Еврейские праздники XIX – начала ХХ вв. как способ мемориализации прошлого
Jewish celebrations in the XIX – the beginning of the XX century as the creation of the memorialization of the past

Summary/Abstract: Traditional Jewish holidays can be considered as the most important mechanism for the transmission of historical memory. Reading of sacred texts, home rituals, house decorating, symbolic dishes of the national cuisine, carnivals and theatrical games during the holidays – all of these were a kind of “historical code” of the Jewish tradition. THe historicity is deposited in the philosophy of Judaism, in the conceptualization of Jews as a people chosen by God in ancient times. Jewish holidays were didactic because they provided ethical and religious rethinking of the life of the individual at the background of a thousand-year history of the people. Performing the same rituals, eating the same dishes, reading the same texts as in ancient times, created a sense of dipping into history, symbolically uniting a person with the past. The historical memory transmitted in the celebration process, both verbally and nonverbally through the Scripture texts, enriched with historical stories, conversations between parents and children about events, formed the basis of celebrations; blessings in Hebrew sounded on the land of Eretz-Israel using the same archaic verbal formulas, the atmosphere of the house; the carnival; the specific dishes. There was a constant appeal to history, which created “a cult of the past, a cult of the roots” (P. Norah). Jewish celebrations unite the past with the present, constancy to the past has been the basis for the development of ethnic identity, the construction of personal identity, opening the way to the people of Israel into the future.

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