Rabbi Moshe Danon רבי משה דאנון
hakham of Sarajevo, whose rescue the city remembers as the "Purim di Saraj"
For four hundred years Sarajevo was a Sephardi town inside an Ottoman one: its own quarter, its own yeshiva, Ladino in the street. At the start of the nineteenth century its hakham was Rabbi Moshe Danon.
In 1819 Ruždi-paša seized him and ten elders of the community and demanded a vast ransom, threatening execution. What happened next is rare: the whole city stood up for them—Jews and Muslim neighbours alike; a crowd went to the seraglio, and the prisoners were released. The day of their freeing, the fourth of Cheshvan, the community of Sarajevo established as the "Purim di Saraj"—its own Purim, with its own scroll read about what had happened.
Eleven years later he set out for the Land of Israel and died on the way, near the town of Stolac. His grave there became a place to which the Jews of Bosnia went for generations—and go still, though of the Sarajevo community itself little survived the Shoah.
Places
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Purim di Saraj scroll of the Sarajevo community — what happened in 1819 and how it was established to be remembered
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — his death in 1830 on the road, and the grave near Stolac
Basis: documents and evidence.