A SUPPLEMENT to the JEWISH EXPONENT MARCH 19 2015 2 MARCH 19, 2015 PASSOVER PALATE JEWISHEXPONENT.COM a Supplement to the Jewish Exponent March 19, 2015
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E T A L A P R E V PASSO A SUPPLEMENT TO THE JEWISH EXPONENT MARCH 19 2015 2 MARCH 19, 2015 PASSOVER PALATE JEWISHEXPONENT.COM A supplement to the Jewish Exponent March 19, 2015 4 Saving the Sounds of Sarajevo By Ilan Ben Zion 6 Modern Recipes for Success 9 Gluten-Free to Be You and Me LOOKING FOR A 13 The Replacements By Greg Salisbury SEDER PLATE? Steven Rosenberg Colleen Dunlap Kosher Food? Publisher’s Representative/ Sales & Marketing Coordinator Interim General Manager Beverly Aldorasi Passover Dessert? Lisa Hostein Nick Staller Executive Editor Classified Sales Extra Seating? Greg Salisbury Melissa Barrett Editor Norma Kramer Let Joseph Kemp Debbie Lusana Design Director Taylor Orlin Josephine Kukuka Helene Rothman Production Director Sharon Schmuckler The Guide Salvatore Patrone Bruce Wartell Prepress Manager Advertising Representatives to Jewish Elizabeth Thompson Joshua Hersz Traffic Manager Marketing Director Greater Philadelphia Tery Moran-Lever Cheryl Lutts Production Control Manager Accounting Manager Lud Hughes Marie Malvoso help you with all of Lionell Robinson Finance Assistant Production Artists Nicole McNally your Passover needs. Subscriptions The Jewish Exponent does not guarantee the kashrut of To advertise in the 2015-2016 edition, its advertisers. Only those products and services which indicate a supervising authority for kashrut are kosher. please call your sales representative or 215.832.0700 All inquiries concerning these products and services should Missed your copy or need copies for your organization? Call 215.832.0705 be directed to the vendors. JEWISHEXPONENT.COM JEWISH EXPONENT MARCH 19, 2015 3 Saving the Sounds of Sarajevo An upcoming book will shed light on a World War II freedom fighters’ Haggadah. By Ilan Ben Zion irty jokes told by gun- mosques, his bookshelves With Italy’s surrender in Au- the Jews, [Altarac] succeeded reciting snippets of Altarac’s Dtoting, Ladino-speaking, weighed down with innumera- gust 1943, Altarac and 244 other with his humor to stir within parody from memory after the Jewish Communist par- ble tomes on Jewish literature. young, untrained Jewish men us a type of hope in some bet- famed ex-partisan songwriter tisans in Bosnia are not the An expert in Sephardic litera- and women formed a Jewish ter tomorrow that is about to died in 1975. Intrigued by the first thing that usually comes ture at Ben-Gurion come.” story he only partly under- to mind when talking about the University of the Altarac be- stood, Papo asked his friend, Holocaust. A book soon to be Negev by profes- came an educa- who happened to be Altarac’s published in English, however, sion, with a knack tion officer and grandson, whether there was a may change that perception as for storytelling, he the following hard copy of the Partisan Hag- it sheds light on a lesser-known said comedy was spring performed gadah anywhere. Altarac, who story about Jews during the the ideal instru- a sort of stand-up went blind in 1963, had appar- Second World War. ment for a religious routine for the ently never written his routine The Partisan Haggadah is group to vent frus- Jewish partisan down, but had taken pains to a bawdy, grotesque parody of tration. troops hiding in record himself singing it to mu- the Passover tale composed by Papo grew up the thickly wood- sical accompaniment. a Jewish guerilla fighter, which as an active mem- ed mountains of Papo made a copy of the tape Sarajevo’s Jewish community ber of the Sarajevo the Yugoslavian recording in 1989 and brought continued to recite each year at Jewish community hinterland. It was it with him to Israel in 1991. the end of the seder for decades before moving to a parody of the During the ensuing Yugoslav after the war. Through frank Israel in the 1990s familiar Passover civil war, when Sarajevo came vulgarity and disjointed as- after the outbreak Haggadah, sung under a brutal two-and-a-half- sociation of the sacred and the of civil war in Yu- to a traditional year siege, the original was de- mundane, the comedic account goslavia. While Sephardic tune stroyed. (Only years later, after of partisans fighting (and flee- Jewish comedy is and accompanied presenting a paper on the sub- ing from) the Nazis distills the typically associ- by guitar, and it ject, did he find an alternative, essence of the Bosnian Jewish ated with Yiddish- reframed Holo- cleaned-up version that Alterac experience. keit, he pointed caust life in the wrote down for a friend.) Bosnians, especially the Jews out that Sephardic mold of an ageless In his book, which was first that have called Sarajevo home Jews for centuries story of redemp- published in Hebrew in 2012, since the 16th century, are “hard