[Avodah] Figs and Wasps

[Arie Folger]

RMB wrote:
> But I don't think this is true, because it fails the Kuzari Test. I
> asked around, and no one around here heard of their grandmothers
> soaking their vegetables in vinegar. With the exception of the romaine
> lettuce used for maror. (Which was possibly the only time Ashkenazi
> grandparents ate romaine...) So at most I would think it is possible
> some qehillos did soak in salt or vinegar water, but it definitely was
> not universal.

Eastern European Jews didn't eat vegetables. My late father told me how, at 
the beginning of the war, while a prisoner of war (this is a humorous strange 
story in its own right: some Polish Jews retrocatively became prisoners of 
war after Germany attacked the Russian part of Poland; the Russians claimed 
that since Poland was now under German control and these Jews were from 
Poland, they were actually Germans), my father ate a turnip. A local military 
officer caught him and slapped him for eating dangerous food (or, as it was 
referred to in Yiddish, maakhel behaimeh). One year later they were all 
converted to "vegetabelism".

Gut vokh,
-- 
Arie Folger
http://www.ariefolger.googlepages.com