Every year when Passover rolls around, Mordechai Ben-Zion Prince wipes the dust of his Passover Haggadah that is kept safely tucked away to protect the text his father Rabbi Avraham Prince wrote by hand in Holland while hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Related stories:
When rumors began circulating in Europe that synagogues were being burned down, Rabbi Abraham took it upon himself to leave behind remnants of Judaism. He crafted a handwritten Jewish calendar marking the holidays and also wrote the Passover Haggadah by hand.
1 View gallery
The hand-written Haggada that survived the Holocaust
(Photo: Courtesy of the Prince family)
"It's always been something that we wait for every Passover seder," said Avia, Rabbi Avraham's granddaughter. "We have to be careful and make sure our hands were clean before being allowed to touch the Hagadah," she said.
"The older I became, the more I understood the importance of memorizing the text in a foreign language. They saw synagogues burned to the ground and heard the rumors and my grandfather understood that Jewish traditions must be preserved as well as their lives. His 18-month-old daughter was given to a Christian family for adoption to save her from the Nazis." she said.
The story came to light after the Jerusalem municipality posted a call for residents to share their special family tales on Passover.
Rabbi Avraham and his wife Rachel went into hiding in 1943 with other Jews, with the help of the local underground. There he put pen to paper, with great effort to remember the text in Hebrew, a language he did not speak.
After the war, the family was reunited and four other sons were born, among them Mordechai Ben Zion who now holds the precious family heirloom. The family immigrated to Israel in 1952.
Avia is named after her grandfather and was the first member of her family to be born in Jerusalem where she still lives. On the occasion of her son's Bar Mitzvah, a new edition of the handwritten Hagada was published although the original document, that is showing its age, is used by the family at the Seder table.