The Unspoken Taboo – Next Year in Jerusalem

What prompted a century of American Jews to omit the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” at the conclusion of their Seder? The aspirations and declarations replacing it speak volumes about American Jewish loyalties, priorities, and conflicts, as does the timing of its reappearance in American haggadot

“Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim – Next year in Jerusalem.” This text isn’t a prescribed, codified element of any liturgy – not at the end of Yom Kippur, and not at the conclusion of the haggadah, though arguably among the most powerful moments of each. Yet this expression of yearning for Zion carries vast popular appeal. These words have engraved the memory of Jerusalem upon the Jewish mind. They’ve nurtured the hope that someday Jews would return to the holy city and rebuild it anew. Recited in unison by all present at key moments in the Jewish life cycle, this formula has inspired the faithful, stirred passions, steeled hearts.

Nevertheless, the first significant American haggadah to include the pithy phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” appeared only in 1942. Prior to that, for just over a full century, even if Hebrew-English haggadot published in the United States included the three Hebrew words Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim, they avoided its four-word English equivalent. “Next year in Jerusalem” was taboo. 

 

A Phrase to Forget

The phrase and its variations have a long history. It served initially as a popular response, like “Amen” or “Blessed be He,” and parallels another once common, even older liturgical refrain that recalled the sacred memory of the lost Temple, “Ke-ha-yom hazehbi-Yerushalayim” (“as in this day – in Jerusalem”). Before the age of printing, Jews spontaneously chorused these words at family occasions or at the end of ceremonies such as that of blessing the new moon and reading the Torah or the scroll of Esther. Gradually it penetrated the liturgy, appearing in the Yom Kippur prayers and the Pesach haddadah in about the 10th century. As Prof. Shulamit Elizur of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has ably demonstrated, these sentiments entered both the high holiday prayer book and the haggadah as heartfelt expressions of the hope of celebrating Passover in the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem in the following year.

Beginning with the very first haggadah produced in the United States, American Jews honored the longstanding tradition of adding Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim to the Seder. In Service for the Two First Nights of the Passover in Hebrew and English, according to the Custom of the German & Spanish Jews … First American Edition, published in 1837 by New York Jewish printer Solomon Henry Jackson, the phrase appeared immediately prior to the blessing over the fourth cup of wine. In a wordy but revealing translation – likely borrowed from Alexander Alexander’s oft-reprinted London edition, Hagadah shel Pesah, the ceremonies… which are used and read by all families, in every House of the Israelites, on the first two nights of Passover – Jackson’s haggadah exclaimed: “The year that approaches, O bring us to Jerusalem” (p. 40).

This awkwardly literal rendering carefully avoided a disturbing ambiguity latent in the Hebrew. Jackson’s formulation placed the onus squarely upon God to bring Jews back to Jerusalem, a restorationist trope generally understood and accepted by their Protestant neighbors. By contrast, the simpler and (as we shall see) widely known “Next year in Jerusalem” could be construed (at least by enemies of the Jewish people) as a statement of disloyalty. It implied that Jews weren’t truly “at home” in the Diaspora and couldn’t wait to scurry back to Jerusalem. “Next year in Jerusalem” thus became taboo because it courted danger. 

In the mid-1800s, some in the American Jewish community explicitly addressed this fear. One such was Gustavus Poznanski, the Reform-minded minister of Charleston’s Temple Beth Elohim. Speaking at the dedication of his flock’s new house of worship on March 19, 1841, just five days prior to Pesach, he emphatically declared that “this synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine” (James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston [University of Alabama Press, 1993,] p. 246). The Orthodox Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia, in the haggadah he printed and translated within his Passover mahzor (prayer book), omitted Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim altogether. 

More commonly, though, 19th-century American haggadot (like earlier German versions and David Levi’s British one) did include Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim in Hebrew – in big, bold letters, no less. However, they left those words conspicuously untranslated. Those who knew Hebrew thus understood the intent, while those who might have objected remained blissfully oblivious. Other traditional haggadot, including the first one illustrated in America (published in 1857), retained Jackson’s stilted translation.

