“Sukkot is my favorite holiday,” said Guy Yehoshua, a 44-year-old Samaritan from the central Israeli city of Holon. If you’ve ever seen a Samaritan sukkah – it’s not hard to understand why. Samaritan sukkot are not covered with palm branches like Jewish ones, but rather with fruit – and lots of it. Samaritan sukkot are a celebration of color and local produce: The sukkah’s ceiling is made up of countless pieces of brightly-colored fruit. These are part of the holiday ritual itself, and they are not just there for decoration – touching them is forbidden, because they are considered sacred.
Why do Samaritans build sukkot out of fruit? The reasons lie in the Samaritan religious worldview, as well as historical customs which became entrenched in the face of persecution. The Samaritans claim descent from ancient Israelite tribes– but they have their own religion, separate from the Jewish one.
Generally speaking, the Samaritans follow the five books of Moses, without the interpretations added to the law later on. They do not recognize the Prophets or Writings sections of the Hebrew Bible nor the Oral Torah. For the Samaritans, the holy mount is Mount Gerizim, near the city of Nablus. They believe this was the site of the Holy Temple, not Jerusalem.
The Hebrew script of the Samaritans is also different – their language and writing is a form of ancient Hebrew. Everyone in the small community knows how to speak Samaritan – but it is solely a holy tongue, not an everyday language.
Over the centuries the Samaritan community was the target of persecutions under the Byzantines and Ottomans, which drove down their numbers. The colorful sukkahs with their fruit ceilings were a common target of harassment by locals. In order to prevent vandalism against their sukkahs, the Samaritans established the custom of placing the sukkah inside the home – indeed, right in the middle of the living room.
This doesn’t mean the sukkahs are hidden from view today – quite the contrary. The Samaritan version of the Ushpezin custom associated with Sukkot entails inviting guests to open houses – meaning that anyone who wants to come and see these ceremonial and colorful sukkahs is welcome. As a result, each sukkah typically hosts many visitors over the holiday, and not just from among the Samaritan community.
“As a child, I remember that all sorts of Knesset (parliament) Members, ministers, and mayors would come to us on the holiday. And alongside them ordinary people, families, and kindergarteners would come to see the sukkahs,” Yehoshua said. The Samaritan sukkahs in Holon, near Tel Aviv, will be open to the public this year as well, and everyone is invited to visit. The Holon Samaritan community will also be hosting workshops and lectures on this ancient tradition and on Samaritan history more broadly. Preparing a sukkah with an entire ceiling made of fruit is not an easy task, and it cannot be done on the fly. It is a true family project, as each sukkah contains some 400-500 pieces of fruit. To build such a sukkah, every family must divide the workload: going to the orchards, picking the fruit, and preparing intricate plans for sukkah construction.
“It’s important to understand that every such sukkah is three or four days of work, it’s not something you do in a day. You have to gather many, many pieces of fruit together, you clean them, arrange them, tie them, and put them all together. It’s a job of threading and connecting. Then it becomes a family project – everyone has to do their part,” Yehoshua says. “It’s hours and hours where the whole family is together. It’s a lot of work, but work which creates many hours of laughter and togetherness, in a way that’s very connecting in a tribal sense. It takes a long time to connect it all together, arranging and reviewing the precise placement of the skakh [sukkah roof] – and these are hours which the family spends together before the holiday,” explains Yehoshua.
The obvious question is this: What happens to all that fruit when the holiday is over? Well, the answer is most of them are eaten. The fruits that can still be eaten after the holiday are consumed. Some of the leftover fruit is used to make jam and juice, and the rest is donated to the needy.
Of course, it isn’t just sukkahs that distinguish Samaritans from Jews: Samaritan synagogues are also different from their Jewish counterparts. They contain no chairs or tables, and the congregation sits in a semicircle on a carpet. “It’s similar to how a mosque appears on the inside,” Yehoshua says, “but that’s what Jewish synagogues were like once, and later the Muslims came and saw what the Jews were doing and decided to do the same thing. During the exile the Jews stopped this practice. But the Samaritans were never in exile, so for us it stayed the same. But because we Samaritans are a minority now, it looks as though we are imitating the customs of the Muslims in the mosque and not vice versa, but in fact we stuck with the original custom.”
The Samaritan community is concentrated in two locations in the Land of Israel: Holon and Mount Gerizim, with each containing precisely one half of the small community, which numbers just 800 people. This is actually a major increase: At the turn of the 20th century, persecutions forced that number down to just 150. But since the establishment of the State of Israel, the tiny community has managed to slowly rebuild and expand.
Like many Samaritans, Yehoshua was born in Holon, where he still lives. He was the only Samaritan student in a secular Israeli school. This was where he realized just how different Samaritan customs were from Jewish ones. Because of the small size of the community, intermarriage is fairly common, and Yehoshua himself is married to a Jew. As opposed to Judaism, the Samaritan religion does not have a complex conversion process: “Anyone who wants to be a Samaritan and commits to live as a Samaritan is invited.”
The Samaritan community will host events open to the public on Sukkot, free of charge. Visit the Samaritan community website for updates.