Pesach is a central theme of Judaism all around the world and the most beloved of Jewish holidays for Jewish families across the spectrum. As I spoke to relatives, friends, and members of the community from all over the world, I was amazed to hear how the same Yom Tov was celebrated in ways that were at once so different and so very much the same. Of course, some of the memories are all the more poignant because the places where the memories took place no longer exist as Jewish communities.
Munkatch
I spoke to Chana,* a Holocaust survivor who grew up in a village near the famous city of Munkatch, in Czechoslovakia, the fifth of 16 children. Her father supported the family by running a flour mill powered not by electricity but by running water. With only three or four Jewish families living in the town, no minyan was available during the week. But for Shabbos, people from surrounding villages would gather in a private house in one of the villages to make a minyan.
I asked Chana about her memories of Pesach. “Oy, my mother worked so hard,” sighed Chana. “Right after Purim she would begin by whitewashing the walls. The walls got sooty from the smoke of the cooking, so before every Pesach, the women painted. First they plastered holes and then they would paint. “My mother would pour boiling water on the chalk, and it would turn into paint. Then she would kasher the kitchen, and all the women from the surrounding villages would purchase flour from my father and bake matzos in our kitchen.”
There was no shortage of food, Chana explained. “We had huge quantities of potatoes, grown on our own land, which we stored in our cool cellar, underground. During the winter, my family would shecht our geese, and we would save the schmaltz (fat) to use for Pesach. My mother would sauté potatoes and onions with goose fat. It was absolutely delicious. We had lots of eggs; some of them we bought, and some we got from our own chickens. We milked our own cows, and my mother made all the dairy products, like yogurt, butter, and cheese. A staple on Pesach was rossel, a fermented soup made out of beets.”
I asked Chana if they had guests for the Seder. “No, it was just our family,” she says. “But poor people used to come to our house, and my mother would give them food. One man, I remember, walked a very far distance to pick up food that my mother made for him. Money was very scarce but food was plentiful.”
Chana told me more interesting stories about her life. Her father hired a rebbe to teach the children. He taught the boys reading, writing, and Chumash, and he taught the girls how to daven and write in Yiddish. The rebbe left his family and lived with them for a few years. Chana’s mother always told the children to make sure to behave respectfully to the rebbe, because he had a son and maybe one day he would be interested in one of them for a shidduch. The rebbe always told his son that he worked for a nice family, and maybe one of the daughters would be a good shidduch for him.
*Pseudonym
After the War, Chana, 23 years old, landed in a DP camp. One day she was traveling on a train and met a young man at the station. He courted her, and they soon got married. It turns out that he was the son of the rebbe who taught her to read. Although her husband is no longer alive, Chana described the lovely, warm relationship they had. “He was so frum,” she says. “He was so careful to be honest in our business and he treated me so well.”
Chana also described how a young man wanted to marry her sister before the War. “He came to the house and they were ready to conclude the shidduch. My father offered the young man a large sum of money as a dowry, but it wasn’t enough for him, because he wanted to start a business. My father refused to give him more, because he needed the money for the next daughter in line, and the shidduch was broken off. As it turned out, it was really better for my sister, because if she would have gotten married and had children, she probably would not have survived the war.” I asked Chana, “What about his family? Did all the money have to come from the girl’s side? “Oh, yes,” she assured me. “It was always the girl’ side that provided the dowry.” Interesting! It seems that the custom of the girl’s family supporting the young couple predates kollel couples!
Teitch
Livia Shacter, another survivor, shared her memories of Pesach in Czechoslovakia. Her town, Teitch, was in the same region as Chana’s, but was big enough to support a large main shul with a rav, as well as several chasidic shteibles. It had many Jewishowned shops, including her father’s leather and shoemaker-supply store; it even had a movie theater. During the season, her father also dealt in apples, as did many men in this apple-growing region near the Carpathian Mountains. The men bought the farmers’ whole crop when only the blossoms were on the tree. For her father, this entailed visits to his rebbe for a bracha that no storms should come to knock off the blossoms and that the apples should make it through the many hazards of nature to a plentiful harvest.
