A Plea for Assistance in Buying Poor Man’s Bread from 1908
Chayem Benzion Kassier wrote letter after letter pleading for financial help so he could properly celebrate the holiday of Passover and feed his starving family and other needy members of the community.
Baking matzah, Bill Gross Collection at the National Library of Israel
There is an old Jewish tradition of giving money or food to the poor in the weeks ahead of Passover to ensure that they can cover the costs that come along with the holiday. The tradition of Kimcha D’Pischa, Aramaic for “flour for Passover,” dates as far back as the time of the Jerusalem Talmud when the community would establish a fund for locals to donate money or food that would be distributed to families in need of financial support.
Passover celebrates the exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. The holiday is also referred to as Hag HaHeirut, or in English, the “Festival of Freedom.” The custom of giving money to the poor before Passover stems from the hope that, with the generosity of the community, every Jew can successfully celebrate their freedom without feeling enslaved to the high costs of preparing for the holiday.
In fact, included in the Passover Haggada, the book that is read at the traditional meal called the Seder, there is a paragraph that invites all those who are poor to come into the homes of the readers and join them for the meal. “All who are hungry, come and eat; all who are needy come and celebrate Passover.” Kimcha D’Pischa, the giving of money before the holiday, ensures the words are not said in vain or without meaning and that steps have been taken to ensure those who potentially do need a meal have been accounted for and are also celebrating.
Letter sent by Rabbi Chayem Benzion Kassier, from the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.
According to several letters found in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People and the National Library of Israel, Kimcha D’Pischa was a matter of life and death for one man living in the Land of Israel in the early 20th century.
Rabbi Chayem Benzion Kassier lived in Tiberias, a city located on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and, while not much is known about the man himself, Kassier’s letters tell a tale of a very poor man, desperate to raise money to feed his starving family and other poor members of his community.
It appears that, in 1908, Kassier sat and hand wrote letter after letter in beautiful Hebrew script from his post near the grave of the Jewish sage, Rabbi Meir Ba’al HaNes, to various wealthy Jewish families living in Europe, pleading with them to send money to help relieve his family and community from destitution. In a letter written during the Jewish month of Adar, just one month ahead of the Passover holiday, Kassier wrote, “We are suffering from a hunger that cannot be described. I have no one to turn to for help in this time of tremendous trouble.”
“I am desperate now more than ever,” he wrote in another letter. “Passover is coming and the need of the nation of Israel is great. I have no clothing and no bread. People ask me to give them bread but I have nothing to give to help save them from their desperation.”
Letter sent by Rabbi Chayem Benzion Kassier, reproduction from the National Library of Israel.
“This is why I dare to write to send you this request to have mercy on us in this desperate time and to extend your hand in charity so I can help save the people from the shame of hunger and continue my work in the name of God.”
He asked for his reader to consider the costs that go into properly celebrating the holiday of Passover and to help him buy Matzah, the poor man’s bread before the upcoming Festival of Freedom. “I am hoping you will have mercy in your heart to help resurrect my soul,” wrote Kassier. “With the help of flour, Kimcha D’Pischa for Matzah, the poor man’s bread to help bring back my miserable soul.”
His heartbreaking cries for help filled entire pages of the beautiful stationery he used that featured a small picture of the gravesite of Rabbi Meir Ba’al HaNes and a biblical verse encouraging people to give charity to the poor.
Letter signed by Rabbi Chayem Benzion Kassier, reproduction from the National Library of Israel.
In return for their generosity and assistance to his family and the wider Jewish community in the Land of Israel, Haim Ben Zion Kassier promised to pray for the souls of his benefactors at the gravesite from which he wrote his letters. “There are those who buy their place in the next world in just an hour by giving charity as they can. More specifically because the act of Pikuach Nefashot, the act saving of lives is a great Mitzvah (commandment.)”
Additional research found another two letters written in the same year by the same man that have been digitized and made accessible online by the National Library of Denmark. The letter is easily identifiable as one written by Kassier as he signed each letter in the same format in English and marked each letter with his personal stamp. Donations were to be very simply addressed to, “Rabbi Chayem Benzion Kassier in Tiberias (Palestina).” While we do not know if his desperate pleas bore fruit and whether or not he received money as a result of his efforts, it seems hard to believe that his heartbreaking words would go unanswered.
Special thanks to Yochai Ben-Ghedalia of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People for his help in writing this article.
This post was written as part of Gesher L’Europa, the NLI’s initiative to connect with Europe and make our collections available to diverse audiences in Europe and beyond.
