Purim starts tonight. It’s a festival holiday in which imbibing alcohol …. plays a role.
Read our Purim 2019 article, about Jews and the wine and liquor trade
With Ukraine in our hearts, and on our minds, we focus today the Jewish wine-trader and community leader Ber Birkenthal, from Bolechow (today Bolekhiv, Ukraine), who lived from 1723 to 1805 and was also known simply as Ber of Bolechow.
He is buried in the historic Jewish cemetery in Bolekhiv, and his gravestone includes the prominent image of a Bear — illustrating his name, Ber.
Wine — kosher wine — forms part of many Jewish ceremonies and rituals, including Shabbat and holiday dinners, the Passover Seder, and Havdalah ceremonies, not just Purim….
To make sure wine was kosher, Jews for centuries have been active both in producing wine and in the wine trade.
Ber of Bolechow left a vivid early description of the wine trade. Often traveling with his father or brother, he 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 win (both kosher and on-kosher), 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.
On one of his trips, in 1765, Ber unexpectedly spent Passover in Hungary in the town of Szerencs, where he stayed at the home of Ezekiel Taub, the father of Isaac Taub — then just a boy — who went on to become a great Hasidic master, the Tzaddik in Kálló (now Nagykálló), known in particular for his songs, including the famous “Szól a Kakas Már” (The Cock is Always Crowing).
Ber had particularly close relations with the Jewish community in the wine-producing village of Tarcal, a few kilometres from Tokaj, and Isaac’s father Ezekiel was a brother-in-law of Ber’s friend and business connection in Tarcal, Ensil Kac. Ber had expected to spend Passover in Tarcal with Kac, but, he wrote, he was prevailed upon to go to Szerencs to perform the circumcision of a newborn son of Ezekiel.
In his memoir Ber detailed extensive (and rather cut-throat….) wine-business wheeling and dealing with Ensil Kac and others in Tarcal.
And he was so friendly with Ensil and the local Jews there that on that trip in 1765 he brought them a collection of beautiful gold, silver, and bejewelled ritual Torah objects made in Lviv — including a Torah breastplate and rollers, and a pointer.
The synagogue in Tarcal was built around 30 years later, and it is not known if the Torah with Ber’s precious ornaments was used there.
The local Jewish community was destroyed in the Holocaust, and the synagogue long stood derelict after the war.
The synagogue was restored for private owners in the 1990s; it was used as an artists’ studio and even for awhile an Air BnB. It holds a prominent place in the village today, though it is not clear what it is used for. There are two Jewish cemeteries in Tarcal — both of them also long stood neglected, but they have been fenced in recent years.