“On Pesach, everyone used handmade matzos,” Mrs. Shacter told me. “Nothing was made by machine. The matzos were baked three or four weeks before Pesach. I used to go with my father to the matzah baking factory, where we got the matzahs. We stored them in a basket in the attic. We had our own cows, so my mother made all the dairy products the whole year and for Pesach. We brought our own chickens, turkeys, and ducks to the shochet.
We got new clothes for Pesach, but we just bought the material. Then the girls had their dresses made by a dressmaker, and the boys went to a tailor.
Mrs. Shacter remembers how they cleaned their sefarim. “We would take all the books outside and lay them on boards. That way, the wind would rustle the pages and all the crumbs would be blown away.
“At the Seder, we moved the couch next to my father’s seat, and he would recline on three big pillows. He hid the afikoman under the three pillows, so it was really hard to steal. I was the only girl, so I was spoiled, and he usually let me steal the afikoman,” she reminisces.
“My mother went to shul every Shabbos and Yom Tov, but as a girl, I never went to shul, even though I was in my twenties when the war broke out. Only married women went to shul in our town. But my father made sure to teach me how to daven. He didn’t want me to be like his sister who couldn’t read, so he sent me to cheder to learn with my brothers. I am still a very good davener today,” she says proudly.
Dombrova-Grube
While the families of Chana and Mrs. Shacter grew and produced most of their food at home, life was different for Mrs. Edith Singer, who was raised in an apartment in a Polish city. Dombrova- Grube was very close to Germany and was one of the first places that the Germans invaded at the start of World War II. The region was known for its coal mines and factories. Mrs. Singer says that most of the food their family ate on Pesach was bought in stores, not very different from today. She remembers that her mother raised chickens and had them schechted , and she used the chicken schmaltz for spreading on matzah and cooking. They didn’t have a refrigerator so all the food that had to stay cold was stored in the cellar.
Mrs. Singer’s mother also had a woman who came every Friday to help with the cleaning and wash the floors. She also came for two days each month to do the laundry. Most of the laundry was done by hand but they had a machine that worked with a handle that helped wring out the wet laundry.
Frankfurt
Until she was six years old, Leah* lived in a very wealthy home in Frankfurt. Although they were religious Jews, their lifestyle was very different from life today. Leah’s grandmother, called Oma, was the matriarch and lived on the first floor of their large, magnificent home, and Leah and her family lived on the top two floors.
The house had three kitchens and two cooks. One kitchen was for Oma, and one was for the family. The third kitchen was for Pesach. A nanny, Deda, took care of the children, day and night, starting from the moment they were born, and ate all the meals with the family. The only night she didn’t eat with them was Seder night, because we are taught that you shouldn’t talk about the destruction of the Egyptians in front of a non-Jewish woman. It was the nanny who brought up the children and taught them about brachos and reminded the little boys to wear their tzitizis. Interestingly, even though Leah’s family was religious, they allowed the nanny to have an xmas tree in the nursery during that season.
Leah’s Oma did not cover her hair, but she was careful to daven three times a day, including Maariv. Every day, a hairdresser came to their house to fix her long hair. Every Friday night, the whole family would gather in the dining room, and a Polish Jew was hired to come teach the family, including the parents and the little children, about the parsha.
Sometimes the older children went down to eat dinner with their Oma. They could choose which language they would speak at dinner: French, German, or Italian.
Leah was only six when they left the big beautiful house in Germany, but she still remembers the family sitting in the living room on Pesach night while the accordion doors that led to the dining room slowly opened, revealing a table laden with beautiful silver items. From the perspective of a six-year-old, the Seder plate itself seemed as big as a small house.
When the family left Germany to England, in 1937, Deda came with them. Wisely, when war broke out between England and Germany, Deda was sent back to Germany. Leah’s mother told Deda that it would be uncomfortable for them to live in the same house when Deda rejoiced at the successes of the Germans and their family rejoiced at the successes of the English.
Shiraz
Mrs. Tirzah Arieh, the American wife of Rabbi Rouben Arieh, the Rabbi of Baltimore’s Ohr Hamizrah Congregation, shared with me some of the customs and halachos of the Iranian Jews that differ from those of the Ashkenazim. “The women would get together and bake Matzos. The matzos did not look like matzos here in America. Like the Teimani (Yemenite) matzos, they were much thicker – similar in looks and texture to pita bread,” says Mrs. Arieh. Now the Arieh family, mainly eats Ashkenazi matzah, but they get a box of Yemenite matzah just to remember the old ways.
“All kinds of rice are permitted,” says Mrs. Arieh, “as long as it is unenriched natural rice. According to the halacha, Iranians can also eat beans, corn, peas, and peanuts on Pesach, although the mesorah in Shiraz is to eat only black-eyed beans. And, interestingly enough, some people don’t eat chickpeas, because chickpeas form the main ingredient of chumus, which sounds so much like the word ‘chometz.’”
Rivka,* a woman who left Shiraz, the Iranian city where most of Baltimore’s Persian community originate, 30 years ago, when she was a teenager, affirmed that her family ate rice and black-eyed beans on Pesach. “All the rice and beans had to be checked three times before Pesach to make sure that no wheat kernels or other foreign substances had gotten into them,” she says. “We also checked all the spices that we used before Pesach and ground them ourselves. In many households, the women prepared all the Pesach foods together.”
Rivka’s mother made her own wine. “We had big glass barrels which we filled with grapes that were washed and dried. Then we smashed the grapes. Every day we stirred the grapes in the barrel, and eventually we strained the liquid. The same mixture will turn into vinegar if it is not stirred at all,” says Rivka. “Everything on Pesach was homemade. We even made our own candies, and prepared pumpkin and sunflower seeds and walnuts for nashing.”
Although Mrs. Arieh never lived in Iran, she is familiar with the tradition of homemade Pesach food. Once, when she accompanied a newly-arrived Iranian woman to Seven Mile Market. “The woman could not believe that the food was kosher for Pesach. She couldn’t fathom that a person could actually buy lemon juice or tomato sauce in a store and use it for Yom Tov!”
The United States
In truth, you don’t have to come from across the ocean or be in your 80s or 90s to remember preparing for Pesach in a different way from how we keep Pesach in 2013. We who grew up right here in Baltimore and other American cities also have memories from our youth that would be surprising to our children.
How many of us remember the tears streaming down the face of the person grating the maror on Erev Pesach before the days of food processors; the tired muscles of the person beating the egg whites for those Pesach cakes before the days of mixers; or the big fish in the bathtub, waiting to be cut up and then ground to make gefilte fish before the days of frozen gefilte fish rolls and kosher l’Pesach fish stores? How about the hours and hours spent checking the romaine lettuce with bowls of water and special lamps in the days before pre-checked lettuce?
Who remembers the “wonder bakers” that were used to bake cakes on top of the stove before the days of selfcleaning ovens, or the clumsy oven inserts, or the homemade mayonnaise, created by very slowly pouring oil into beaten eggs in the days before special kosher for Pesach products? How about squeezing lemons for lemon juice and oranges for orange juice? Or making chocolate spread with a hand mixer using cocoa and cans of white shortening?
Thinking back nostalgically to the past, one wonders what we are so busy with today. With self-cleaning ovens, refrigerators, stores bursting with ready-made clothing, milk and milk products that seem to come from cartons instead of cows, Pesachdik mayonnaise, and even kosher l’Pesach “cereal,” “mustard,” and “pizza,” we should be sitting with our feet up until Erev Pesach. But somehow, it doesn’t seem to work like that.
Wishing all the Jewish People a happily hectic and busy Pesach season!â—†
