Passover: The storied Haggadot of the National Library of Israel

Imagine you are sitting down to a Seder in Kibbutz Be’eri in 1950. The kibbutz was established in 1946, two years before the State of Israel, and named after Labor Zionist leader and author Berl Katznelson.

In 1946, the residents of Kibbutz Be’eri published their own Haggadah, which bears little resemblance to the traditional text of the Haggadah. For example, here is the text that replaces the “Mah Nishtana”:

“All other nights we would set the order of the festival of freedom while we were in the hands of a foreign and oppressive regime, struggling for the building of and immigration to the Land, and now we are free in the State of Israel, the gates are open to the returnees of the exile and is the breadth of our Land in our hands to be settled?…

“Last Passover night we stood opposite a strong enemy, who invaded our land and aspired to destroy us, and we threw him out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and now we are sitting in our homes while the enemy is at the gate?”

This is just one of the 15,000 editions of the Haggadah at the National Library of Israel, which has the largest collection in the world.

The world'a largest Haggadah collection

“There is no Hebrew book that has so many different kinds like Haggadot,” Hezi Amiur, the curator of the Israel Collection told The Jerusalem Post in an interview at the National Library. “Starting in the 1930s there are non-traditional Haggadot from Russia or Eastern Europe and some are in Yiddish. Starting in the 1960s, we even had many units in the army who wrote their own Haggadot.”

The curators here get excited when they talk about the collection.

“We have thousands and thousands of Haggadot and we are very proud of our collection,” Chaim Neria, the Judaica curator at the National Library, said. “We have manuscripts and rare print editions in all of the languages that Jews speak including Yiddish, Ladino, and Persian.”

The National Library Collection also includes some of the oldest Haggadot in the world including the Rothschild Haggadah from Germany in the 15th century. That Haggadah is part of the permanent exhibit at the library.

The Haggadah was copied and illustrated by Yoel Ben Simeon, who traveled around between Germany and northern Italy copying Haggadot using beautiful calligraphy and illustrating them. Around 30 of his works have survived. According to the website of the National Library, he had quite a sense of humor.

For example, the wise son in the Haggadah is picking his nose, thus making a witty pun on the Hebrew word “af,” used in the Haggadah to mean “even” but which can also mean “nose”, writes Yoel Finkelman in The 101 Treasures from the National Library of Israel. 

“Likewise, the son “who does not know how to ask” is depicted as too foolish to wear matching shoes or put on trousers. One drawing depicts a nude woman in the margins of the holy book. There is also a depiction of a lazy man responsible for preparing the Passover sacrifice who, after making himself comfortable and removing his shoes, is far more interested in warming his feet by the fire and enjoying a bottle of wine than in the sanctity of the religious ritual.”

This particular Haggadah has a fascinating story behind it. It was stolen by the Nazis from the Paris branch of the Rothschild family, who were known to have an impressive collection of Hebrew manuscripts. After the war, it somehow made its way to the US where a collector bought it, not knowing the history of the theft. He donated it to Yale University, which eventually returned it to the Rothschild family. They, in turn, donated it to the National Library.

Even older than the Rothschild Haggadah is a Haggadah printed in the late 1400s. Solomon ben Moses Alkabetz, one of the first printers in Guadalajara, Spain, printed a simple Haggadah of two columns with no commentary. It is the first-ever printed Haggadah and the only copy that still exists is in the library.

The Haggadot are also a way of understanding Zionist history, says curator Amiur. Many of the kibbutzim published their own Haggadot, often changing it every year or two. Their focus is not on the religious aspects of the exodus from Egypt, but on the Zionist movement’s transition from the Holocaust to being part of an independent state.

“I like these Haggadot very much when you know that hundreds of thousands of people sing this and say it aloud,” Amiur said. “There is no disagreement that this is the core of what it means to be a kibbutz member one year after the War of Independence.”

Some of the Haggadot have recipes, others have original art or poetry. There are Communist Haggadot, where the traditional text is replaced by Communist theory. There are many Haggadot that use a combination of traditional and modern texts.

The kibbutz Haggadot also show the Jews in the Diaspora as weak and the new Israeli kibbutznikim as strong. In 1946, members of the United Zionist Youth Movement wrote their own Haggadah in the DP camps in Germany. For them, the exodus from Egypt was something that they were in the process of living through from Europe to Israel. One of the survivors, Zvi Miklos Adler, who later Hebraicized his last name to Ben-Binyamin, made a series of woodcuts that showed the Egyptian bondage as the starvation and intensive labor in the concentration camps. 

Looking at this Haggadah today is a good way of understanding what it felt like to be a survivor in the 1940s, one of the most crucial decades in Israel’s history.

