AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Anywhere else in Europe, a muscular cartoon character named Max the Matzah would have amounted to little more than an inside Jewish joke.

What?!

But in the Netherlands, where matzah for many non-Jews is a household item year-round, Max became an unlikely hit with the general population. Since his creation about 15 years ago as the unofficial mascot of the CHILDREN’S MUSEUM of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, Max has proven popular beyond the country’s 40,000 Jews.

He has been featured on taxi cabs as part of the museum’s advertising campaign and on tens of thousands of boxes of Hollandia, the matzah factory in the Netherlands located in the eastern city of Enschede. (It is largely thanks to that factory, which used to be owned by Jews, that matzah, unleavened bread that Jews consume on Passover to commemorate their ancestors’ hurried flight from Egypt, became so popular here.)

https://www.jta.org/2019/04/08/global/this-cartoon-matzah-character-is-huge-in-holland-and-not-just-among-jews