Surprising sedarim Area Jews recall past Passovers

For many Jews, Passover means cleaning the cupboards, dusting off the seder plate and passing on the cookie jar at work.

For some others, however, Pesach has meant having to walk home with an armed guard in the dead of night, sending a Passover recipe via overseas radio and holding a seder in a rain forest.

In October 2004, Rabbi Berel Wolvovsky of Chabad of Silver Spring was commissioned by the Chabad movement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to spend Chanukah in Namibia and Zambia. The trips were such successes that he and a friend were asked to return to Africa to host a seder last year for the Jewish community in Lusaka, Zambia.

For the latter trip, the duo had to first fly into South Africa just to purchase kosher meat, since none was available where they would be staying. Then, they caught a flight to Lusaka.

Once there, the rabbi and his friend had to rent a bungalow in a gated, guarded community “because it’s not uncommon to see someone walking down the street with a machine gun who’s not part of a security force,” Wolvovsky said.

The seder was held in the restaurant of a German friend of one of the seder guests, an Israeli citizen who was working for the Zambian government at the time. The entire retaurant had to be kashered, the rabbi said, which meant “the ovens had to be blowtorched and the utensils had to be boiled,” among other tasks.

When it was over, because Wolvovsky and his friend couldn’t drive during the holiday, they were escorted back to their bungalow on foot by an armed guard.

“We had just two days to pull this all together,” the rabbi continued. “We believe that out of the 50 Jews in Zambia, 45 came to the seder … it’s still something that gives me a little wake-up. You know, you’re in America and here people sometimes complain about all the preparation they have to do for Passover, but these people took an hour or two flight within their own country just to fulfill a mitzvah. They were so overjoyed that the opportunity came to them.”

Kandy Hutman, the Jewish Community Center’s continuing education program director, had her own unusual seder five years ago ‹ in a jungle. Hutman was in Peru on a trip with Joan Zuckerman, a teacher friend who was leading a group of Montgomery County students and some of their parents through the country on an educational tour.

“We knew we would be in the Peruvian Amazon during Passover,” Hutman said. But “we decided that we would bring the Haggadahs and traditional foods with us and asked the staff at the environmental center where we were staying to provide a chicken and hard-boiled eggs.”

Though the group’s Jews numbered only five, they were not the only ones participating in the seder. The rest of the group, which included both students and their parents, also joined in.

“As we started to clear the table, one of the adults [who had participated] said to us, ‘This taught me more than anything we have done this week. … I wish everyone could share their traditions.’ ”

Eric Greenberg, a District attorney, has an inspiring Passover story. In 1987, he traveled to the former Soviet Union to have a seder with refuseniks, Jews whom the Soviet government had forbidden emigration. At the time, Greenberg was working for the Coalition to Free Soviet Jews, an organization that was based in New York.

“Secretary of State George Shultz was going to Moscow for Passover and agreed to host a seder at the embassy,” Greenberg remembered. “We helped, behind the scenes, to coordinate that. We were not part of the official Shultz delegation, [but] we interviewed refuseniks when we were there and smuggled out the videotape” for screening in the U.S.

Shultz wore a kippah and discussed the meaning of Passover “and its close analogy to the Soviet Jews,” Greenberg said. “Their rallying cry was, ‘Let my people go!’… None of us at the time could have realized how much things were going to change. Probably every one of the people at dinner are now living in Israel.”

In April 2000, Ellen Daniels, an English as a second language teacher at Einstein High School in Kensington, and her husband, Adam, visited a friend in Quetzaltnango, Guatemala’s second largest city.

“When he found out we were coming, he asked if we could bring some matzah because he wanted to celebrate Passover,” Daniels, of Takoma Park, recalled. “So, Adam and I put two boxes in the bottoms of our backpacks.”

Two-hundred and ninety-five miles of hitch-hiking later, the couple pulled the boxes out of their packs to prepare for the 16-person seder.

“Not one piece was broken. We were hysterical ‹ we just couldn’t believe it. We joked that it surpassed the miracle of Chanukah,” Daniels said.

Though there were individuals of seven different nationalities at the seder, which was held at a language school in the city, there were just five Jews.

“So we really had to explain [everything]. And people were genuinely interested,” she said.

They served latkes, vegetable kebabs and the charoset, horseradish and matzah Daniels had brought from the States.

“It ended up being the most meaningful seder I’ve ever been at,” Daniels said.

Alexandria’s Ann Moline, an area writer, has a more humorous story about an unconventional Passover. Ten years ago, a friend of hers was living in Romania.

“This was right after the fall of communism, so she was [even] having trouble finding things like eggs and chocolate … there was very little Pesach food there,” explained Moline, whose husband, Jack, is the rabbi of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria.

The friend, who is now living in Singapore, asked Moline for a cake recipe because she was hosting an Israeli delegation for the holiday. Moline sent it via another friend by fax ‹ but she left out a critical step.

“I forgot to tell her to freeze it, or else the whole thing would fall apart on the countertop,” she remembers.

Just days after she sent the flawed recipe, the Voice of America came to the Moline household to broadcast a segment on Passover sedarim. A film crew would be recording the family’s preparations and a reporter would be interviewing Moline.

While Moline was talking to the reporter, she realized her mistake in sending her friend the recipe without the crucial instruction.

“I asked the reporter, ‘Will this be broadcast in Romania?’ And she said yes. So I asked, ‘Could I give my friend a recipe through this broadcast?’ She said, ‘sure.’ ”

Moline later found out that her friend had been listening to VOA on her radio at home in Romania and heard the extra recipe step. Her cake ended up a success, after all.

“It’s the globalization of a chocolate cake recipe,” Moline quipped.

Lloyd Wolf, a photographer living in Arlington, remembered an improptu seder he and some colleagues once held outdoors in Dallas. Twenty-five years ago, Wolf was expected to attend the Society of Photographic Education’s national conference in Texas “for significant professional reasons,” he explained, even though it conflicted with Passover.

Reluctantly, he attended, and, after the last speaker at the conference had finished, Wolf and half a dozen Jewish friends decided to hold their own seder.

“We scraped together an egg, some greens, maybe a piece of fried chicken, saltwater and definitely a few bottles of wine,” Wolf recalled. “Being Texas, it was warm out, and with the moon being full, we decided to hold the ritual meal on the putting green of a golf course adjacent to our hotel.”

The group shared the few Haggadot Wolf had brought with him from home and reclined on the grass to sing and take part “in the mitzvah of making Pesach together.”

One of the men at the outdoor seder was on the society’s board, and asked at a later meeting that no further conferences be held on Passover.

“To my knowledge, the group has not again scheduled its annual national meeting over Pesach,” said Wolf.