Sarajavo Haggadah

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The Sarajavo Haggadah

What makes our TAS Temple Library different from other Temple Libraries? Our Temple Library has a copy of the priceless Sarajevo Haggadah gifted to our library by Lynne Elson who purchased it many years ago while traveling in the Balkans. It sits on the top shelf of our library Reference Section, a testament of Jewish presence and survival since approximately 1350 C.E., the golden age of Spain. We will never know the exact date and place of the book's creation or the name of the artist who illuminated it.

Imagine a book surviving the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and remaining intact through years of World Wars, brutal regional conflicts, political upheavals and the burning of most Hebrew texts deemed heretical by the church. Our facsimile copy of the original Haggadah is printed on paper. The original illuminated manuscript was written on parchment consisting of 34 full page miniatures, an illuminated Haggadah text, hymns and Torah readings for the Passover week. Wine stains, writing, smears and other markings on the pages attest to its use at many seder tables over the centuries.

The Sarajevo Haggadah was created in about 1350 C.E., probably as a wedding gift, but it had to have changed hands many times over the centuries. The full details about how and when it arrived in Sarajevo are not known, but it was sold to the Bosnian museum in 1894 by a Jozef Kohen. Legends abound about where and how it managed to survive and also unknown is where it was during all of those five centuries.

During WWII, the Nazis, ever collectors of precious Jewish artifacts, wanted it but as the story goes, the then director of the Museum smuggled it to a Muslim professor who hid it in a mountain village, some say under the floor of a mosque. Its whereabouts during the 1992-95 Bosnian war are a matter of rumor. The museum was bombarded and badly damaged, but the Haggadah survived unscathed, hidden for most of the time in a vault of the National Bank. In December 2002, the book went on display at the Bosnian National Museum where it resides to this day.

In 1983, a limited number of paper copies of the book were made which is about the time that Lynne Elson purchased a copy. In 2006, James Wolfensohn, then President of the World Bank, personally donated $150,000 for the publication of 613 copies printed like the original, on parchment and bound with leather covers. Each copy was to be an exact replica of the Sarajevo Haggadah itself which would sell for more than $1000 a copy. A parchment copy was recently available on eBay for $3300.

The original was appraised in 1991 for $700 million. How do you put a price on a six hundred year survivor?

Written by Maud Pincus,
TAS Archivist