It’s Purim! — a time of crazy celebration that often includes quantities of …. drink.
We’re taking a little look at that today.
Wine — kosher wine — forms part of many Jewish ceremonies and rituals, including Shabbat and holiday dinners, the Passover Seder, and Havdalah ceremonies….
To make sure wine was kosher, Jews for centuries (millennia!) have been active both in producing wine and in the wine trade.
In a letter dated January 1208, the medieval Pope Innocent III left the following description of Jewish winemakers:
At the vintage season the Jew, shod in linen boots, treads the wine; and having extracted the purer wine in accordance with the Jewish rite they retain some for their own pleasure, and the rest, the part which is abominable to them, they leave to the faithful Christians; and with this, now and again, the sacrament of the blood of Christ is performed.
In Eastern Europe, we have a vivid early description of the wine trade thanks to Dov Ber Birkenthal, a wine merchant and Jewish community leader in Bolechow (today Bolekhiv, Ukraine) who lived from 1723 to 1805 and was also known simply as Ber of Bolechow.
Ber made frequent, and sometime harrowing, wine-purchasing journeys from his native Galicia to the Tokaj wine-producing region of northern Hungary — and not long before his death he published a memoir recounting his trials and adventures.
He described how he sought out and drove hard bargains on wine, and he detailed the perils of the road — everything from complicated currency exchanges and customs duties, to drunken wagon drivers, icy, unfordable rivers, double-dealing business partners, flea-ridden inns, and even occasional attacks by roving bandits.
In the 18th and 19th centuries in Eastern Europe, producing and selling liquor was a widespread occupation among Jews.
According to the YIVO Encyclopedia:
According to the census of Jews in 1764–1765, about 80 percent of the Jews living in villages and about 14 percent of those living in towns and cities were involved in these activities. In Podlasie, Podolia, and Mazovia, innkeepers made up some 55 percent of the total Jewish population.
Jewish tavernkeepers were collectively immortalized in one of the most famous characters in classic Polish literature, Yankel the Tavernkeeper, in the epic poem Pan Tadeusz by the romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, published in 1834.
Glenn Dynner, who published an award-winning study of this phenomenon in 2013 — Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland, writes:
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Polish Jewish tavernkeeping was banned. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that Jewish tavernkeepers often evaded fees, bans, and expulsions by installing Christians as “fronts” for their taverns and carrying on business as usual, all with the knowledge and complicity of nobles and other local Christians. This vast underground Jewish liquor trade reflects an impressive level of local Jewish-Christian coexistence, despite occasional flare-ups of anti-Jewish violence.
Part and parcel of selling liquor was making it — and in addition to tavern-keepers selling their own production, Jews also ran commercial distilleries.
A major distillery in what is today southern Poland was the Haberfeld liquor factory, founded in 1804 in Osiwecim — the town outside of which the Auschwitz death camp was built a century and a half later.
The distillery was the first factory to be built in Oswiecim, and the Haberfelds became the town’s wealthiest Jewish family. Before World War II the town had a majority Jewish population, and members of the extended Haberfeld family were prominent in many ways.
Banker Rudolf Haberfeld (1874-1921) was also a member of the Oświęcim Town Council and the Kraków Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Oświęcim Jewish Community.
The Haberfelds lived in a huge mansion, located next door to the distillery overlooking the Sola at the edge of the town center.
Haberfeld liquors were sold worldwide, and the last owner, Alfons Haberfeld (1903-1970), and his wife Felicia (1911-2010) were on their way back from exhibiting their products at the New York World’s Fair when World War II broke out in September 1939.
They could not return, and their young daughter and other family members were killed in the Shoah.
The German occupation authorities took over the Haberfeld buildings, and after the war they were nationalized by the Communist regime. After the fall of communism, Felicia fought for years to try to regain ownership, without success.
When JHE Director Ruth Ellen Gruber first visited the site in 1993, the mansion and factory were still standing — but in perilous condition. And though they were registered as monuments in 1995, their condition deteriorated to the point that they were demolished in 2003.
For more than a decade the site remained a rubble-strewn vacant lot overlooking the Sola and the town’s historic tower.
In 2018, a new building was completed on the site — a Hilton Hampton Hotel, designed by the local architects Marcin Susul and Krzysztof Strama.
The hotel was built as projects to revitalize the city — but also to recall the past. It does so in two ways.
Inside the lobby, a plaque recounts the history of the Haberfelds and their factory and mansion, and the facade of the building overlooking the river bears a stylistic representation of the the facade of the old Haberfeld mansion.
