BANGKOK — Jewish travelers in Thailand this Passover season found themselves navigating between Thai New Year’s celebrations and the far more serious – and at times violent – anti-government protests taking place just blocks away.
Thousands of Pesach Celebrants Ride Out Thai Protests
BANGKOK — Jewish travelers in Thailand this Passover season found themselves navigating between Thai New Year’s celebrations and the far more serious – and at times violent – anti-government protests taking place just blocks away.
According to Chabad-Lubavitch officials in the Far Eastern country, the demonstrations – which foreign news outlets have pinned to a possible overthrow of the government orchestrated by an ousted prime minister – are disconcerting only for the potential that things could get out of control. At the beginning of the week, said Rabbi Nechemia Wilhelm from Bangkok, things seemed to be confined to the government compound nearby, but nevertheless cordoned off from areas popular with tourists.
“Only one main street was blocked on the way to the airport Monday,” said Wilhelm, the director of Chabad of Bangkok who hosted a Passover Seders last week for some 700 Jewish travelers, primarily Israeli. “Here, you don’t really feel it.”
Wilhelm added that from where the Chabad House is located, one couldn’t tell whether the raucous behavior of locals was because of their multi-day New Year’s festivities, or because of the political situation.
“If you didn’t read the newspapers, you wouldn’t know what was going on,” he said.
Levi Stein, a Lubavitch rabbinical student from Oak Park, Mich., who was in Thailand last week to assist with the Seders, said that the crowds of people filling the streets were on the whole benevolent, but that the throngs of revelers kept him confined to the Chabad House for a day.
“For the most part, they weren’t violent, but they were dousing each other and everyone who walked past with water,” said Stein. “The real danger was a few blocks away, where the protests were happening.”