 

Replacement Theology

By the 1870s, some central European Jewish immigrants and their children had lost interest in the traditional haggadah, and Pesach Sedarim were on the decline. Hoping to stimulate a revival, scholarly Rabbi Marcus Jastrow of Philadelphia produced the first Reform haggadah in America. In keeping with Reform ideology at the time, he eliminated both Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim and all other references to Zion and the restoration of the Temple. Gone was the Aramaic “this year here, next year in the land of Israel” at the beginning of the Seder; ditto for the prayer for “rebuilding Jerusalem” in the Grace after Meals, the reference to “Israel redeemed” at the end of the haggadah, and even the beloved hymn Adir Hu, because of its call to rebuild the Temple. (Jastrow replaced it with a new English-language hymn, sung to the same tune.) 

Though the rabbi later supported Zionism, his haggadah (reprinted as late as 1901) celebrated America, “where the morn of religious liberty has already dawned and is shedding its roseate light over all inhabitants alike” (Marcus Jastrow, Family Service for the Eve of Passover [Philadelphia, 1878], p. 10). The word “Jerusalem” appeared nowhere in Jastrow’s text. 

Then the equation changed.

In the late 19th century, tens of thousands of eastern European Jews immigrated to the U.S., creating a growing market for traditional haggadot. Jewish publishers responded with new editions featuring Yiddish translations, Hebrew commentaries, illustrations reprinted from earlier American haggadot, and/or Jackson’s derivative English translation of 1837. All these haggadot included Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim. Yet not one rendered it as “Next year in Jerusalem.” If they translated the Hebrew at all, it was into language designed not to be “direct, sacrilegious and offensive,” as The Oxford Companion to the English Language (2018) describes the process of adapting and softening a “taboo.” The formulation cited earlier, “The year that approaches, O bring us to Jerusalem,” was used extensively.

Jews certainly knew the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem.” Anglo-Jewish scholar Israel Abrahams referred to it as one “we have all said since childhood” (Abrahams, Festival Studies: Being Thoughts on the Jewish Year [J. H. Greenstone, 1906], p. 2). Israel Zangwill cited these four words twice in his best-selling novel, Children of the Ghetto (1892). 

Even Christians regularly quoted Jews as reciting the formula at their Seder tables. Jewish-born British missionary Ridley Haim Herschell reported that at the conclusion of the Seder, “the head of the family says: ‘This year we are here; may we be next year in Jerusalem’” (A Brief Sketch of the Present State and Future Expectation of the Jew [Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1842], p. 79). The same words appear in the American Sunday School Union’s widely read The Jew, At Home and Abroad (1845). And British artist William Henry Bartlett considered it “well known” that “Jews use an exclamation annually at Passover … ‘Next year in Jerusalem’” (Bartlett, Jerusalem Revisited [T. Nelson and Sons, 1863], p. 82). 

 

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The first significant anti-Semitic tract published in America, Telemachus Thomas Timayenis’ The Original Mr. Jacobs: A Startling Exposé (Minerva Publishing Co., 1888), questioned Jews’ loyalty on the basis of “Next year in Jerusalem.” “The first condition of adopting another country is to renounce one’s own,” the author wrote. “The Jew has a country that he never renounces. It is Jerusalem, the holy and mysterious Jerusalem – Jerusalem triumphant or persecuted, joyous or afflicted, serves as a tie to all her children who every year at the Rosch-Haschana [sic] say, ‘next year in Jerusalem’” (Timayenis, p. 29).

Hence American Jewry’s anxiety about including “Next year in Jerusalem” in haggadot. 

