8-day, 2-Seder observation forms a pillar of Jewish faith

The story of the Exodus of Hebrews from Egyptian bondage forms a foundation of the Jewish religion, and many Tucson Jews will hear it not only tonight, when Passover begins, but again Thursday night.

Though Passover dinners, called Seders, can last for four hours and require complicated cooking, it’s common for Jews to attend two straight Seders.

University of Arizona sophomore Sarah Langert will attend one with her parents tonight and a second one at her grandparents’ house Thursday night.

Langert, 20, says the dinners are interactive and the ways her father and grandfather lead them are quite different, though the family reads from the same Haggadah for both. The name of this book, which guides the Passover Seder, is Hebrew for “telling.”

“There’s so much symbolism to the evening that every time you experience it, you get something out of it,” said Rabbi Robert Eisen of the Conservative Congregation Anshei Israel in Midtown.

The Exodus story tells how Moses led enslaved Israelites to freedom after God sent 10 plagues against Egypt, including frogs, hail and the slaying of the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. The story says God parted the Red Sea, allowing the Jews to escape, and they wandered in the desert for 40 years before they conquered Canaan, their Promised Land.

Passover readings are accompanied by specific foods such as matzo, a flat, unleavened bread that is reminiscent of the flight from Egypt, when the bread had no time to rise; and salt water, to recall the tears shed by the Jews when they were enslaved.

Eisen’s synagogue will hold a community Seder on Thursday night, as will the Reform Temple Emanu-El and the Reform Congregation Ner Tamid. The Reform Congregation Chaverim will hold a community Seder outside Saturday, near the base of Mount Lemmon.

Preparing for two Seders can take all week — the meals require intense preparation. Naomi Winner has been cooking for three days to prepare Seder for 250 UA students — about 200 students tonight and 50 Thursday night. She hard-boiled 250 eggs, in addition to preparing other Passover foods such as beets, horseradish, pear sauce, lemon dressing, cole slaw, cucumber salad and potato and zucchini pancakes. She does not use any processed food in the preparation.

A hard-boiled egg and roasted bone recall the time when sacrifices were offered by Jews going to the Temple in Jerusalem. Other foods include charoset — a mixture of wine, walnuts, spices and apples, which is tasted to evoke the pasty mixture of mortar used to build the pharaoh’s cities.

Winner and her husband, Rabbi Yossie Winner, moved to Tucson from Brooklyn last summer to establish a permanent Chabad Jewish presence on the UA campus. Chabad Lubavitch is a large branch of Hasidic Judaism, though the services the Winners host are open to all Jewish students. About 10 percent of UA students — or 3,500 — are Jewish, according to Hillel, a campus group.

In contrast, about 3 percent of the Tucson area’s population — about 28,000 people — is Jewish. A 2002 census of the local Jewish population said 61 percent of Tucson’s Jewish population typically attends a Passover Seder, and it’s the most likely to be observed by Jews who don’t attend synagogue.