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World Jewish News
Moscow Center Wins Grant for Important Purim Etnography
15.04.2009
The Jewish cultural center on Nikitskaya Street in Moscow hosted a presentation of a group of scientists, ethnologists, and philologists, members of the "Sefer"
Center of researchers and Judaica teachers in higher educational establishments.
They won a grant for the project "An ethnographic expeditions to old-timer Jews" within the program "Grassroots 2009", supported by the New York Federation and the "Genesis" Foundation.
The nearest expedition of this kind will go to Chernovtsy in May this year. The presentation was dedicated to the perception of Purim in the Jewish communities of Ukraine.
A teacher of the Center of Biblical and Jewish studies of Russian State University of Humanities Maria Kaspina described the curious additions that were made in the Middle Ages to explain the "dark places" in "Megilat Esther" - for example, the famous story of Queen Vashti, who did not wish to come to her husband and was replaced by Esther.
"Usually, the commentaries stated that Ahashverosh demanded that Vashti came to him naked, just with a crown on her head, that is why she refused," noted M. Kaspina.
She also said that interviews with the older generation of Ukrainian Jews, who remember "the true life" of communities, have provided the opportunity to hear
local bilingualism - when a story in Russian includes some Yiddish words, and vice versa.
"So we asked the interviewees to tell their stories twice - in Russian and Yiddish,"summarized Maria Kaspina.
A colleague of M. Kaspina, Alexandra Polyan spoke about the various customs of Purim and the origins of their appearance.
Her first story was devoted to the famous "gomentashen" - triangular sweet pies, the name of which is persistently translated as "ears of Haman", while in reality "tash" is a bag.
The pies were "renamed" as a result of people's rethinking of their form: they were said to be baked in memory of the fact that Haman's ears had been allegedly cut off, or in memory of Haman's triangular hat like those Napoleon wore (the source of this interpretation was a print of the XIX century).
However, it seems that gomentashes were not the only Purim dish. There are old records of some dumplings made for this holiday.
Another Purim custom, widely practiced in shtetls, was a carnival, like the Ukrainian carol-singing. The mummers came to both Jewish, and non-Jewish homes.
Ukrainians called the Purim carnival "Jewish malanitsa".
An employee of the Institute of Slavonic Studies Dr. Olga Belova, speaking of the perception of Purim by the non-Jewish population, noted that it combined exact details of what they saw and a totally fantastic perception of the holiday itself.
Purim was often called the festival of "Jewish Shrovetide", "Jewish sacrums", and indeed sometimes it appeared chronologically close to Shrovetide.
On the other hand, the peasants, who had a very vague idea of the history of Judaism and Christianity, believed, for instance, that Haman allegedly wanted to forcibly baptize all the Jews (this belief was recorded in Vilno province in the late 19th century).
And the fact that Christians were often invited to play the role of Haman in Purimspiels, created a belief that connects the murder of Haman to the "Christ crucified by Jews".
However, sometimes a carnival ended in tragedy. It happened so in 1827, when the denunciation of ill-wishers accused the Jews in Slonim of using a crucifixion from the roadside statue during the carnival.
Despite the fact that a local landowner and the priest conducted their own investigation and found out that no one touched the statue (the Jews were carrying and profaning the effigy of Haman), many Jews were punished by whipping, and a few people even sentenced to hard labor.
Concerning the issue of ethnographic expeditions, O. Belova stressed that this is a very important event, because in such a way, the last remnants of the collective memory of the life and customs of the Jews of Eastern Europe are preserved.
The presentation showed fragments of the interviews - in Russian and Yiddish - from previous expeditions. The participants questioned the Jews from Western Ukraine.
Semen Charny
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