Remembering Passover Seders in extraordinary times
Unable to count on broad vaccine dissemination and herd immunity, it looks like we are in for a repeat of the pandemic holidays of spring 2020. For those who celebrate Passover, there is the Seder to consider. Perhaps we now know better how to organize a virtual gathering. There will be more resources to help adults engage children in the story of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. And many celebrants will be well able to imagine what it means to navigate a narrow place, a type of bondage. A year of loss, fear and restrictions may deepen discussions of redemption.
At some future date, will we look back on these times, asking what made the Seder different. Will we remember who we were with when we wondered why the Seder night is different — mah nishtanah — from all other nights?
As I look to the holiday this year, I find myself thinking about distinctive Passovers past. Not the Seders of my growing up years or my married-with-children years, which as varied as they may have been all took place in the northeastern United States, in times of normality. But rather those experienced by my mother, Rachel, a child survivor of the Holocaust:
Passover 1944
At 14, Rachel — the second of six children — celebrated Passover with her family in Sighet, a small Carpathian mountain town. Her parents had saved all year to buy their children new clothes for the holiday. Rachel had helped to clean their apartment, and looked forward to the delicious foods she saw her parents preparing.
She appreciated having her father home — having escaped a massacre, he was among the few Jewish men to return from the notoriously brutal labor service into which he had been conscripted. When toward the Seder’s end Rachel’s sister opened the door for the prophet Elijah, in staggered their building’s inebriated caretaker. Pounding the table with his fist, he spoke loudly. “Do not worry, good folks,” he said, “the war will be over in one year.” After escorting the man out the door, Rachel’s father said that a drunk speaks the truth.
Passover 1950
Having been orphaned in Auschwitz and contracting tuberculosis in Bergen-Belsen, Rachel, now in remission, was living in the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden. At 20, she was barely supporting herself by working in an electric meter factory. When a friend mentioned that there was a Jewish family looking for help during the Passover holiday, she jumped at the opportunity. It had been six years since she attended a Seder in a Jewish home.
Rachel enjoyed meeting the Schnabels — the grandparents, their adult son and daughter, and their eightyear-old grandson. She participated in the preparation and serving of food, admired the apartment’s beautiful furnishings and table setting, and forged a connection with the child. She did not then know that the Schnabels would liberate her from her tedious factory work, that she would become part of their family and a nanny to the boy, whose good behavior that evening belied his problems. Passover 1955
Having just arrived in the United States, Rachel, 25, and her husband Sidney traveled from Long Island, N.Y., to a Seder in Lakewood,
N.J. The hostess, Rachel’s new sister-in-law, was Ratza, with whom she had worked in the Christianstadt Labor Camp. There they had labored for the Nazi war machine — but not in the camp’s munitions factory. Both worked in the kitchen. Rachel had ladled out soup to prisoners and served the SS in their dining room; Ratza, older and stronger than Rachel, carried heavy bowls of vegetables from the washroom to the kitchen. They saw each other every day. Now, more than a decade after the war, they met as family.
Ratza and Irving (Sidney’s brother) recreated the Seder of the shtetl communities they came from. It had been so long since Rachel was with those whose tastes and traditions, whose spoken languages — Yiddish and Hungarian — evoked the world she knew as a child.
Already imbued with historic significance and enduring themes, the Passover Seder may be further marked by the special circumstances in which it takes place.
Whether the stories are our own or passed down to us, we might remember when something out of the ordinary happened. One day, reflecting on Passover 2021, we may recall adaptations made. How did we explain the bread of affliction, reflect on the 10 plagues and discuss the bitterness of slavery? How did we express our hopes for freedom?