Pandemic again forces Passover Seders online
But with adapted celebrations, family traditions continue
In the photo from 1966, Karen Fazekas is in the corner.
Her green shirt and black bob peak out from behind her mother’s blue dress and cousin’s chestnut hair; they are three of nearly two dozen family members smiling and crammed around a vast Seder table in a wood-paneled Queens basement.
In the photo from 2020, Fazekas is in the center, smiling out of a laptop screen, sitting atop a box of matzo. She’s flanked on either side by her grandchildren, Samantha and Jesse, plus two American Girl dolls to make up for the notable lack of other people at the table.
Today at sundown marks the beginning of Passover, an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the liberation of Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. It is the second year of celebrating amid the coronavirus pandemic.
For nearly 60 years, the Fazekas family united for Passover Seder, a tradition that started in the 1950s when Sylvia and Murry Waltzer, Fazekas’ parents, purchased their home in Queens. But the coronavirus pandemic hit last year just weeks before Passover began.
While traditionally, the family would be making plans to converge from California and Boston or drive down from New York and New Jersey. But in 2020, they stayed put in Annapolis and instead opened laptops, said Amy Fazekas Bird, Karen Fazekas’ daughter.
“I think we’re like plotting out the reading last minute,” Bird said. “We all had an electronic copy of a Haggadah, and my cousin Artie who is sort of the patriarch of the family, he lead as he usually does when we’re all together.”
In 2020, the holiday began just weeks after the virus officially arrived in Maryland, sending families and local congregations who traditionally gathered on the first night for the Seder meal scrambling to learn new video-conferencing technology.
“The last Passover, we didn’t even fully appreciate what we were stepping into,” said Rabbi Ari Goldstein. “Obviously, this
year, we have a whole lot more perspective about what’s been going on, but I think it is certainly a sadness. We are waiting to get back together in person.”
On Passover, families and communities convene for a Seder dinner, a ritual meal during which participants recall the story of Jewish emancipation in Egypt.
Goldstein, head rabbi at Temple Beth Shalom in Arnold, said last year, he struggled to connect a camera to a laptop to host virtual Seder for the congregation. This year, the temple has multiple cameras set up in the sanctuary, plus software to place the text of prayers over the video stream.
At Chabad Anne Arundel County, volunteers handed out meals to go, said Rabbi Nochum Light. This year, the congregation will host Seder under an outdoor tent that has served as a day-school, hosted a bar mitzvah and provided “whatever anyone wanted and needed” for the last year, Light said.
Congregation Kneseth Israel has held in-person holiday services during the pandemic, said congregation president Jody Goldsmith, after the Annapolis synagogue installed new high-grade filters.
“The air is cleaner than any hospital,” he said. “They’ve tested it.”
With social distancing in the sanctuary, mask requirements and temperature checks, Kneseth Israel will host Yizkor, a remembrance of the dead, in person.
This year, with most of the adults vaccinated, the Fazekas family will make the trip up to Long Island, where Amy Fazekas Bird grew up, to celebrate in a pod with her mother, sister, in-laws and video call the rest of the family. Missing among the virtual faces will be Bird’s great aunt Roz Joseph, the last of the generation who started the Seder tradition, who died from COVID-19, and her father, Joel, who died suddenly in December 2019.
It’s not quite the big celebration in the Queens basement, but that the tradition continues is important, Bird said.
Cindy Kowal’s family traditions go to the early 1930s when her family fled Poland before the Nazi invasion and the start of World War II. Whoever didn’t come was never heard from again, she said.
In 2019, Kowal, her husband and three children piled into their car to make a trip to Long Island only to break down in New Jersey. Last year, they gathered around their computer with a modern Haggadah, edited and translated by two popular Jewish authors, while the family read from their own. They’ll do the same this year.
“Being in Brooklyn and being around a lot of Russian and Polish immigrants, it’s extremely important to me that the high holidays are honored,” Kowal said, “even if they’re not honored perfectly.”