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The Soviet Campaign against Passover

April 14 2016

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union authorized Jewish sections of the Communist Party to bring government propaganda, often in Yiddish, to the Jewish masses; the same bureaucrats also worked to discourage, sometimes forcibly, Jewish belief and practice. Henry Abramson describes an attempt to turn Passover into a secular, socialist holiday:

Recognizing the powerful hold that religion had on Soviet Jews, the Jewish sections . . . attempted to co-opt the population by capturing and transforming Jewish traditions and texts, including the Passover Haggadah. Called “Red Haggadahs,” several were published in the 1920s with the explicit goal of replacing belief in God with faith in the Soviet Union. . . .

The traditional text . . . reads . . . “If the Holy One, Blessed be He, did not take our ancestors out of Egypt, then we, our children, and our children’s children would remain slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” The officially atheistic Soviet Union could not tolerate such a passage, so the text of a Red Haggadah read instead: “We were slaves to capitalism until October [i.e., the Communist Revolution of 1917] led us out of the land of exploitation with a strong hand. Were it not for October, we and our children would still be slaves.” . . .

At the seder’s conclusion, Jews famously proclaim “This year we are here—next year in Jerusalem!” Following the Red Haggadah, participants at the seder are urged to pronounce, “This year, we have revolution in this land—next year we will have a world revolution!”

Read more at Aish.com

More about: Communism, Haggadah, History & Ideas, Passover, Soviet Jewry, Soviet Union

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic