Hamodia on Pesach Merkos Shlichus

The world is a big place. In fact, few of us realize quite how big it is, particularly in the frum community. To us, the world seems very small. Every year, all over the globe, millions of families just like ours set up the same Sederplate, spread a clean white tablecloth on the table, set out silverware and dishes saved just for this special occasion, and celebrate Pesach just like we do.

We tend to forget that there are Jews in situations very, very different than ours.

How Big Is Your Seder Table?

Take the Jewish community in Nepal, for instance. Mendy Cohen of Leeds, England, has helped Rabbi Chezky and Chani Lifshitz make Pesach in Nepal for the past five years.

Mendy describes the scene in Nepal: “Nepal is a third-world country in every sense of the word. They have their water brought in on a truck at night. They only have electricity a few hours every day.”Yet Chabad of Nepal holds the largest Sederin the world.How big is your Seder table? Can you barely fit another family member in the room? In Katmandu, they serve chicken soup for two thousand — give or take a few. A second Nepalese Seder takes place in Pukrah at the foot of Mount Everest.

Rabbi and Mrs. Lifshitz are forced into some very strange situations when making Pesach in Nepal. Seven tons of supplies are purchased in Israel and then shipped by freighter to Calcutta, India, where a truck is waiting to transport the goods over land the rest of the way to Katmandu.

Once outside the city, the several tons of matzah, wine, gefilte fish and other supplies are loaded on to smaller vehicles late at night to be driven to the Chabad House, as well as the Yak and Yeti Hotel where the Seder is held. Why late at night? “The streets are so narrow that vehicles can’t fit through until all pedestrians have cleared out to go to bed,” explains Mendy.

How did a third-world country come to have a Yak and Yeti Hotel with a hall seating two thousand? Well, even in countries regularly plagued by vicious terrorist coups, lacking consistent electricity or even streets wide enough to drive through, the daughter of the king (now overthrown) still needed a place to get married! In 2004, a few days before Pesach, the government kicked Chabad out of the Yak and Yeti in order to hold the wedding on Seder night. That year, for the most part, the world’s largest Sederwas held in tents.

How Hard Is It to Make Pesach?

But that’s when everything goes right.Mendy will never forget the year that almost everything went wrong. Telling the story in complete detail would require an article in itself. In 2005,the driver transporting all the Pesach supplies from the port in Calcutta got into a traffic accident, ending up stranded in a humid desert outside the Nepalese border,where the temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

While Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, vice chairman of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, tried to make other arrangements for them to receive the necessary supplies, shluchimfrom around the world mobilized to try to get the truck to Katmandu. Would you believe that international Chabad contacts with both Indian and Nepalese government officials from across the gamut yielded nothing? A three-day religious celebration had rendered governments, armies, and all available police forces useless.

As you may recall from your own mad dash to complete preparations that year, Erev Pesach fell on Shabbos. Even a private airplane could not be found to fly them to the site of the crash, since the international holiday had closed all airports. Private airplanes are usually available in Nepal in order to save would-be climbers who might be stranded in the Himalayas. I guess for those three days they all just had to wait.

After numerous failed attempts to find a solution, Rabbi Lifshitz and Mendy ran on to the runway of the airport on Friday morning, willing to do anything for whoever would let them make use of their plane. The birthday celebrations had just ended. One pilot was convinced to consent, but only on condition that all his would-be passengers would be paid off as well. As Rabbi Lifshitz settled accounts, the pilot finally prepared for take-off.

Flying none too smoothly, the motley crew finally arrived to find the truck splayed open, the driver asleep, and the locals pillaging and picking through the remains of the would-be Seder supplies. Rabbi Lifshitz and Mendy began piling supplies on the plane,but it quickly became evident that no matter how they tried, they couldn’t fit nearly enough in the plane to run the Seder. As the two tried to figure out what to do, the pilot began threatening to leave without them. Just before take-off, Rabbi Lifshitz informed Mendy that he had finally gotten through to the army on his cell phone and convinced them to send a helicopter to carry over the remainder of the supplies to Katmandu before Shabbos. He was not leaving.

“I tried to physically pull him on to the plane.If no helicopter had arrived and the plane had left without us, we would have been literally stranded there in the middle of nowhere,”Mendy explains. “But he said that he had spoken to the army and was not leaving until he had supplies to make Pesach for everybody.”

“I cannot describe the mesirus nefesh of Rabbi Lifshitz,”he adds.“It was so hot and muggy out there that we were pouring grape juice on ourselves just in order to stay conscious. We were wading through a three-foot-high flood of half-dried dips, picking out boxes of matzah and bottles of grape juice. My shoes never recovered!”

In the end, Mendy actually decided to leave without Rabbi Lifshitz,whose wife was terribly upset, but the helicopter did arrive in time. A few hours before Shabbos, the Rabbi and almost all the rest of the supplies made it to Katmandu, where they held the largest Seder in the world one night later. I would imagine their Shabbos table that night wasn’t too sparsely populated, either.

Who Comes to Your Seder?

For more than 4,500 shluchim and their wives in 3,700 locations around the world, making Pesach isn’t easy.While Chabad Houses are often the only Jewish presence in a city or even the country, many small Jewish communities don’t even have that. Training seminars and visits from shluchimmake it possible for many of these very small Jewish communities to run Torah classes and minyanim year-round. However, the many details of Pesach require special guidance. That’s where Chabad’s yeshivah bachurim step in.

