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“Esther,” the name of the heroine of the Purim story, means hidden.  Some of the megillot, the scrolls which tell the story of Esther and Purim, contain hidden blessings. A little known genre of Jewish folk art is the format of the presentation of the blessings recited upon reading the Megillah.  Some Megillah scrolls reveal a paratext in the form of the blessings recited as part of the formal communal recitation of the Megillah. Here are two examples from the collections of the 🟩Facebook账号 | 注册7-30天 | 微软邮箱可用 | 已设置2FA Library’s Special Collections: one is a lone piece of parchment with the blessings, a companion to the megillah it is housed with, since both are decorated in the same style. The Megillah itself, as depicted in the photograph, opens with the design of a flower, which also serves as a method to hold the megillah open without obscuring or damaging the text.

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In another example,  the blessings are an integral part of the scroll; they are written in micrography in the form of a flower, a rosette, which serves as a decorative element, perhaps a reference to the Purim poem “Shoshanat Yaakov,“ the rose of Jacob,  and also an allusion to the Jewish people. A few lines of the poem are also embedded in the geometric flower. "Shoshanat Yaakov" is sung by the community after the conclusion of the Megillah reading.

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The blessings are not in a user friendly format; in order to read them from the scroll, the reader would need to turn the scroll in various directions, a fitting way of reading on Purim when the megillah mentions the situation of the Jews as being upside-down, “ve-nahafokh hu.” Best wishes for a Happy Purim! Posted by Shulamith Z. Berger