Vassar-educated Esther Witkowsky of Chicago insisted that America, not Jerusalem, was the “land of promise for the persecuted Jew.” Speaking at the famed Jewish Women’s Congress in 1893, she dramatically invoked the taboo phrase and derided immigrants who still pronounced it:

“Next year in Jerusalem[,]” prays the orthodox Jew. Let us hope that here, in the future, he may forget this prayer, believing that he has found what he has sought. (Papers of the Jewish Women’s Congress Held at Chicago, September 4, 5, 6 and 7, 1893 [Jewish Publication Society of America, 1894], p. 76) 

Rather than forgetting “Next year in Jerusalem,” Theodor Herzl embraced it. Indeed, the father of Zionism placed those words at the very center of his “attempt at a modern solution of the Jewish Question.” His Jewish State linked the idea of a Jewish polity to the “kingly dream” embodied in the “old phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’” Herzl challenged readers “to prove that the dream may be converted into a living reality” (Herzl, A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question [The Maccabaean Publishing Co., 1904], p. 12). When he famously declared that “If you will it, it is no dream,” the “it” referred obliquely to “Next year in Jerusalem.” Thus, with a stroke of Herzl’s pen, this taboo text that liberals found embarrassing became a manifesto that Zionists found exhilarating.

Zionism soon transformed the American haggadah as well. Yet the taboo persisted. In 1904, Lillie Goldsmith Cowen, Zionist wife of the publisher of the weekly American Hebrew, Philip Cowen, revamped the haggadah with her own revised translation, improved graphics, scholarly notes, illustrations, and even sheet music. Her haggadah, and its English translation, were both evidently the first ever published by a woman. 

Aiming to appeal to a broad spectrum of Jews, Lillie Cowen maintained the full traditional text in Hebrew with a smaller English font indicating “what matter may be omitted, without touching the vital parts of the service” (Cowen, The Seder Service, 1905, p. ix). Whereas so many earlier American haggadot had left Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim untranslated, Cowen spelled it out: “In the year to come, in Jerusalem.” But these words appeared in small print, marking them for possible omission. Her translation, while still wordier (and thus safer) than “Next year in Jerusalem,” removed the Jackson haggadah’s call for divine intervention (“O bring us to Jerusalem”) and opened the door to the Zionist option, that Jews would return to Jerusalem of their own free will. 

Cowen’s translation likewise bared lines of the haggadah that anticipated returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding the Temple, notably, in Adir Hu, “Rebuild it, O God! Rebuild it, rebuild Thine house betimes.” Beginning with the ninth edition of her haggadah (1911), Cowen added Naphtali Herz Imber’s Zionist hymn, Ha-tikva, on the final page, explaining that the anthem (written in 1878 but sung at Zionist Congresses only from 1901) had “touched the Jewish heart the world over” (Cowen, The Seder Service, 1915, p. v). The “Hattikvoh Edition,” as Lillie Cowen dubbed it (ibid.), rapidly overshadowed all other haggadot produced in America, with “hundreds of thousands of copies” [. . .] sold in many parts of the world” (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia 3 [1941], p. 391, s.v. “Cowen, Philip”). 

Lillie Cowen’s success inspired many competitors. A few, caught up in Zionist fervor, placed new emphasis on Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim, translating it enthusiastically, if unidiomatically, as “Coming year in Jerusalem!” 

Not one, however, dared violate the taboo by printing “Next Year in Jerusalem” in the haggadah.

 

New Jerusalem

Meanwhile, Zionism’s opponents within the Reform movement rejected Cowen’s haggadah in favor of ones devoted to America with no mention of Jerusalem. Pittsburgh-based Rabbi J. Leonard Levy’s Home Service for the Passover (1903), entirely in English, mandated an American flag on the table and, in response to the child’s question of “Where do we find civil, political and religious liberty united today?” had the reader exclaim resoundingly, “Here in America” (J. Leonard Levy, Home Service for the Passover [Rodef Shalom Congregation, 1903], p. 25). Reform liturgist Rabbi Isaac S. Moses likewise dropped references to returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding the Temple. The rare 1893 edition of his haggadah went so far as to thank God for having brought Jews “into this Canaan – America, this land of freedom!” ( I. S. Moses, Seder Haggadah: Domestic Service for the Eve of Passover [Chicago, 1893], p. 15). 

