By Asef Shalev

Tel Aviv It was the spring of 1971, and the 1960s spirit of revolution still throbbed
in the streets of America and Europe. On the streets of Jerusalem, knots of young
Sephardi Jews could be seen protesting, too calling for the overthrow of Prime
Minister Golda Meir and for their own liberation in Israel as an oppressed people.
They called themselves the Black Panthers of Israel. Inspired by film reels about
revolutionary movements from around the world then, they strongly identified with
the black American radical group of that same name.
The Black Panthers turned out to be a short-lived phenomenon in the end. But their
sudden surge onto Israel's political scene hit the country's Labor Party establishment
hard where it was most sensitive on its claim to embody egalitarian redemption for
Jews returning to what they viewed as their historic land. They were young
Sephardim demanding freedom after decades of quiet desperation among the
hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Arab world
who had been settled and more or less forgotten in low-income caravans and dusty
towns on the geographic and social margins of the country.
And it turns out they even produced a Passover Haggadah that year to make their
point. Rediscovered now, some 44 years later, the Black Panther Haggadah
decontextualizes the struggle for liberation as a tale of their own struggle in Israel,
with Golda as pharaoh and the Panthers as Moses. Reading it today is like taking a
time machine back to the heart of those times.
The afflictions in this Passover tale are the overcrowded Sephardi ghettos, the
discrimination against non-Ashenazim at the employment lines and the lack of
secondary school education in many places where they had been settled. The song
Dayenu describes the modern exodus from Egypt (and other Arab countries) to
Israel as a story of alienation and disillusionment.
Inspired by secular leftist ideology, the Black Panthers left God out of their quest for
redress. Instead, this Haggadah confronts the oppression of Sephardim by inflicting
10 plagues of protests, hunger strikes, and solidarity rallies upon the government,
until it is compelled to change policies that favor Ashkenazi Jews. Redemption is the
moment when the socioeconomic gap between the two communities is finally closed.
But the Panthers were not concerned with economics alone. In a forward to the
Haggadah, they lash out, too, at the political establishments systematic erasure of
their distinct culture.
It is a crime to destroy the culture of an entire people,
the Haggadahs authors wrote. You took our culture that we
brought with us from the Diaspora and promised a different one
in its place. But you forsook us and discriminated against our

communities by rendering us without culture and without faith,

leaving us suspended in a cultureless vacuum.
In the days before the Passover holiday of 1971, hundreds of Jerusalemites paid
what little they could afford to Panthers hawking copies of the Haggadah on the
streets of Israels capital. The selling of Haggadot was a neat, if unintentional parallel
to how the American Black Panthers peddled Chairman Maos Little Red Book on the
campus of University of California, Berkeley.
Reuven Abegrel, one of the authors of the Haggadah, remembers huddling with four
other Panthers on the tiled floor of the shack that was their headquarters when the
inspiration to write the Haggadah came. Each of the Panthers scuttled home and
retrieved a copy of a real Haggadah to use as raw material. Crouched over a
typewriter, they cobbled together a seven-page manifesto.
I began reciting the Haggadah in melody, Abergel recollects 44 years later. This is
how we identified the nuances and began replacing Egypt with Israel... we got
excited, and each of us jumped up with an idea.
The core group that founded the Panthers started out as young men with criminal
records and no apparent prospects. The typos and spelling errors in the Haggadah
reflect how little formal education they received. From the seedy ethnic slum of
Musrara in Jerusalem, however, their ideas of revolution quickly caught fire among
large swaths of Sephardim. The Panthers ripped open an ethnic conflict that was
simmering under the surface since the founding of the state and before.
The racism Sephardim faced when they arrived in Israel can be encapsulated in the
words of of Aryeh Gelblum, one of early Israels leading journalists, who warned of
the immigration of a race the like of which we have not known in this country.
A serious and threatening question is posed by the immigration from North Africa,
Gelblum wrote in Haaretz on April 22, 1949. This is a people whose primitiveness
sets a record, their level of education borders on ignorance.
The Panthers had mostly dissipated by the time of the 1973 Yom Kippur War as
security woes trumped all else. But their impact on society was profound and lasting.
Their protests catalyzed an increase in government welfare funding and engendered
a renewed sense of communal pride among Sephardim. To this day, many activists
for social justice point to the trail blazed by the Panthers. Anti-Sephardic racism also
persists to this day, however, as does the large income disparity between
Ashkenazim and Sephardim.
In the decades after the movements demise, the Haggadah went missing. All copies
appeared to have been lost. Even an archive in Jerusalem devoted to the Panthers
could never find one.
Eventually, an original turned up in the private collection of a Reform rabbi in Tel Aviv.
Rabbi Meir Azari, an amateur Haggadah collector, discovered it a few years ago
some withered and yellowed pages tucked in between the pages of a different

Haggadah. The seemingly vanished revolutionary tract was found. He remembers

reading the Panther Haggadah for the first time. It was a very angry Haggadah...full
of accusations against the Ashkenazis and the state, he said. It was amusing to
read.
Azari reached out to Abergel and other Panthers to share the news and confirm the
documents authenticity. For Abergel, seeing the real thing after so many decades
was a fulfilling moment. I had been searching for the lost Haggadah for so long.