Opinion: Purim Party Felt Different This Year

This article was submitted by members of Mending Minyan. 

(Opinion) The wicked prime minister Haman was hoisted by his own petard, or at least hung by his own gallows, for approximately the 2,500th straight year at Bregamos Community Theater last Friday.

Mending Minyan, a grassroots community group engaging in liberationist Jewish spiritual practice decoupled from Zionism, retold the Purim story during its annual Purim celebration. 

The story of the Jewish people, a vulnerable and subordinate population in the ancient kingdom of Shushan, surviving an attempt at extermination by the power-hungry Haman has been a cause for revelry and dancing in the Jewish calendar for centuries. But too often retellings of the story stop at the point in the narrative when Jewish cousins Esther and Mordechai leverage their relationship with the king to save their people. Mending Minyan Rabbi May Ye reminded the approximately 100 people in attendance that the Book of Esther ends not with Jewish survival, but with more death — this time ordered by Jews against those who they said had sought to kill them.

The parallel was apparent to those in attendance, as the contemporary political nation of Israel has engaged in a campaign of bombing and mass starvation against the Palestinian territory of Gaza following an Oct. 7, 2023, attack by the Gazan militant group Hamas. The Palestinian death toll exceeds 32,000, and much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed since October. In New Haven, advocates have pushed for New Haven’s Board of Alders to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in the region.

Mending Minyan raised $1,693 to be split evenly between the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and Haven’s Harvest. David Chevan & Friends played klezmer music for partiers and Semilla Collective and Kandaka vended tamales and falafel for a nosh.