Purim deserves its own entry

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Purim is a jewish feast which is celebrated in March. This year it fell on march 4th. It celebrates the victory and existence of the Jewish people despite the evil plottings of Haman, in the book of Esther in the Bible. It is tradition for the people to dress up and then they read the story of Esther. You boo for whenever the name Haman is read and cheer for Esther. We did this on saturday the 4th, and everyone dressed up. I have some pictures attached of some of the costumes people had.
The real fun however was in Jerusalem. Purim is the one night that the Jewish people are not only allowed to be drunk, but actually commanded to be drunk. They are commanded to be so drunk that they cannot tell the difference between Mordecci and Haman, which are the good guy and the bad guy of the story. We went into the city on sunday night, and the purim celebrating had just begun at sundown. Even though Purim was on saturday, the city of Jerusalem will always celebrate it a day later. It was crazy! I have never seen anything like it in my life. The new city was filled with people, dancing and drinking. The later it got, the more drunk and crazy people got. All of the sidewalk shops were turned into dance clubs and Zion square had huge speakers and there was a DJ. There were also buses which would travel up and down the street and play music from loud speakers.
Only men are allowed to dance, though. and we kind of found that out the hard way. we were in zion square and started dancing and got firecracker thrown at us. oh well. we stopped after that.
The whole thing reminded me of a Jewish Mardigras. it was so great to see all the super orthodox and conservative jews completely drunk. It was weird, Rabbis and everything. We had an interesting conversation with a Rabbi from New York and i could not understand a word he was saying.
what an interesting holiday.....i am so glad that i got to witness the insanity.

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