Patrick Comerford
Passover this year begins tomorrow evening (Saurday 12 April 2025) and ends on the evening of Sunday week (20 April 2025).
It means there is an overlap between the Jewish celebrations of Passover this year and the Christian celebrations of Holy Week, which, in a rare occurrence, also coincide this year for Christians following both the Western Church Calendar and the Eastern Orthodox Calendar
As I was considering this coincidence in advance of my visit to Greece next week, I came across a relatively modern piyyut in Espanyol, Pesach a la mano, ‘Passover is at hand,’ whose origins date back to 17th century Greece and the work of Hazzan Yosef Shalom Gallego from Thessaloniki.
A piyyuṭ (plural piyyuṭim, Hebrew: פִּיּוּטִים / פיוטים, פִּיּוּט / פיוט; from the Koinē Greek: ποιητής, poiētḗs, ‘poet’) is a Jewish liturgical poem, usually sung, chanted, or recited during religious services. Most piyyuṭim are in Mishnaic Hebrew or Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, and most follow some poetic scheme, such as an acrostic following the order of the Hebrew alphabet or spelling out the name of the author.
This piyyuṭ from Greece is in Espanyol or Judaeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino or Judezmo or Spaniolit. This Romance language is derived from Castilian Old Spanish, and it was originally spoken in Spain. After the mass expulsion from Jews in 1492, it spread through the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, including Greece, Turkey, West Asia and North Africa, and also found its way to France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco and England.
Today it is spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it is acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel and France, and is recognised formally by the Royal Spanish Academy.
The core vocabulary of Ladino or Espanyol is Old Spanish, and it has numerous elements from the other old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Old Aragonese, Asturleonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Andalusi Romance.
The language has been enriched by Ottoman Turkish and Semitic vocabulary, such as Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, with many words for new and modern concepts adapted from French and Italian.
There are influences too from local languages in the Balkans, such as Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian.
Hazzan Yosef Shalom Gallego, the author of this 17th century piyyut in Ladino, was born in Thessaloniki in the late 16th century, and became the first Hazzan or cantor of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community in around 1614.
In 1628, he published Imrei No’am’, a compendium of piyyutim that helped spread a new style of Hebrew religious song from the Ottoman Empire to Western Sephardi and North African communities. Among these was the Hebrew piyyut ‘Purim, Purim, Purim Lanu’ (פורים, פורים, פורים לנו), which recounts the Purim story and the salvation of the Jewish people.
The song became widely popular in the Sephardi tradition, inspiring a well-known Ladino saying ‘Purim, Purim, Purim Lanu, Pesah a la Mano’, meaning ‘Purim is upon us, Passover is near.’ This phrase in turn became the opening line of ‘Pesah a la Mano’, a beloved Ladino song by Flory Jagoda (1923-2021).
Flory Jagoda was a Bosnian-born Jewish American guitarist, composer and singer-songwriter. She was known for her composition and interpretation of Sephardic songs in Ladino and the Bosnian folk ballads. Her most famous song is the Hanukah standard, ‘Ocho Kandelikas’ (Eight little candles).
Flory Jagoda was born Flora Papo in Sarajevo on 21 December 1923 and grew up in the Bosnian town of Vlasenica and in Sarajevo. She was raised in the Sephardic tradition, in the musical Altarac family.
When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, she, her mother and her step-father Michael Kabilio escaped on a train to Split and from there to islands off the Croatian coast and then to Bari in Italy. There she met an American soldier, Harry Jagoda, and she moved to the US as a war bride in 1946.
Her recording Kantikas Di Mi Nona (‘Songs of My Grandmother’) includes songs her grandmother, a Sephardic folksinger, taught her as a young girl. Other albums followed, including Memories of Sarajevo, La Nona Kanta (‘The Grandmother Sings’), and Arvoliko: The Little Tree (2006), remembering the tree in Bosnia said to be the only marker of the mass grave of 42 massacred members of the Altaras family.
Flory Jagoda died aged 97 on 29 January 2021.
Purim, Purim, Purim lano
Pesah, Pesah ala mano
Laz masas’si stan faziento
Loz japrakis si stan koziendo
Aman aman...
Il Dio bendico muz da mazal.
Purim, Purim, Purim lano
Pesah, Pesah ala mano
La nona sta diziendo aloz njetos
Alipja il puelvo, kantoniz i loz tecos
Aman, aman...
Il Dio bendico muz da mazal.
Purim, Purim, Purim lano
Pesah, Pesah ala mano
Il Singjor Rubi diso a laz tijas
No kumer il pan oco dijas
Aman, aman...
Il dio bendio muz da mazal.
Now that Purim is over,
it is time to prepare for Passover.
The Matzohs are being baked,
the stuffed leaves prepared.
Grandmother leads her troops
against every crumb,
every drop of dust,
even the ceilings are not safe.
And then comes the Rabbi
to inspect our efforts,
and to remind old aunts
not to eat bread for eight days.
Purim is over and Passover approaches.
May Almighty God give us good fortune.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Chag Pesach Sameach, חג פסח שמח
