Green Prophet’s Daniella witnesses the Muslim holiday ritual slaughtering of a sheep, in Jaffa.
Last Friday I was determined to find a sheep slaughter. It was Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice. The story goes that Ibrahim was about to slaughter his son Ismail, when an angel came and redirected him to a lamb. In honor of that sacrifice, Muslims worldwide butcher sheep and goats on the holiday, and Jaffa, the Arab half of Tel Aviv, was no exception.
I got to Jaffa at 11 a.m. and began walking the streets looking for a family performing the ritual. Many families have stopped killing their own sheep in recent years; some don’t have the money, others don’t want the mess, some live in apartments without a yard, and others prefer celebrating the holiday in a vacation cabin in the north. At any rate, after calling about six families during the week, I still had no destination on Friday, and it was by chance that I saw a white sheep tied to the aluminum gate inside the Jaffaly family home in Shiveti Yisrael street in Jaffa. Two weeks earlier, Jaffar Jaffaly, 35, had paid 1,800 shekels (around $450) for it, and it was delivered the night before the holiday to his home.
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