a vegetable, maror – bitter herbs, chazeret – bitter vegetable, charoset – sweet dessert. Most of described traditional dishes are visible in Seder scene of films Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) and Café Society (2016) by Woody Allen. In both films the extended families are gathered together. Their members’ personalities reflect symbols of Seder dishes.