Moshe Sasonkin is the rabbi at Anshe Sfard synagogue.
He has been preparing for the Jewish holiday of Purim.
“The holiday of Purim goes back to the fourth century BCE,” Sasonkin said. “There was a king and his adviser named Haman who wanted to destroy the Jewish people. He was not very fond of them. Through a sequence of events and the help of the wife of the king, Queen Esther and her uncle Mordecai, ended up changing that decree and the Jewish people ended up not being destroyed and annihilated.”
This year, Purim will start at sunset March 16, and it lasts 24 hours.
Purim is a day of rejoicing and reflection, and one of the traditions during this holiday is to make and eat hamantaschen. Hamantaschen is a triangular filled pocket pastry that comes in a flavors such as, raspberry, apricot, chocolate and poppy seed.
This filled pastry carries a lot of meaning.
“This shows us how you have the filling, which is the blessings, and it is kind of covered over and so many times in our life,” Sasonkin said. “We have a lot of blessings, which are a lot of times covered over. We don’t notice them. We don’t realize them, and when you bite into it, you see all of those blessings. So you just have to uncover and reveal those blessing, so that is really the significance of the hamantaschen.”
Each year, members of this synagogue make thousands of these cookies to sell, and Sasonkin said on Purim you are free to eat as many of the cookies as you wish.