Close to 600 yeshivah bachurim are sent from six different locations, especially Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to help make Pesach in areas around the world. One hundred eighty of the young men are sent to the former Soviet Union. Funding for the Sedarim comes from several donors and longtime Chabad philanthropists…

“They’re going out to find the ‘fifth son,’” explains Rabbi Kotlarsky, who is responsible for arranging, coordinating, and funding this program, “the one who otherwise wouldn’t be at the Seder table at all.”

For example, octogenarian Moishele Silber* probably wouldn’t have been. Originally from Hungary, Moishele had been living there when the Nazis took him and his family away to the camps. After the war, Moishele and his wife did the unexpected: they decided to settle in Germany.

The Jewish community of Heilbronn, Germany, including Moishele and his son Chaim, numbers no more than 150 individuals. “And that’s estimating very generously,” adds Mendy Margolin, one of the young bachurim who has been helping make Pesach in Germany for the past three years.

The apartment where Heilbronn’s first communal Pesach Seder was held in 2006 sits across the street from a large, hollow monument demarcating a building that used to be one of the most beautiful shuls in the country. Today, Jewish pride is expressed in other ways. Reb Moishele’s son Chaim is a middle-aged Jewish man who owns the town’s local body building shop and,at all times, wears a necklace bearing a large Jewish star directly in the center of his imposing, muscular frame.

Moishele called the Seder of 2006 the first “real Seder” he had seen since the war. The knowledgeable enthusiasm of Mendy and his brother Yossi touched Moishele in a way that he had not been touched for many years.

“Real Jews still exist,” exclaimed the elderly man in amazement, an expression of joy radiating from his aged features. Where would Reb Moishele, who survived the camps, have spent the Seder night otherwise?

Seder participants in far-flung locales often repeat Moishele’s message. As Rabbi Menachem and Sara’le Goldstein of New Zealand were told by a young backpacker in 2007, “I lived in Israel all my life, but I never met a religious Jew until I came to the Seder here in New Zealand.”

Guests at the Seder table of Rabbi Shaul and Esther Wilhelm in Oslo, Norway, added, “Tonight, I have finally witnessed what a Seder is supposed to look like,”and,“Listening to your daughter say the Mah Nishtanah with Yiddish translation reminded me of my home before the war.”

How Meaningful Is YourSeder?

“They are so grateful,”says Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky. “We often take it all for granted — the pillows, the silver Judaica, the family — but for many of the Jewish people,this year will be the first time they have ever experienced a Seder in their lives. They’ve never experienced Yiddishkeit like this before. They’re asking Mah Nishtanah because they really want to know, because they really mean it.”

The experience is life-changing. Yeshivah bachur Yaakov Behrman has visited Ethiopia, Angola, and two cities in Nigeria for Pesach over the past five years.Four years ago in Lagos, “a wild city,” says Yaakov, the young man was doing some last-minute Pesach shopping in the open market, buying fresh lettuce and eggs for the Seder. The last thing he expected was to be approached by a white woman with a complex question involving the intricacies of tevilas keilim.

It turned out that the young woman lived in Lagos with her Nigerian family. She certainly hadn’t learned about tevilas keilim there, though: She had grown up in Bnei Brak. In the wake of several bad experiences years ago, the girl had left and never looked back. The only mitzvah she had decided to retain after leaving had been to try to keep kosher.

And now that it was Erev Pesach, she wanted to know about tevilas keilim.“We invited her to the Seder and began reconnecting her with her heritage,”says Yaakov.“Now, we’ve been bringing her kosher meat and other kosher foods for four years running. We’ve affixed a mezuzah to her door and have gotten to know her children…” Dr. Yechezkel Shoshani, one of the world’s most renowned researchers regarding the life of the elephant, met Yaakov outside the Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A short conversation led Yaakov to invite the professor to the Seder scheduled to take place in a few days.

Dr. Shoshani, or Chezi, as friends called him, was surprised to find that he felt so comfortable at the Seder, surrounded by men in black hats. His childhood in south Tel Aviv had certainly not exposed him to experiences like this before. “He was very moved, and he told us that our Seder was one of the most special events in his life,”says Yaakov. Dr. Shoshani was killed in a disastrous terrorist attack during his continuing research in Africa several months later. That Pesach Seder had been the last contact he had with Torah in his life. Hashem yinkom damo.

What Does Your Seder Celebrate?

This Pesach, remember that you are sharing your Seder night with Yidden in Bangkok, the Congo, Hanoi, Cuzco, Cambodia, Namibia, Bulgaria and hundreds of other places where life is very, very different. After all is said and done, what brings us together as Jews is not the style of clothing we wear or the type of food we eat. Black hats and gefilte fish might not be as common in Morocco, Bangladesh, or the North Pole, but there is one thing that unites the entire Jewish people: the precious mesorah we were all given at Har Sinai together.

We might not all be able to travel to Africa, Iceland or Turkey, but we can each reach out in our own way. How about calling a kiruvorganization and letting them know that you would like to invite some not yet religious Jews to your own Seder table? Start a phone chavrusa and tell your study partner what happened during the ten plagues. You know all about it, but he or she may be amazed. The steps are easy, but the result could be the personal Yetzias Mitzrayim of a Jewish soul in captivity.

In the zechus of our ahavas Yisrael and achdus, may we be zocheh this year to celebrate not only Yetzias Mitzrayimbut the Geulah Sheleimahthat we are all eagerly waiting for.

*Names changed to maintain anonymity.