The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition - Avadim Hayinu // עֲבָדִים הָיִינו
At our seder, my roommate Natasha brought out a book titled "The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition." Her grandmother was born in the Gurs Detention Camp in southwestern France, which is where she lived her first 5 years of life.
The seder at Gurs in 1941 was performed in the middle of the camp. As is tradition, they shared:
We were slaves to Pharoh in Egypt and the Lord freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm. Had not the holy One liberated our people from Egypt, then we, our children and our children’s children would still be enslaved to Pharoah in Egypt. And even if we were all wise, all men of understanding, all old and learned in the Torah, it is a positive commandment upon us to tell of the story of the Exodus from Egypt. And the more one tells of the Exodus from Egypt, the more he is praised.
The facsimile in the book shows the incomplete Haggadah that was handwritten by memory by one of the camp's inmates, Aryeh Zuckerman, in 1941/5701. That Passover, the Haggadah was distributed among camp inmates who used it to conduct the seder. A rabbi at the camp stood on a platform and recited the Haggadah.
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