Author to talk history of Haggadah

4/5/2013

On the final day of the Toledo Museum of Art’s exhibit of three Haggadah volumes that tell the story of the Hebrews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, native Toledoan Ira Steingroot, author of Keeping Passover: Everything You Need to Know to Bring the Ancient Tradition to Life and to Create Your Own Passover Celebration (HarperCollins), will present a free lecture at the museum’s Little Theater at 2 p.m.

Mr. Steingroot’s talk with slides traces 700 years of the illustrated Haggadah, including the bird’s head Haggadah, in which “the artist who did it followed the rule that we should not show the human form, no graven images, the second commandment,” Mr. Steingroot said. “So instead you end up with a kind of a Foghorn Leghorn version of the Exodus with all the figures having the heads of birds but still wearing the Jewish hat that they would have worn in the 1300s.”