Bake a batch of hamantaschen

If you’ve never had a hamantashen, you ought to. If you have, you know why.

I had my first encounter with this to-die-for pastry at the original Kaplan’s deli, bakery and restaurant, which was long a gem in the crown of South Coast Plaza. As a Jewish bakery and delicatessen, Kaplan’s had no rival between here and Langer’s in Los Angeles.

During my junior and senior years at UC Irvine, I waited tables at Abraham Kaplan’s thriving place. Early one still-dark morning, I walked through the bakery on my way to a breakfast shift and came across the legendary patriarch and baker at work.

Surrounded by steel cooling racks taller than he was, he slid enormous baking trays straight from the oven into the racks’ slots. Each tray was covered with plump, golden shortbread triangles, every one of them bursting with a jewel-colored jam or a shiny dollop of blue-black poppy seeds held together with confectioner’s sugar.

I said: “Oh, those smell tempting! What are they?”

“Have one,” the man I knew as Mr. Kaplan said. While I did, he told me the story of hamantashen and Purim, the Jewish festival for which hamantashen are baked.

Were you to be in Tel Aviv next week, you’d know it was Purim. The festival is a big part costume party. Costumed children, teenagers and young adults will take to the city’s Dizengoff Street ? which will be closed to traffic ? or Hayarkon Park to celebrate. There will be music and dancing and performances on stages set up in the park and on the street. Bakeries all over the city will sell truckloads of buttery hamantashen.

Here, unless you’re Jewish or someone told you, it would be hard to tell that Purim celebrations start on Monday evening. Unlike Hanukkah, when you might notice the holiday’s symbolic menorah in front of a synagogue or even in a shopping mall, lighted candle by candle for eight days, Purim, outside of Israel, typically remains invisible, celebrated only inside the walls of homes and synagogues.

In Huntington Beach, Congregation Adat Israel Chabad of West Orange County will mark the holiday with several events, to which the community is invited.

Purim remembers the survival of the Jewish people through hostile circumstances in ancient Persia more than 2,300 years ago. Like Hanukkah, it is a rabbinical festival, anchored in history and tradition, not a holy day in the sense of those, such as Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, instituted in the Torah.

Nevertheless, it is held in high regard. Its story, the story of a woman named Esther, is found in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. The manuscript is known as the Megillah, which means “the scroll of Esther.”

There is also a later Greek version of the story, which contains six sections not found in the Hebrew text. The Greek-language story can be found translated in English-language Christian Bibles that contain what are called deuterocanonical writings not included in the compilation of Hebrew Scripture.

Likewise, the Hebrew-language story can be found translated in English-language, Christian Old Testament scriptures between the books of Nehemiah and Job.

The Megillah is available in English, too, although I’ve found copies hard to find both on Amazon.com and in local bookstores. The website chabad.org offers “The Complete Story of Purim” by Nissan Mindel, “The Book of Esther in Rhyme” by Fay Kranz Greene, “The Story of Purim for Children” (told through sketches of the story’s main characters) and an audio version of the story. The texts can be read and the audio heard online.

Better yet, if you take Congregation Adat Israel up on its invitation, you can hear the story read right here in town ? as many as three times. Show up at the synagogue Monday evening for a 6:30 reading followed by a Purim costume party. The congregation’s Rabbi Aron David Berkowitz says both adults and children are encouraged to attend in costume. Children will be given noisemakers called “graggers.” These are used to make a racket during the reading of parts of the Megillah when the bad guy gets booed.

The story tells how a man named Haman, a right-hand man to the Persian king, plotted to plunder and murder all of the Jews in the kingdom. But by way of mystery and miracles, Esther, who is herself Jewish, becomes queen. Alerted to the plight of her people by her uncle Mordechai, she bravely moves to foil Haman’s plans. In the end, Haman hangs from the very gallows he intended for the Jews.

I remember seeing a “Dry Bones” cartoon about the Purim story in the Jerusalem Post. Its salient message, the cartoon said, is this: There’s a Haman in every generation. So the holiday celebrates not only the escape of the Jews in ancient Persia from the hands of Haman ? it finds joy in the escape of Jews throughout history from a succession of Hamans.

The story of Esther will also be read by Congregation Adat Israel on Tuesday morning at its 6:30 Purim service and again at 5 p.m. before its “Purim in China” feast, featuring Chinese food and music by the Orange County Klezmers (www.ocklezmers.com).

If want to know the story but prefer the Spark Notes version, check out the 60-second overview on the Aish HaTorah website (www.aish.com; type “60-second overview” in the search box).

In commemorating Purim, members of Congregation Adat Israel read the Megillah, give gifts to the poor, send gifts of food to friends and eat a festive Purim meal. Purim baskets called Shalach Manos will be distributed to hospitals and senior centers.

Whatever you do, I hope you can find a hamantashen to savor. I wish I could tell you where to find one without driving to Los Angeles. If you’re game for baking a batch, drop me an e-mail and I’ll send you a recipe.

And why are these tasty triangles called hamantashen? I can only tell you what I’ve been told. In the story Abraham Kaplan told me, they represented the wicked Haman’s ears cut from his head after he was hanged. When I lived in Israel, I did sometimes hear them called Oznei Haman, which in Hebrew does mean “Haman’s ears,” but no one ever repeated the story of them being removed from Haman’s head.

I’ve also been told the tri-cornered sweets represent a three-cornered hat Haman liked to wear. But the Yiddish tash or the German tasche means “pocket,” not “hat.”

The pockets, I’ve heard, are the pockets in the pastries made to hold jam or poppy seed filling, not the pockets in Haman’s pants.

Haman’s ears, Haman’s hat or Haman’s pockets ? by any name, they’re scrumptious.

Congregation Adat Israel is at 5052 Warner Ave. in Huntington Beach. For more information, call (714) 846-2285 or visit www.chabadhb.com.