had a rich tradition tion. Papo renders the original text working at being funny,” ex- of parody — typi- The familiar into English. While some of the plained Professor Eliezer Papo, cally playing off the opening lines nuance — let alone the rhyme author of Fighting, Laughing familiar material Sani Altarac of the Passover scheme — is lost, Altarac’s and Surviving, which examines found in the Hagga- story as recited at blend of satire and anguish is the unique riff on the Passover dah. The Partisan Haggadah is battalion. Altogether, 691 Jews the beginning of the seder are universal. story. just one piece of a larger mosaic fought in Yugoslav leader Josip rendered at the opening of the “How is this night differ- Told in a blend of Ladino of Ladino parodies that date Broz Tito’s 7th Partisan Divi- Partisan remix thusly: ent,” a stanza opens with one of and Serbo-Croatian corre- back at least to 1789, and were sion; 100 died before the end of “This is the bread of afflic- the familiar four questions in sponding with Aramaic lines popular among Sephardim the war. tion — what a severe situation; Hebrew — “This whole deal is from the Passover seder, the from Suriname to Istanbul. “When the partisans arrived That our ancestors ate — worthless,” comes the response Partisan Haggadah provides Before World War II, Saraje- from Crikvenica on the Island woe unto us; in Serbo-Croatian. a glimpse of the brutal real- vo was 20 percent Jewish, home of Rab, whoever wanted to join In the land of Egypt — chok- “From all other nights? — ity of guerilla warfare against to eight synagogues and over- the partisans could join them,” ing and drowning am I. Hitler is the beast of beasts. the Nazis, stripped of the glo- whelmingly Sephardic. The recounted fellow camp survi- Let all who are hungry come On all other nights — [Ustase ry commonly accorded to the city fell to the Fascist Ustase vor Elvira Kohn years later. and eat — miserable suffering leader Ante] Paveli is an idiot, fallen. Refrains of dayenu — regime in 1941 after Yugosla- “A group of young Jewish boys and great pain. too. “enough!” — recount the anti- via was invaded, occupied and registered and was sent to Kor- Let all who are in need come We eat — and they drive a Fascist partisans’ advances divided between the Axis pow- ski Kotar. Most of them didn’t celebrate Pesach — planes and nail into us. and retreats; fatigued fighters ers. Over the course of the war, know how to use weapons — great fear. And tonight it’s all matzah bemoan how unrelenting rains 10,000 of the country’s 14,000 many of them lost their lives Now we are here — lice and — and we ate only corn mush.” left the ragtag troops “soaked Bosnian Jews were killed. soon after they were liberated fleas as a gift. While Bosnian Jews have al- like rats, like monkeys — dear Many Yugoslav Jews fled to from Rab.” In the land of Israel as free ways had a unique connection God — from great fear we wet the Italian-controlled sectors Altarac, 29 years old when men — until Comrade Stalin with Passover (the Sarajevo our pants.” along the coast, where Ital- the camp was liberated, was a rescues us.” Haggadah, a magnificent 14th- Humor is “a cultural im- ian authorities interred them talented wordsmith and musi- The irreverently told story is century Spanish manuscript perative” in the multiethnic in concentration camps, but cian. Scion of a prominent Sa- peppered with colorful charac- that survived two Inquisitions, Balkans, explained Papo as didn’t engage in systemic mass rajevo Jewish family, he had ters such as a “well-hung fellow,” the Holocaust and the civil war, we sat in his south Jerusalem murder of Jews like the Ustase received an extensive Jewish “the fat whore” and Jakica Abi- is the community’s most re- apartment bedecked with para- or Nazis. education. Isak Levi, a fellow nun, who “said that Levi Miša vered artifact), under commu- phernalia from back home — Šalom “Šani” Altarac was camp prisoner and, later, a par- taught him to say [to the British] nism it became the central holi- swords and flintlock pistols, one of the several thousand tisan, recalled in an interview that he constantly pisses.” day for Yugoslav Jews, and was paintings of Bašaršija, old Sara- Jews who were interned at the with Papo that “in the most dif- As a young man growing rebranded as an ethnic rather jevo’s iconic main pigeon-filled Rab concentration camp off the ficult times of World War II, in up in Sarajevo in the 1970s and than religious festival. square and miniature model coast of modern-day Croatia. the times of the persecution of ‘80s, Papo would hear the elders The survivors of the war, 4 MARCH 19, 2015 PASSOVER PALATE JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Papo said, “picked Pesach as a holiday that is basically a com- munist holiday — slaves rising up against exploitation” — and, crucially, one that was toler- ated by Yugoslav authorities.