Ma Nishtana HaLaila HaZeh—why is this night different from all other nights?

When we began planning this supplement, over two months ago, we had no idea that the answer to that essential Passover question would be so glaring and so painful. We could not have imagined the ways in which Passover would look and feel so different this year, as we weather this unprecedented crisis.

That said, the themes of Passover are timeless and urgent, and the theme of this supplement—of being a stranger in a strange land—is deeply true for all of us this year, navigating this reality. It is our hope that sharing these stories will give you comfort, inspiration, and the freedom to tell your own. Chag Sameach—we wish you a happy Passover, in the midst of it all.

— Rabbi Sari Laufer

Safe Passage
Rabbi Ron Stern

Late in the evening of November 9, 1938, my grandparents left my father in safe-keeping with a non-Jewish baby sitter and walked the streets of a neighboring village. A constable who had an eye for my grandmother, warned her that trouble was coming and as Jews they were at risk. As they strolled, pretending to be young lovers, they witnessed the burning of books, breaking of windows of Jewish stores, the desecration of Jewish sacred sites. Within days, their own parents implored them to leave their German homeland. My “Hochdeutsch” speaking grandmother was a regal woman with sparkling green eyes. Both beautiful and a force to be reckoned with, she used every resource she had to secure the exit permits and a visa for the United States.

When she made her way to the American consulate to apply for a visa the agent processing her request looked up at her strangely and said, “Your maiden name is Teller?”

“Ja”, she replied. His hand hovered above the documents that named my grandfather and father. Their fate depended upon which stamp he selected: rejected or approved. It was at that moment that my grandmother noticed his name embossed on the pin on his uniform. It was Teller.

“Well, I’m a Teller too,” he said. “Maybe we’re related.” And with that he approved the visas to freedom in the USA.

Visa in hand, my grandmother set out to free her husband—rounded up with the men of his town—from a local concentration camp, a feat only possible at the beginning of the war. After selling most of their possessions and using the money to bribe those who needed to be bribed, she secured his freedom, and used whatever money they had left to purchase passage to America. Their elderly parents were supposed to follow them, but were unable to secure passage. We still have the letters that my great-grandmother wrote from the concentration camp, the markings of the German censor harsh upon them. “Don’t worry my kinderlach (my children)…all is well…I will see you soon.” Looking back it was a tragic promise; within months she was dead.

Passover, for me, is personal. It is the story of a young couple leaving the comfort and familiarity of the land they thought would always welcome them and crossing a vast ocean to rebuild their lives in an adopted land. My grandmother is Miriam, she is Esther, and she is Deborah – her strength, her vision, and her resilience gave life to the next generation.

Eggs, Potatoes, Freedom, and Memory
Rabbi Josh Knobel

I was twelve when the visits began in earnest. As my grandmother, still suffering the effects of childhood rheumatic heart disease, frequented the hospital more and more, I found myself increasingly at the side of grandfather, Leib (z”l).

He didn’t speak much. Often, he asked for eggs and mashed potatoes. Sometimes, he asked how I was doing in my Jewish studies. For the most part, our communications were limited to navigating the apartment together (he was blind). Every so often, he cried out, responding to frightening daydreams or nightmares he never wanted to share. To be fair, my presence may have exacerbated his distress. After all, I wasn’t the grandson he was supposed to have.

More than likely, he expected that he would grow old in Poland studying and teaching Talmud alongside his second wife and three sons, but it was not to be. Among the first captured after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, my grandfather spent the war moving from concentration camp to concentration camp. Posing as a carpenter, he helped build Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Auschwitz.

The remainder of his family did not survive. Ignoring his instructions to lie, as he did, about their age and occupations, they were killed in the first days of the invasion. Once the Allies liberated Auschwitz, my grandfather was transferred to a displaced persons camp in Italy, utterly bereft of family or friends.

Soon, that would change, as a marriage program sponsored by the Federation introduced him to Riva, my grandmother, who married him in Rome in 1947. When he arrived in the United States, Leib discovered how challenging it could be to fashion a new life. With little in the way of skill or enterprise, he continued his work as a carpenter, making just enough to provide a home for his wife, son, and two daughters. He never mastered English, preferring to stick to his Yiddish tongue, and his son, rather than embrace the Talmudic study that he championed, instead became an electronics engineer, earning Leib’s disdain.

Of course, it was Leib and Riva’s son who cared for them as they aged; hence, my regular visits. I can only pray that the eggs and potatoes offered some measure of comfort that conversation could not. Our tradition teaches that though our ancestors celebrated their liberation, they weren’t quite prepared for the Promised Land; their misgivings doomed them to wander throughout the desert for forty years. I often wonder if the same applied to my grandfather. Though he was, indeed, liberated from his captors, was he ever truly free?

