Jerusalem – Traditional post-Passover festivities, known as Mimouna celebrations, were held around the country on Monday night and Tuesday with several politicians taking part in the lively events.
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Deputy Religious Affairs Minister and Bayit Yehudi MK Rabbi Eliahu Ben-Dahan attended a Mimouna in Ashkelon on Monday night, along with MK Yoni Chetboun, also of Bayit Yehudi.
The celebration is a tradition that began in the Jewish communities of North Africa, in which families open up their homes to guests and provide leavened products, prohibited during Passover, such as bread, cakes and various other delicacies including mufletta, a type of pancake eaten with honey.
The festival has since been widely adopted throughout Israel.
Speaking at the event, Ben- Dahan, who was born in Morocco, said that the festival provides a message of unity.
“The Mimouna festivities symbolize, above all, the unity of the Jewish people around the world in the belief and trust of the coming of the Messiah,” the minister said.
Ben-Dahan explained that the rabbis of Morocco worried that at the end of the Passover holiday, a time defined by freedom and redemption, the Jews of the community would still not feel redeemed. The rabbis feared the community would be despondent and their faith in their ultimate redemption would decrease.
The rabbis therefore established the tradition “to strengthen the faith and trust [of the community] in the redemption of the Jewish people and the coming of the Messiah,” Ben-Dahan said.
Chetboun, whose parents immigrated from Morocco to Israel, lauded the celebration as a cultural contribution to the state.
“The Mimouna is the warmth and hospitality which immigrants from Morocco and North Africa contributed to Israeli society,” Chetboun said.
“Above the arguments and the differences between cultures and communities, and for sure beyond the political arguments, we are all one people and its important to remember this.
“We must also remember the spiritual value of the Mimouna as a sign of the expectation and yearning for the coming of the redeemer at the end of Passover, from the redemption of Egypt to the future redemption.”
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat also attended a Mimouna in the capital, saying that the holiday unites the people and the country.
Economy and Trade Minister and Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett attended a Mimouna in the southern city of Netivot and helped make the muflettot at the event.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara also attended a Mimouna festival, traveling to a local celebration in Or Akiva.
Content provided as courtesy of The Jerusalem Post
This a new one for me. Never heard of it. Must be a sefardic tradition
I’m 46 & I never heard of this feast! I don’t believe I am missing anything either.
I heard from a Sefardi friend in kollel, who’s family is from Morocco, that the frum roots of the holiday in Morocco (before it became a secular Israeli holiday) was to inspire achdus and neighborly trust after Pesach, since we don’t traditionally eat from each others’ cooking during Yom Tov (Pesach). This is just like the Chumash tells us, that the korban Pesach was eaten in groups, and many people don’t eat from others’ foods throughout Yom Tov where they didn’t have the seder. Therefore, in Morocco, the day following Pesach, families would set up their tables with all kinds of foods and delicacies and everyone in the community would make the rounds of the neighborhood eating from everyone else’s offerings – to reinforce that nothing personal was meant by the Pesach isolation from each other. Unfortunately, this beautiful occasion has degenerated today into a secular excuse for a holiday all around Israel with barely a remnant of its holiness apparent except with the religious.
I’m celebrating “Mimouna” by waiting in line for over an hour for pizza (& it will probably cost a lot of “mimouna” too)
The Moroccan minhag, according to one version, is akin to the Seudas Moshiac that the Chasidim celebrate, though the Moroccan Jewish community was flourishing way before the Chasidim showed up in Jewish history a few hundred of years ago. My mechunanim in Bet Shean always invite us to come up north and celebrate with them, but my Ashkenazi stomach tells me to stay home.
A! Did any of these guy actually refrain from eating the levened stuff for the pas eight days!?