For Passover, Israel’s Jews Hold a Monopoly Bake Sale : Religion: Rabbis transfer leavened products to Arabs during festival. But Arabs have to give them back.

As Ahmed Mugrabi handed over four bundles of rather worn bank notes, he looked like a man who had just bought Boardwalk, Park Place and all the utilities and railways in a giant Monopoly game.

“ ‘Israel’s biggest tycoon!’ ” Mugrabi said, signing the four-page bill of sale with a theatrical flourish. “That’s what the headlines should say. ‘Arab lawyer buys Israel’s bread monopoly!’ ”

With a down payment of just 20,000 Israeli shekels, about $7,500, Mugrabi had bought all the grain and flour--and almost everything, from pasta to beer, made from them--in the possession of the state of Israel, most of its larger corporations and many smaller businesses too.

In the bargain, Mugrabi had also leased the Israeli bakeries, flour mills, breweries, warehouses, army canteens, prison storerooms and even ships at sea where the grain and the related products might be stored.

“There--now it all belongs to you,” said Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the country’s Ashkenazic chief rabbi, adding his signature to the contract. “Mazel tov!”

To comply with the biblical injunction against eating or possessing any leavened products during the Jewish Passover festival, which began at sundown Monday, Israel’s chief rabbis sold the holdings of the government, state corporations and others for which they had powers of attorney to Mugrabi, 58, a Muslim lawyer.

Sadly for Mugrabi, however, the deal is only for a week. Pleading insufficient capital to execute the transaction, he will cancel it in eight days under an option in the bill of sale, return title of all the goods to the original owners, give up the leases--and get back his money.

The transaction is legally binding, Lau said, and religiously symbolic for Jews as they began the celebration of the Exodus, the escape of the Israelis from 430 years of slavery in Egypt about 1280 BC.

“The prohibition in the Torah against hametz (products of fermented dough) is very strict,” Lau said in an interview. “We must be very scrupulous in its observance, not even holding the grain of last year’s harvest where some kernels might have cracked and begun to ferment, for the Torah says anyone eating hametz ‘shall be cut off from his people.’

“The point is to recall the way in which the people of Israel fled from Egypt and to hold to the covenant we have with the Almighty.”

The practice of selling the hametz began centuries ago, Lau said, because of the huge losses that Jews would suffer, both personally and in their businesses, if they actually had to dispose of all their grain and the products derived from them each Passover.

“It may seem formal, it may seem a fiction, and it may seem especially odd that we have to ask for the help of a non-Jew in observing Jewish law in Israel,” Lau said, “but these qualities only underline the importance of our strict observance.”

Jews around the world carry out similar transactions just before Passover, giving powers of attorney to their rabbis to sell the prohibited products to Gentiles, who later cancel the deals or sell everything back. Matzo, the flat, thin unleavened bread specially prepared for the Passover, is naturally exempted from the prohibition.

The difference in Israel, Lau said, is the sheer scale of the sales--and that the nominal buyers are usually Arabs and Muslims.

“Here, we are putting assets of the Jewish state and of the Jewish people--and considerable assets at that--in the hands of a non-Jew,” Lau said. “It is an act of trust.”

“There is also an element of risk--not large, but quite real,” said Zali Jaffee, Lau’s attorney. “If, God forbid, Mugrabi dies with ownership of all this, if for some reason he decided to execute the sale, if the documents proved defective, I would be in the soup. If any of the ‘ifs’ arise, I am in the soup.”

To Jaffee’s discomfort, Lau recalled how Gentiles in Eastern Europe often “bought” taverns owned by Jews--whiskey and many other spirits are forbidden as hametz --and then invited their friends in for parties during Passover.

“When it came time to resell the establishments to the Jewish owners, there were often arguments about the diminished stocks,” Lau said.

In Israel, the payoff for the buyers is largely goodwill. Mugrabi, officially, received a desk clock from the rabbinate for his services as go-between; unofficially, he acknowledged “a good flow” of legal business.

Some buyers “expect” up to a 10% premium when they resell, according to those who follow the arcane hametz trade, but most are comfortable in an old and easy partnership that does not really involve money.

Paradoxically, Israelis sometimes have a problem finding a Gentile to buy their hametz simply because the country is so overwhelmingly Jewish. Each rabbi thus looks for a non-Jew, usually a local Arab worker, to become the hametz buyer for his congregation.

Ahmed Said abu Kateesh, a telephone operator at a central Jerusalem hospital, laid out 10,000 shekels, the equivalent of $3,500, on Monday in a deal similar to Mugrabi’s to buy the personal hametz holdings of thousands of the strictly observant haredi Orthodox as well as many businesses, such as supermarkets, bakeries and restaurants.

“It’s really a funny sort of thing, but they are absolutely set on it,” said Abu Kateesh, 63, a principal hametz “buyer” in Jerusalem’s haredi district, Mea Shearim, for the past 30 years. “In Islam, when you sell, you sell, so to me this all does seem to be a game. . . .

“But then the Jews had a good laugh last month during Ramadan when we Muslims fasted by day and feasted at night. Each people has its own religious beliefs, its own way of worshiping God. To my mind, we should help one another do that; after all, there is but one God, however you worship him.”