Heartfelt greetings from JHE for a meaningful Pesach!
The Seder meal, with its symbolic foods arranged on a special plate, is guided by the Haggadah, whose wealth of ancient texts and songs retell the story of the Biblical Exodus from Egypt.
There are many Haggadot to choose from, many of them beautifully illustrated — we usually have several different ones at our seder table.
Here are a few, ancient and modern, to explore. We’ve posted them before but — like the Passover story — it’s worthwhile (and tradition) to post them again!
Here’s an hour-long Zoom presentation about the New Venice Haggadah, an arts project by Beit Venezia that resulted in a Haggadah illustrated by contemporary artists published in 2021.
Follow the Seder — page by page — in a medieval Haggadah from Catalonia
Watch an illustrated lecture about the history of the so-called Washington Haggadah, which was written in Germany in 1478.
The Haggadah (now preserved in the Library of Congress in Washington DC) was displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011, and this lecture accompanied the exhibition, called “The Washington Haggadah Medieval Jewish Art in Context.”
Learn more about the art and contexts of the Washington Haggadah, and particularly about the illustrations, in this lecture: Joel ben Simeon Illustrating the Washington Haggadah:
This lecture also accompanied the Met exhibition in 2011.
The Sarajevo Haggadah and its remarkable history, from medieval Spain to the Balkans — including the story of its dramatic survival in World War II and the Bosnian War of the 1990s
Created and painted by hand on the finest leather in Spain in the 1300s, the Haggadah was discovered in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in 1894. How it got there, no one knows, but an Italian church censor decided not to burn it in 1609 when he scribbled in its margin. In 1942, a Nazi general went looking for it while a Muslim scholar was hiding it. Then, when Sarajevo was besieged in 1992, the great book vanished – all while local Jews turned their synagogue into a humanitarian aid agency. .
Watch a video by Edward Serotta about his search for the Haggadah during the Bosnian war:
Click here to read a lengthy article about the Sarajevo Haggadah
Take a quick browse through the Sarajevo Haggadah.