How Israelis keep Passover traditions alive
Israelis keep their forefathers' Passover dinner traditions, with Persian Jews hitting their dinner neighbors with green onions and Djerba Jews reading the Haggadah in Arabic.
To an outside observer, it might seem strange, even bordering on crazy: During the Passover traditional dinner (the Seder), when the participants read from the Haggadah about Israel's exodus from Egypt, each diner takes a green onion and lashes his tablemate's back with it. This is only one of the unusual traditions of Passover. This green onion tradition comes from Persian Jewry, but other Jewish communities also maintain unique holiday traditions. Jews from Djerba (a Tunisian island) keep another tradition. When reading the chapter “This is the Bread of Our Affliction,” the patriarch of the family turns the Seder ceremonial plate above the heads of the diners, including young children, even those who have already fallen asleep. Despite the verse cited in the Haggadah, “Pour out your wrath upon the nations,” they read the book in both Hebrew and Arabic.
In other Jewish communities, when the Ten Plagues (inflicted by God on the Egyptians) are recited, everyone goes outside with lit candles and yells the names of the plagues in public.
Despite these essential differences between communities and the strange traditions some of them still maintain, researcher Hizky Shoham from the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem explains that today most Israelis adhere to what he calls “duplicated Haggadot.” He is referring to standard Haggadot that lack any uniqueness, published in tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies before the holiday and distributed by commercial entities and various organizations.
"The sense is that for most Israeli families — and it doesn't matter from what [Jewish] background — the Seder looks the same, with minimal 'stage directions' and even the same tiring jokes,” he said. “Most families don’t really keep the unique folkloristic traditions, except for the food. That’s what is surprising anthropologically: Most people take the duplicated Haggadot without altering them, want to finish the Haggadah reading quickly — and eat. And still everyone does it.”
