Megillat Rut on Shavuot (Public Reading of Ruth)

The custom of publicly reading Megillat Rut (the Book of Ruth) in the synagogue on Shavuot, connecting the scroll's harvest setting with the festival of first-fruits and the giving of the Torah at Sinai. Spread from Ashkenazic northern France and the Rhineland communities to Polish-Lithuanian Jewry by the 14th–15th centuries. Sephardic adoption was uneven: Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch does not codify this reading, and many traditional Sephardic communities did not observe it. Modern Sephardic uptake is largely a post-emancipation and Israeli convergence phenomenon. The custom became near-universal in Ashkenazic communities by the early modern period; the Bnei Yissaschar (R. Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, c. 1850) describes it as practiced by "all Israel," reflecting Hasidic-era perception rather than strict Sephardic historical fact.