In 1906, William Rosenau of Baltimore, whose congregation hovered on the conservative edge of the Reform movement, produced a handsome haggadah with a traditional Hebrew text but a decidedly untraditional, nonliteral English translation. Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim was thus rendered, “Grant, O God, that a year hence Israel’s glory may be more resplendent than it is today” (Rosenau, Seder Haggadah: Home Service for Passover Eve [New York: Bloch Publishing, 1906], pp. 122–23). For Rosenau, the Hebrew text reflected immutable tradition (“the charm of the Haggadah is intimately linked to its old form” [ibid. p. i]). The English translation, by contrast, opened up exciting opportunities for “free renderings” and treating passages “figuratively” (ibid.).

In the more widely disseminated Union Haggadah (1st ed., 1907; revised 1908), which became the standard text in many Reform Jewish homes, the underlying assumption was that the Hebrew and English should match. So rather than maintaining the references to Zion and the Temple in the original Hebrew (and Aramaic), as Rosenau had, it altered many of them. The ancient Aramaic declaration at the opening of the Seder, “May the year to come find us in the land of Israel,” was replaced by a neo-Aramaic one translated as “Let us, whom God’s mercy has freed, now remember those who are still oppressed and resolve to aid them with all our means” (The Union Haggadah [Bloch, 1907], p. 16). Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim was eliminated entirely, with the haggadah concluding instead: “And may all the wrongs that still prevail/ Be righted in the coming year, Amen” (ibid., p. 44).

An unusual Reform haggadah was published in 1916 in Baltimore by Benjamin and Rebecca Cohen. In place of Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim, the authors offered a highly revealing commentary opposing Zionism and celebrating life in the United States:

[W]e do not consider the restoration of Palestine as a Jewish state either practical or necessary. The mission of Israel is spiritual, not political, and we who fortunately live in these United States, a land of liberty and equality, where we are accorded all the rights of citizenship, are proud of this, our native land. We therefore feel prompted this night, while celebrating our festival of freedom, to intone the national anthem of this land of freedom. (Benjamin and Rebecca S. Cohen, Seder Service Affectionately Dedicated to our dear Children for whose instruction it was prepared. Printed in Commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of our Wedding Day [1916], p. 15)

Following the singing of “My Country! Tis of Thee” (amending “Land where my fathers died/ Land of the pilgrim’s pride” to read “Land where the world’s oppressed/Find shelter, home and rest”) and before the fourth cup of wine, the haggadah proposed a toast to what it considered Passover in America to be all about: “the mission of israel: the proclamation of freedom” (ibid., p. 16).

 

On the Edge

Then came the 1917 Balfour Declaration, America’s recognition thereof, and burgeoning Jewish emigration to Palestine (especially after the Immigration Act of 1924 severely limited the ability of the “world’s oppressed” to find shelter in the United States). What seemed in the 19th century a pious hope too dangerous to discuss with outsiders had become a realistic possibility. Several American haggadot reflected this sea change. While remaining careful not to call into question Jewish loyalty to the United States by explicitly stating, “Next year in Jerusalem,” they nevertheless edged ever closer to doing so. 

Exemplifying the new mood was the popular interwar haggadah produced by Orthodox writer and encyclopedist Judah D. Eisenstein in 1928, with whimsical illustrations by lola, pen name of cartoonist Leon Israel of the Jewish Daily Forward. More than any previous editor of a traditional American haggadah, Eisenstein politicized the Exodus, titling his introduction “Liberty Enlightens the World: A Jewish Creation” (Seder Ritual for Passover-Eve, trans. and ed. J. D. Eisenstein [Hebrew Publishing Company, 1928], p. v). While liberal haggadot trumpeted America as the land of true freedom, he insisted that the ideal of liberty actually derived from “the Israelites of old.” “No other religion in the world,” he gushed, “can [. . .] claim liberty as the basis of its origin and existence like the Jewish faith.” (ibid. p. vi) As for Zion, while Eisenstein didn’t include Ha-tikva in his text, he did translate Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim (in capital letters, using all four words of the tabooed English phrase – with a few more in between): “Next year we hope to be in Jerusalem” (ibid., p. 53).

