NY Metro On The Tzivos Hashem Exodus Show

CROWN HEIGHTS — Water turns to blood, frogs fall from the ceiling, and the Red Sea parts.

This is an interactive “exodus from Egypt experience” taking over the fourth floor of the Jewish Children’s Museum on Eastern Parkway. It was scheduled to open yesterday, but was postponed as volunteers — mostly yeshiva students from this Lubavitch community — rushed to finish construction.

They expect to be ready this morning for a scheduled tour by girls from a local school, according to Gershon Emmer, a rabbinical student overseeing the installation.

Emmer pointed to an 9-foot-high waterfall they were building. “This right here is what’s been causing all the delays,” he said, standing in a room littered with tools and a boombox playing Matisyahu. “This has never been done before in any exodus.” Since Moses, that is.

The Red Sea

The device has four pumps that will recycle 20,000 gallons of water a day to create a biblical effect that will pause when an actor playing Moses — carrying a staff in one hand and a live baby goat in the other — ushers the kids through. In another hallway, a sand-covered floor and heat lamps will recreate the Israelites’ wandering through the desert. At the end, they’ll make matzoh.

In other exodus recreations that Lubavitchers around the globe have been staging for more than a decade, no one has attempted such a Red Sea simulation.

Everyone welcome

The museum hopes to attract children from all backgrounds to the exhibit. Local yeshivas have signed up, as has the local Catholic school St. Vincent’s.

Besides spending whatever waking hours they had on construction, many of these volunteers have also been perusing the Internet for materials and instructions. They even found a waterfall they thought they could use — but it was too expensive to ship from Australia.

“We found some waterfalls on the Internet that were 2 or 3 feet high,” Emmer added, “and people said you couldn’t get a solid sheet of water if you went higher than that, but we wanted to go higher. This will be very dramatic. It’s a small room and you’ll get the feeling when the water is falling that you have nowhere to go,” he said. “Kids learn about this in school, but it’s ancient history to them. This brings it to life.”

Museum

• The Jewish Children’s Museum, which opened last year at 792 Eastern Parkway, was a $31 million project of Tzivos Hashem: Jewish Children International, which sponsors educational and recreational programs as well as helping underprivileged children go to summer camp.