In Every Generation…
Rabbi David Woznica

My father was the youngest of six children born in Czestochowa, Poland about 60 miles north of Krackow. He grew up in an Orthodox home. Their synagogue, just down the street, was also the rabbi’s home, a shteibel. His life changed dramatically when Nazis invaded the city and forced the Jews of Czestochowa into a ghetto. My father was twelve years old. His parents were murdered in Auschwitz and four of his five siblings did not survive. My dad spent his teenage years in the concentration camps of Dora, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945 at the age of 18. Though he passed away about ten years ago, this week marks the 75th anniversary of his liberation. He came to America through Ellis Island in 1952 where his name was changed from Szymek to Simon but everyone knew him as Sam.

My mother, Susanna (Sue) hails from Atlanta, Georgia. She is a classic “southern belle”. Her father, Victor (Hayim), however, was born in Isle of Rhodes (Italy, now Greece) and her mother, Juana, was born in Milas, Turkey. They settled in Atlanta, where my mom describes a warm and engaged Sephardic community centered around the temple and some of the best Sephardic food known to humanity.

Monica, Beverly’s mom, was born in London in 1930. She has memories of retreating to the tube (subway) during the bombing of London during WWII. Tiring of dreary weather and looking to fulfill her adventurous streak, she paid a visit to her Aunt Jenny in Los Angeles in 1953, fell in love with the city and soon made it her home. She has a soft British accent which makes every one of her sentences sound sophisticated.

Beverly’s father, Gunter, grew up in Gleivitz, Germany. His father died when Gunter was a young teenager. Gunter fled Germany in 1939 to Swaziland (a small country surrounded by South Africa). After the war Gunter learned his mother had been murdered in Auschwitz. Gunter immigrated to the States in 1953 where he later met Monica.

Some of you left the country of your birth to come to the United States. All of us are here because someone in the family, perhaps many generations earlier, made the journey. Most fled countries filled with hostility to Jews. Regardless of the motivation, I’ve come to appreciate the courage it takes for immigrants to leave their family, home, language, culture and more, to be strangers in a strange land and make it their home.

It is our obligation to tell the story of Passover — to remind ourselves and the next generation that God Intervened to take us out of slavery in Egypt. As we gather around the Seder table to express our appreciation to God, let’s also take a moment to reflect on the gratitude we owe those in our family who made it possible for us to be celebrating this moment in the freedom we enjoy in America.

Tears, Love, and Potato Kugel
Cantor Nathan Lam

As a child, Pesach was my favorite holiday. I loved sitting at the table, loved being the youngest person at my mother’s family Seder. The story of Passover was told by my uncle Charlie (my mother’s sister’s husband). But, I most loved being in the kitchen for the few days prior to the Seder with my auntie Sylvia. Sylvia, who was born in Poland learned to cook from my great grandmother and grandmother, and carried that legacy into her kitchen. The care, love, and work that went into making every dish perfect was her goal. Perfect, to her, meant that it had to be the way it was made in the old country, nothing less. Perfect meant the taste, the way it looked, and of course, the stamp of approval from my grandma Freida.

My grandfather Nathan came to America in 1914, just before the First World War broke out; my grandmother, Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Ben weren’t able to come to the States until 1920. My mother Marcia and her younger brother were born in Springfield, Missouri, then a city with 85 Jewish families (and not many more now). There was a 17 year age difference between my grandmother and Aunt Sylvia, and 16 years difference between my mother and her older sister. Those years spoke of a place and a time that I would never know firsthand. My aunt was one of my connections to the world of Jews in Jewish Poland, a lifeline to that part of my story.

Each year, Passover was a connection to the past—not only the Exodus from Egypt, but also from a world lost to the Shoah. My aunt and grandmother would tell me stories about their hometown Yozefov, a shtetl (small town) not far from Warsaw. And each year, I would look at the only picture we had of my great-grandparents, which hung above my grandmother’s bed. Just like the story of the Exodus, they would tell those stories year after year, and they were just as much a part of the Passover seder as parting of the Red Sea.

Taste is one of the strongest centers of sense memory, and our memories were certainly tied up in the foods we ate. Each year I would taste the chopped liver and kugel while it was being made; each year, I watched them cry as they read the last letter they got from the family in Poland, in 1939. It was clear to me how deeply those loved ones lived in their hearts, and how the taste of those foods and the memories—both joyous and tragic—were inextricably linked. I began to realize that as my aunt cooked, she was cooking not just for the Pesach that we were about to celebrate, but for all the ones that we missed, all the ones at which our extended family would never sit. We tasted the bitter herbs and the salt water, and felt their absence, even as we celebrated the joys of freedom.