While less bold, the original Maxwell House haggadah, produced by the well-known American coffee company and usually dated to 1932, bravely included not only Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim but also an English translation: “The following year grant us to be in Jerusalem” (Hagadah Passover Seder Service, General Foods Corporation, p. 57). By implicitly making God responsible (“grant us”) for effecting the move to the holy city, this formulation likely aimed to relieve Jewish anxiety about making the text in question available to anyone receiving a free haggadah when purchasing Maxwell House across the country. (Incidentally, this sales promotion made the Maxwell House haggadah by far the most widely distributed in history, with more than fifty million copies of its various editions in print.)

 

Crossing the Line

In 1930, a thirty-year-old Jewish historian finally defied the taboo. In his British haggadah, which gained popularity a few years later, Cecil Roth offered a fresh translation in large capital letters opposite the traditional Hebrew: “Next year in Jerusalem.” In the 1934 edition, the accompanying illustration by Ukrainian-born Donia Nachshen of London eschewed the Temple motif, a fixture of illuminated haggadot. In its place, Nachshen depicted joyful young pioneers standing proud amid a sunny and verdant Jerusalem speedily being rebuilt. Roth knew the city firsthand; his brother, Leon Roth, held the Ahad Ha-am chair of philosophy at the Hebrew University. Rather than a taboo, “Next Year in Jerusalem” was the author’s dream. Many years later, he indeed retired there. 

All of Cecil Roth’s haggadot translated Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim as “Next year in Jerusalem.” As Nazism rose and European Jewry’s prospects darkened, these words became the normative translation in the United States as well. 

Two highly influential American haggadot set this change in motion. Both were produced by professors at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, as World War II raged.

Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), father of Reconstructionist Judaism, authored the first of these works. His controversial New Haggadah, like earlier Reform haggadot, significantly altered the traditional text. Kaplan was particularly proud of having deleted any reference to Jewish chosenness. He also eliminated the recitation of the Ten Plagues and the plea “Pour out Your fury on the nations that know You not” (Psalms 79:6–7).

The haggadah concluded with all pronouncing in unison: Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim. Kaplan sensitively upheld the taboo against “Next Year in Jerusalem,” but his full-caps translation made a Zionist declaration of it nonetheless: “May the coming year witness the rebuilding of Zion and the redemption of Israel.” That wish was followed by the singing (“slowly, like a trumpet call”) of those same Hebrew words in a musical arrangement written by Kaplan’s daughter, Judith Eisenstein (Kaplan, The New Haggadah [Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1941], pp. 174–76). 

Perhaps in response to Kaplan’s revisionist haggadah, Louis Finkelstein (1895–1991), president of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Kaplan’s boss, lent his name and introduction to a thoroughly traditional haggadah published in 1942, with a fresh English translation by Zionist author and intellectual Maurice Samuel. Significantly, Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim occupied two full pages, with music that began “very slowly,” as if recalling the long, tragic Diaspora, and then repeated “in a much livelier tempo” (Haggadah of Pesach, trans. Maurice Samuel [Hebrew Publishing Company, 1942], pp. 55–56), suggesting that the return to Jerusalem was imminent. The translation – bold, forthright, and in keeping with Zionist hopes – made the same point. For the first time, a major American haggadah stated unequivocally: “Next year in Jerusalem”(ibid., p. 56). 

Many editions of the haggadah prepared by the National Jewish Welfare Board for American soldiers in World War II similarly asserted, “Next year in Jerusalem!” The United States government actually paid for this booklet (edited by Rabbi David de Sola Pool of New York’s historic Congregation Shearith Israel, along with his learned wife, Tamar), with over three hundred thousand copies distributed to Jewish men and women in the armed forces. Jews thus became less apprehensive about “Next year in Jerusalem,” realizing that their national vision in no way offended Uncle Sam.

With that, the taboo against “Next year in Jerusalem” was broken. In postwar haggadot, especially following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, circumlocutions regarding Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim largely disappeared. And as Jerusalem grew in size and significance, the formulation even gained a word: “Le-shana ha-ba’a bi-Yerushalayim ha-benuya – Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt.”  

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Further reading: Jonathan Sarna, “The Taboo against ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ in the American Haggadah (1837–1942),” in Emet le-Ya‘akov: Facing the Truths of History: Essays in Honor of Jacob J. Schacter (Academic Studies Press, 2023).