When Pesach is over, I feel truly proud: I served 10 Yom Tov meals, and they were all good! Never mind that I felt overwhelmed beforehand, with planning, shopping, shlepping, and cooking. Never mind that I had to post a list on the wall to keep track of all the different meals and courses. The main thing is, I did it! But when I spoke to “Rabbi Yitzchak” and his wife “Rifka” about their Pesach sedarim, I was awed! Making Pesach in my own house was really a cinch in comparison to their seder experience.
Rabbi Yitzchak is a kiruv rabbi on the NYU campus in Manhattan and lives in Passaic. This year, he and his wife and their nine children – ages three months to 16 years – moved into a small apartment in Greenwich Village so that they could be near the NYU college campus.
“Why did you go this year and not in previous years?”
“The question is not why we did it this year,” says Rabbi Yitzchak, “but why we never did it before. My job is to bring Judaism to the students of NYU, and making a seder is a big part of that. Until now, we didn’t have anywhere to stay, so we didn’t go, but this year someone let us use their apartment, so of course we went.”
The apartment sleeps three comfortably, but that did not faze Rabbi Yitzchak’s family. They are used to roughing it and did not mind camping out on mattresses on the floor and tripling up in the beds and the couch.
They arrived at the apartment on Erev Pesach. Someone had kashered and covered the kitchen in advance, so they didn’t have to worry about that part. “The hero of this whole endeavor was Rifka,” says Rabbi Yitzchak. “She cooked for our whole family and all the students and then packed every last thing up, including the paper goods. She even remembered the spigot to pour the wine from the kos shel Eliyahu back into the wine bottle. Because we try not to use prepared products on Pesach, she made everything from scratch, even the mayonnaise and the chrein. When we started loading the van – with the wine, matza, mattresses, and food – it looked like it would be impossible to squeeze it all in. That was my job, and I miraculously managed. Another miracle was that we were able to find a parking place right in front of the apartment, and I could leave the van there the whole Yom Tov.”
I wondered if all the children wanted to come. Some were more reluctant than others, explained Rabbi Yitzchak. “Chani, 11, didn’t want to come because she was afraid to say the Ma Nishtana around the students. I told her that if she didn’t want to come we wouldn’t go, but she later changed her mind. We have a former student, Pia, whom our daughter really loves .She is married now and has two children. I reminded Chani that the students who came to our seder were just like Pia was a few years ago. In the end, Chani enjoyed it. It is exciting for our kids to be in the position of knowing more than the adults and to feel that our family is part of something big. They also enjoy the extra attention from the students.”
Moshe, the 13-year-old agreed, although, if given a choice, he wouldn’t go again next year. “I’d rather be with my grandparents, but the students were very fun and geshmak,” he said. “They were chilled and shmoozed with us. Some of them texted on their cell phones under the table during the seder.”
Shevi, who is four, told me, “I said the Ma Nishtana, drank grape juice, and went to sleep. In the morning I got two lollipops and I gave one to Miri!”
I asked Fayge, 16, what she thought of the experience. Wasn’t it a tremendous amount of work? “Well,” she said, “we prepared 180 matza kezasim and a 120 maror kezaisim ahead, so that saved a lot of time. The serving wasn’t that difficult, because the apartment was so small that we didn’t have to take any steps to serve; the table was pushed up right next to the kitchen counter.”
Still, the whole endeavor seemed superhuman to me. How did Rifka prepare so much food? “I couldn’t have done it without the children,” she said. “They stayed up many nights until one the morning peeling potatoes and apples, skinning chickens, and frying schnitzel. I wrote out the menu and everything was labeled. Of course, it was hard to warm up the food, because the oven only had room for 2 , 9 x 13 pans at a time.”
Rifka also prepared a vegetarian menu for some of the students. “Instead of the gefilte fish, they got a small salad cup. Instead of the chicken soup, they got cauliflower-butternut squash soup, and for the main course they got Portobello mushrooms stuffed with sautéed onions, mushrooms, squash, and peppers. The vegetarian students really appreciated the effort I put into their meals,” Rifka says. “They told me that, usually, when they ask for a vegetarian meal at an affair, they just get some vegetable thrown on a plate. It showed them that I cared.”
“Wasn’t it overwhelming,” I asked Rifka. “Well, kind of,” she admitted, “but I tried to complain only to my friends and sisters and not to my husband, because I knew that if he thought it was too much for me, he would cancel the whole thing. And I felt it was important for us to go.”
Rifka’s feeling was vindicated: “Although many had been to sedarim before, it was usually just a family meal. They couldn’t believe that we were actually measuring matza and maror. One boy told us that he would be having not one, not two, but three sedarim this year! We were quite surprised, but he explained that his family had rescheduled their seder for the following week, because it was more convenient for them. That certainly was a different perspective for us.”
It turned out that the second seder was more successful than the first. “The first night, all the guests had left by the time we got to Chad Gadya,” said Rabbi Yitzchak. “The second night, they all stayed til the end. The second seder was more interactive, because I had the students take turns reading the parts of the Haggadah, instead of teaching them what I had prepared. One girl was a theater student, so I got her to read the parts that lent themselves to drama.”
“Like what?” I asked, imagining the girl acting out the four sons. “Like Nishmas,” Rabbi Yitzchak answered, to my surprise.
I asked the Rabbi what they discussed that would be inspiring to a bunch of college students and also relate to the themes of Pesach. “I started by asking the students if they remembered the slogan that was used when Jews were behind the Iron Curtain. Of course everyone remembered the words, ‘Let my people go.’ I showed them that the words come from the Torah and that the expression ends with the words, ‘…so that they can serve G-d.’ True freedom is knowing the way to go. A car with gas won’t bring you to true freedom, but a GPS will. Pesach is about having a road map that leads to real freedom.”
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Interviewing the family of Rabbi Yitzchak and Rifka was enlightening and inspiring. It put my own work for Yom Tov in perspective. It was fascinating to hear about this family adventure and the efforts its members made to bring an authentic Pesach experience to the college students at NYU.