My Seder table looks different today. I am aware of those who no longer sit with me, and I still carry the memories of those whom I never met. But I also look around at my children and grandchildren, the life we have built here—and feel the deepest joy and sweetness. So for us today, we say shehecheyanu, we thank God for all our blessings, our families, community, Israel and this great country we live in. We say shechechiyanu for our freedoms and the many gifts we are afforded every day.

I Have Your Book
Rabbi Sari Laufer

One year during my tenure in New York City, a middle school student burst into my office, holding up a novel he had recently been assigned for English class. “I have your book,” he shouted with excitement! And, sure enough, there was—in my 7th grade handwriting—my name and homeroom. Setting aside the thought that perhaps my alma mater could stand a refresh on its book supply, I loved seeing the connection—a shared history, a shared experience.

Cleaning out my grandparents’ house after my grandfather died was a bit of a comedy of errors; perhaps appropriate for my grandfather the jokester, though I don’t remember my father finding it funny. I remember a burst pipe; I remember a lot of random lottery tickets, and I remember the Bibles.

At first, we thought nothing of them, setting them aside and getting down to the more serious business of going through the papers. Later, in front of a warm fire in our New York City apartment, my dad took a closer look. And the illustrations, the calligraphy, the dates and the notes and the names told a different story. It was a story that, in one of the Bibles, shared bits of my family’s story—the story that was less known. A story that lead from Monroe Township, Louisiana—a town that does not exist on a map anymore—to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and eventually to Rockville Centre, New York. It is the story—still not entirely known—of a Jewish family, arriving on the shores of this country before the Civil War. A Jewish family, settling in the American South, probably peddling clothes, or shoes, or some other “dry good.” It is names on graveyards in Vicksburg and Jackson, faces on oil portraits, a department store that once bore a family name. It is births and deaths recorded in perfect penmanship, some from illnesses since eradicated. And, I know that in-between the dashes, in between the lines—there were lives lived, jokes told, laughter and tears and hopes and fears. It is my story.

In the other Bible, a similar story is told. Again, names and dates and places. Only these names are different, and so are the dates. “In the year of our Lord,” some might read. No Geisenbergs here. How, we will wonder, did our Jewish family in the South come into possession of a Christian Bible, marked with the names and the stories of a family not our own? What story might we tell, of shared lives and shared destinies? How is this, an unknown story of an unknown family, my story too?

My dear friend and colleague, Rabbi Leora Kaye, told me that at her family seders, each guest writes their name and the year in their haggadah, year after year. I imagine opening those haggadot years from now, knowing that some people will still be sitting around the table, and knowing others will be gone. And yet, opening the pages—seeing the handwriting and the names and the dates—we, like my student, will say excitedly: I have your book!

And what we’ll mean is: I share your story.

Next Year in Jerusalem
Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback

Every Seder ends the same way: Next year in Jerusalem! I said these words growing up in Omaha and with family in Kansas City. I said them at college in New Jersey and once even at a Seder I was privileged to lead in Fairbanks, Alaska.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I began to seriously consider the possibility of living that dream, of making those words more than a prayer, more than a wish. After years of planning, we did it. We moved to Israel as a family and at long last we were celebrating a Passover Seder in Jerusalem. And when we came to the end of the meal, we said: “This year we are slaves, next year we will be free. This year we are here, next year, in Jerusalem!”

No matter where you celebrate your Seder, it still ends with a longing for redemption, for freedom, for Jerusalem and everything it represents.

(And by the way, keeping Passover in Jerusalem is, as you might expect, much easier than it was in Omaha. Every grocery store in town has kosher for Passover items and many restaurants stay open during Chol HaMoed (the intermediate days)—there’s even a pizza place in the German Colony that has a kosher for Passover pie that tastes so good that you almost feel guilty.)

I am so grateful that my family had the opportunity to make Israel our home. There were challenges to be sure and sometimes, as immigrants, we even felt like strangers in our Homeland. As much as we mastered the language, as much as learned to navigate the city, to make Jerusalem our home, there were still moments when we felt alienated and apart, visitors who would always be more American than Israeli. But overwhelmingly, it was an amazing time for us all and a formative experience for our kids especially.

We now call Los Angeles home and here’s part of what we’ve learned so far in our journey:

Wherever we are in this world, even when we’re in Jerusalem, we are still searching for the Promised Land. And in our searching, in our longing, in our journey, we never give up hope that somehow, some way—next year even—we will be free.

And I believe we will.