A new kind of haggadah

April 13, 2011 - 6:58 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Religion 

Pesach is less than a week away — I know, I know — so this is a tad on the late side, but worth hearing about. One of the new haggadot out there this year is A Happy Passover Haggadah – for the Entire Family, with bright, visual graphics by Israeli artist Monicka Clio Rafaeli, classic Ashkenazic and Sephardic texts and an English translation by Rabbi Marc Angel.

For Rafaeli, this Haggadah fulfills a long-time dream, from when she was a nine-year-old growing up in Greece, her birthplace, and her grandmother bought her Viewmaster reels. One of them was the story of Moses, and it’s a story that she’s always wanted to tell, in her way. Fast forward through the years, including moving to Israel at 14 with her family and spending five years in New York. Rafaeli was newly married and pregnant when she started working on this Haggadah here in Israel, creating a wildly colorful version as she’d always imagined. It took three years, and now that moment has finally arrived.

“I wanted to bring a fresh look to the table,” she says. “To show that Judaism and the seder are not only an ancient thing, they can be exciting, offer a new flavor.”

The haggadah is fully bilingual and transliterated in parts as well, and given its colorful illustrations and graphics, offers something to the non-reading set as well. It can still — well, maybe — be ordered off Amazon, and is available at Jewish bookstores.

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Israeli wine buying season – even on a budget

March 24, 2009 - 11:04 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Business, Food, History and Culture 

Zion winery's cabThe weeks leading up to Passover represent the lion’s share of the kosher wine industry’s annual sales. Just like December is the peak season for general retail revenues every year, post-Purim early spring is where it’s at for kosher wine transaction volume. Young wines from the fall harvest are starting to be bottled and marketed at this time, and those handling the wine buying for a Seder must procure enough for the proverbial four cups consumed by each participant as part of the Haggadah’s rituals, meaning around one full bottle per person – plus whatever’s consumed separately during the meal.

And just as consumer retail columnists formulated analyses and advice columns this past December, focusing on how to make solstice holiday purchases where one garners maximum bang for one’s buck in today’s tough economic climate, Ha’aretz‘s renowned wine critic Daniel Rogov recently released a highly practical guide to affordable spring 2009 kosher Israeli wines:

For several years, knowledgeable wine drinkers have known that the best buys in the country were the Tabor, Galil Mountain and Dalton wineries as well as in the Gamla series of the Golan Heights Winery. Those wines are now being joined by wines from the Zion winery and, while those may not make for the most sophisticated drinking, they do offer excellent value.

He goes on to rate nine kosher Zion winery (their Hebrew-only official site) products, all of which falling well within his “good to very good” stratum of scoring.

Rogov is getting out there more and more nowadays, serving as a formidable advocate of Israeli oenophilia. I’ve written about Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV before, and the enthusiastic eccentric personality also seemingly has Passover fever nowadays, having welcomed Rogov himself recently on the program (check out the fascinating 38-minute episode here). The banter-laden rapport between the two alone makes the video worth watching.

To Israeli wine lovers like you and me, this is not all big news (the fact that kosher wine no longer exclusively resembles cough syrup, and the fact that great Israeli wine is not exclusively kosher – we’ve known these things for years), but it’s great to see more and more mainstream wine-oriented media channels recognizing the quality coming out of this part of the world.

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