The joyous Jewish holiday of Purim begins with a solemn feast. It is the only day of the year when Jews are allowed to drink heavily. The Jewish sages said,

The name Purim comes from the word “pur” — “lot”. It was cast by Haman, the Persian vizier, to choose a date for the extermination of the Jews after capturing Jerusalem and destroying the Temple. Purim commemorates the miraculous rescue of the Jewish people by the brave sage Mordecai and his niece Esther.

Since the early Middle Ages, Purim has been the season of merry shows and carnivals for children and adults — Purim spiels. Before World War II, colorful masquerades and theatrical performances were staged in Germany, Italy and Poland. Today, the tradition lives on in orthodox families.

This is how a native of the Ukrainian town of Khotyn recalls Purim,

The main characters of a Purim spiel were, and still are, Queen Esther, her maid in a silk dress with a fan for the mistress, the sage Mordecai and the villain Haman in a cardboard mask with a glued-on beard. Sometimes an effigy of Haman was ceremoniously burned.

The Mordecai costume sketch from the collection of the Russian Museum of Ethnography was made by the Belarusian-Jewish artist Solomon Borisovich Yudovin in 1934. In this series the artist made sketches for the costumes of King Artaxerxes, Queen Vashti, the jester Mondre and Haman, as well as drawings of musicians with violin and cymbals, without which no holiday was complete.

Solomon Yudovin, or Shloime Boruchov, was born in the Vitebsk Governorate in 1892. He saw life in the Jewish community with its traditions, values and flavor from a young age. At the age of eight, Solomon enrolled in the drawing school of Judel Pan, the teacher of Marc Chagall. Yudovin joined the Jewish Renaissance movement and participated in ethnographic expeditions aimed at preserving the culture of Russian Jews. He donated the sketch of Mordecai’s costume to the museum in 1939.