Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Passover At Hogwarts: Jewish Fascination With Harry Potter Goes Way Back

Riding on the coattails of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” a new Harry Potter-themed haggadah is coming out this week.

But Jewish spinoffs of all things Harry Potter are nothing new.

The author of the new haggadah, Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg, has used Harry Potter to teach Torah for years. While the later books were still coming out, he ran a book club at SAR Academy in Riverdale for middle school students to write their own chapters for the series.

Dov Krulwich, a computer scientist in Israel, wrote “Harry Potter and Torah,”.

Fellow member of the tribe Dinah Bucholz wrote “The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook,” a guide to the delicacies enjoyed by wizards from the Leaky Cauldron to Hogwarts. The cookbook includes recipes for Kreacher’s French Onion Soup and Pumpkin Pasties among others.

In 2014, J.K. Rowling confirmed via Twitter that there were Jews at Hogwarts, including a certain Ravenclaw named Anthony Goldstein. In “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” Porpentina and Queenie Goldstein, two of Anthony’s relatives, make an appearance, as well.

Contact Shira Hanau at [email protected]

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.