Beginning in the last years of the 19th century, a new medium conquered the entertainment industry: cinema. During the first three decades of the development of cinema, viewers had to tolerate watching moving pictures that played with musical accompaniment. From the end of the 1920s, the number of films featuring synchronized sound (“talkies”) began to grow steadily, and within just a few years, silent films disappeared entirely.
Disappearing with them were also many actors who did not adjust to the new demands of the medium, including the soundtrack. In effect, film was a technological upgrade of theater: on theater stages, actors would appear every evening before a new audience, as they do today, while films preserve a one-time production of the plot. The film reels could be reproduced countless times, so copies of the film could be screened in the various cinemas in many cities across the globe – and in every screening, the audience would see the same version of the work (with the exception of differences that arose from the conditions of screening or from technical defects in the particular copy of the film).
Many cinemas also sprung up in Germany. Already in the days of Imperial Germany, these institutions drew an audience that was enthusiastic for even more films to be produced. The rate of film production was greatly accelerated during the years of the Weimar Republic – despite the tremendous economic problems that hindered the growth of the branch in the early 1920s. The production companies also operated movie theater chains such as UFA and EMELKA. In 1927, there were already some 4,300 cinemas in Germany, and the largest among them could house over 1,000 viewers. Premiere screenings of the new films took place in prominent movie theaters in the large cities, in order to ensure a large audience and immediate positive public response with the film’s release. Film critics and journalists were invited to these screenings, in the hope that they would write positive reviews in the newspapers, which in turn would be likely to draw more viewers to subsequent screenings.
One of the cultural critics active in Berlin was Carl Ehrenstein (1892-1971), a Viennese Jew, and brother of the well-known expressionist writer Albert Ehrenstein.
Albert Ehrenstein, Carl’s brother
Carl, who also attempted to create literary works in the expressionist style (but without much success), wrote reviews of various cultural events that took place in the German capital in the mid-1920s, often for the communist newspaper, Die Welt am Abend (“The World in the Evening”). Ehrenstein saved the invitations, entrance tickets and drafts of his articles about the events, as well as the final texts that were ultimately published in the newspaper. In this manner, his personal archive presents an impressive picture of the cultural life of Berlin in the “Golden Twenties.”
Cover of the invitation to the premiere of “Der Große Unbekannte” – “The Great Uknown”, 1927, the National Library of Israel collections
One of the events reviewed by Carl Ehrenstein was the first screening of the silent film “The Great Unknown,” held on October 13, 1927, at the Emelka Palace Theater on Berlin’s grand entertainment boulevard Kurfürstendamm. This movie was the first rendering of one of the spy novels written by British author Edgar Wallace (1875-1932): The Sinister Man. Wallace’s spy novels were very popular in Germany and appeared on the bestseller lists even decades after their publication. However, because this particular book was translated into German only a year after the premiere screening of the film, the plot was still unknown to most of the viewing audience.
The text of Ehrenstein’s review of the film
The film was produced and directed by Manfred Noa, a German director, who apparently came from a Jewish background, and who directed approximately 30 films during the 1920s. The most outstanding of these was a cinematic version (the only to this day) of the play “Nathan the Wise” (1922) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. “The Great Unknown”, however, whose spectators included Carl Ehrenstein, belongs to another genre and appealed to a wider audience.
The plot tells the story of a drug dealer, the power struggles of criminal gangs, and big money. The assortment of actors appearing in the film is a good representation of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Berlin in the 1920s. It included actors from England, France, Austria, Germany, and even Asia. As occurred often, six years after the production, with the Nazi rise to power, the paths of the actors who appeared together in the film diverged. For example, Jack Trevor, the British actor who played the film’s leading role, moved to Germany and stayed there even through the Nazi period, during which he was forced to broadcast news on the radio throughout World War II. His Jewish colleague, Kurt Gerron, who was a very well-known actor in Germany, attempted to flee the Nazis but was apprehended and became an inmate at Terezín (Theresienstadt) where the Nazis forced the actor, who was also a director, to direct a propaganda film on the Theresienstadt Ghetto, the “City of Jews.” Ultimately, Kurt Gerron was murdered in Auschwitz a few months after the film was produced.
The invitation to the premiere, including the names of the actors and their respective roles
It is clear that when Carl Ehrenstein wrote his review of “The Great Unknown,” all that was yet to happen to those involved in it, and to the film itself, was unknown to him. In Ehrenstein’s opinion, the plot of the film was boring and represented bourgeois values (it should be remembered that he was writing for a communist newspaper). In contrast, he did not conceal his opinion that the directing and acting were good. As far as we know, every existing copy of the film disappeared. All that remains from “The Great Unknown” is the announcements advertising it, as well as the rare invitation to the opening screening presented here, which Carl Ehrenstein preserved among his documents.
