PASSOVER, ALEXANDER

PASSOVER, ALEXANDER (1840–1910), Russian jurist. The son of an army surgeon, Passover was born in Uman, Ukraine, and graduated from Moscow University in 1861. He was denied a professorship because of his refusal to renounce Judaism, and became a prosecutor's secretary at the Moscow District Court. Passover was admitted to the Odessa bar in 1871 and after the Odessa pogrom of that year was one of several Jewish lawyers who represented the victims in court proceedings against the perpetrators. From 1874 he practiced in St. Petersburg, where he founded a seminary for law students and where he acquired a reputation as an outstanding jurist and an authority on Russian and foreign law. His advice on civil-law matters was sought by public bodies and his interpretations of judicial rulings in Russian legal journals were sometimes adopted by the Supreme Court. For some years, he sat on the board of the St. Petersburg Bar Association, but resigned in 1889 when the board gave the Ministry of Justice statistics on Jews in the legal profession. Passover was an active figure in the Jewish community and initiated research projects on the economic situation of the Jews in Russia. He bequeathed his large library, containing a huge amount of anti-Jewish literature, to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Ginsburg, Amolike Peterburg (1944), 101–10; Russian Jewry 1860–1917 (1966), index. (David Bar-Rav-Hay) PASSOVER, SECOND PASSOVER, SECOND (Heb. פֶּסַח שֵׁנִי, Pesaḥ Sheni), According to the Bible (Num. 9:6–13) every person unable to offer the passover sacrifice on the 14th of Nisan because of ritual defilement or because of unavoidable absence from Jerusalem was bound to observe the Passover ritual for one day, one month later, on the 14th of Iyyar. The only biblical reference to the actual observance of the Second Passover is to the time of hezekiah , and occurs in II Chronicles 30:1–27. Since the date of the Second Passover falls during the mourning period of the counting of the omer and only four days before lag ba-omer , no special ritual is now observed except the omission of the Taḥanun in the liturgy. Some people eat unleavened bread on Second Passover, as a symbolic remembrance.