Toulouse Hagadah. Prepared by Joshua Bindiger. Square Hebrew letters with nikud

Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, foreign-born Jews resident in France, especially recent refugees from Germany and Austria, were summarily arrested and interned by the French government in bleak detention camps in South-Western France: Saint-Cyprien, Gurs, Vernet, Argelès-sur-Mer, Barcarès, Agde, Nexon, Fort-Barraux, and Les Milles. Despite severeley degraded conditions and isolation from the outside world, inmates of one of these camps rather miraculously succeeded in clandestinely producing - from memory - this mimeographed edition of the Passover Hagadah to be circulated among inmates. A more well-known example of this genre is the Gurs Hagadah (Sold by Kestenbaum & Company, June 2007, Lot 85). The colophon of this Toulouse Hagadah reads: “S.R. Kapel, Rabbin de Mulhouse, Aumonier des Camps, Toulouse” (S.R. Kapel, Rabbi of Mulhouse, Chaplain of Camps, Toulouse). Followed by the scribe’s name in Yiddish, “Bindiger,” and the wish, “Di hagodoh zol zein di letzte in golus!” [This Hagadah should be the last in exile!] While Yudlov speculates that Bindiger is the name of the printer, it appears that Yerushalmi’s supposition that Bindiger is the name of the individual who actually wrote the text, is far more consonant with the facts. Shmuel René Kapel of Mulhouse, in Alsace, survived the war and lived until 1994, when he died in Jerusalem. See Shmuel René Kapel, Ma’avak Yehudi be-Tzarfath ha-Kevushah [The Jewish Struggle in Occupied France 1940-1944] (Yad Vashem); see also EJ, Vol. VII, col. 35