A new exhibition that includes magnificent Haggadot from both the library collection and that of renowned Zurich-based collector Rene Braginsky is now on display at the National Library. Among the treasures presented are a Haggadah from 1719, hand-copied by Meshulam Zimmel ben Moses of Polna, a leading artist working in Vienna, and the 1739 Braginsky Leipnik Haggadah Altona, copied and illustrated by Joseph ben David of Leipnik, one of the most popular and accomplished artists of his time. 

According to the exhibition catalogue, “Joseph ben David’s illustrations were innovative, featuring new themes and an unconventional palette.” The exhibition, Encounters of Beauty, is part of the library building and permanent exhibit tour.

Since October 7 the National Library has been preserving a different type of history – the Hamas attack and the ensuing war, which has now been going on for more than six months. In a press release, the library said that “this is the first event of its kind to be documented in real-time digitally.”

The library will bring together dozens of different documentation projects around the world that will include texts, photos, audio, and video. For example, the Civil Administration has already transferred about 200,000 photos and videos to the Library.

The library says that there are “tens of thousands of texts, audio and video recordings of fallen victims and fighters, interviews with survivors, families of hostages, plus hundreds of thousands of video recordings created by the IDF and the security forces, advocacy organizations, private individuals – as well as by the terrorists themselves.”

The library will also be housing individual archives from some of the kibbutzim that were the hardest hit including Kibbutz Be’eri and Nahal Oz.

A special Haggadah

The goal of the Seder is to tell the story of the exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt and to continue that tradition from generation to generation, said Irit Shapira Meir, curator of ANU-Museum of the Jewish People. But the interesting thing is that though the telling of that story has largely remained intact, over the generations and throughout the Jewish Diaspora, it has nevertheless picked up different cultural expressions over time wherever Jews have settled.

“Even when Israel was in Egypt, God told Moses to keep the day and do a sacrifice but after the destruction of the Temple there was no ability to do the paschal sacrifice and Jews found alternatives. And, also, the Seder night and the story of the exodus, which we see as very Jewish, is [based on] the Greek symposium tradition. When it comes to the Seder night we all come from different lands and different traditions and now we each have our own twists,” she said.

Everyone largely recites the same words when reading the Haggadah, but as shown in some older Haggadot in the museum’s collection, historically there have been differences in the illustrations.

For example, the 1707 Gottwirt-Zucker Prague Haggadah, which is one of the earliest known examples of illustrated Hebrew manuscripts that were produced in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, also served as a real status symbol among wealthy Central European Jews. The pages of the Haggadah are decorated with spectacular colorful illustrations and traces of its years of use at the Seder table of many families are evident by the stained pages. 

Donated to the museum by Benjamin Zucker and the Gottwirt family, the illustrations in the Haggadah show scenes related to the holiday such as burning hametz, the Passover sacrifice, or eating matzah but the fashion of the times for the Jews of Prague is also reflected. 

There are three illustrations of the Seder table giving a glimpse into what the Passover table looked like in the homes of wealthy Jews of the time: men and women sitting together along the men’s and women’s Seder table. In two illustrations, the men wear curly wigs according to the fashion of the time, and another illustration shows two servants, one carrying a tray and the other pouring wine. 

An illustration of a rabbit hunt at the bottom of the page with the text of the kiddush also shows the influence of the surrounding culture on the world of the Jews, since the German word “Jagen-hase”, or rabbit hunt – a popular activity in the first half of the 18th century among the European aristocracy to whom the court Jews looked up – is similar to the acronym “Yaknehaz” which stands for wine, kiddush, candle, havdalah, and zman (the shehecheyanu blessing) and which appears next to the scene, explained Shapira Meir.

A later Haggadah in the museum’s collection from 1952 Jerusalem includes a translated text into Iraqi-Jewish Arabic alongside the Hebrew text in accordance with the custom of Babylonian Jews. In the end, there are poems written by Rabbi Yosef Haim of Baghdad – “The Ben Ish Chai,” a highly-revered Torah scholar and Kabbalah master from Baghdad. 

The Haggadah was printed in Jerusalem after the establishment of the State of Israel and shows that the Jews from Iraq continued to celebrate the Seder night according to their traditions and in their language, even after having immigrated to Israel.

A series of photos in the museum also depicts the traditional baking of matzah in the basement the day after the Seder night of the secret Jewish community of Belmonte, Portugal, which secretly kept Jewish traditions following the Inquisition and into the 20th century.

“Jews have always tried, whether they are in their homes or in times of war, to have the Seder night as best they can,” Shapira Meir said.

Families from other ethnicities, especially from North Africa and the Middle East have other customs such as some participants dressing up as if they themselves are leaving Egypt for the Promised Land or circling the Seder plate over the heads of the participants to remind each one of the story of the exodus, said Shapira Meir.

“Part of the text of the Seder is very flexible because [people see the importance] of having children asking questions. People do different things so children will inquire about them. Also, the dressing up and the reenactment is to intrigue the children to relive the story and for everybody to see themselves as having gone out of Egypt,” she said.