Early preparations

Cherry Orly recalled that in her home village of Czernowitz, which then was part of Romania but which today is in Ukraine, her family would collect the ashes from the wood-burning stove for several months prior to Passover. The ashes would be saved for the ritual by which pots and pans that had been used for regular cooking would be made kosher for Passover.

"All the pots and pans to be cooked in were put into ashy waters to be made ready for Passover," she recalled. The mixture of boiling water and ashes "had to be very strong to kill whatever yeast might have remained on the pots."

The pre-Passover cleaning extended to hidden places of her parents' home in Tunis, Jacqueline Gmach recalled. "My mother would even card the cotton inside the mattresses of our beds," she said. "She started the cleaning two months before."

Rose Schindler, who grew up on a farm in Seredne, Hungary, near the Czech border, recalls that her family's preparations for the holiday also began months before Passover. "We would stuff the geese with corn kernels to fatten them up," she said. "The throat of a goose is very long, you would have to push the corn down the throat with your hand, to make sure it would go down. We would make little balls and shove them down their throats."

The geese would be slaughtered by a shochet before Pesach and the fat would be rendered and used for shmaltz, which her family would spread onto the matzohs. "It tasted great," Schindler enthused. "But I wouldn¹t eat it now — too much cholesterol."

Schindler's husband Max had grown up in Cottbus, Germany, but in the early phases of the Holocaust his family was forced by the nazis to relocate toWytrzyszcka, Poland. In Europe, the months before Passover can be quite cold, and he remembered that "the geese used to be kept in a special hut, so they wouldn¹t run around too much."

"Matzohs were homemade for the village in my grandmother's house," he said. "They would scrub the kitchen from top to bottom and have an assembly line, with the matzohs going into the oven for so many minutes. They were round because they were rolled out with rolling pins. They had little wheels to make perforations in them.

Egyptian Jews follow Sephardic customs for Passover, which include eating rice — a food most Ashkenazim consider off-limits during the holiday. A native of Heliopolis, Egypt, Sofia Maio Merdinger recalled that "a month before Pesach, mother would put 40 pounds of rice in the middle of the table and then we would clean it— enough to eat for eight days."

Gmach said her Tunisian father ate rice, but her mother from Constanine, Algeria, did not. "So that was the annual discussion, the yearly debate," she said. "Father would want rice and mother wouldn't want to make it."

Later preparations

The removal of chametz — products with leavening — occurs just before Passover. As matzoh was purchased before the switchover, the family of Michael Broudo in Salonika, Greece, "used to have a special place to keep it — a big piece of luggage, like a trunk." Then during the eight days of Passover, his family would pull out sufficient supplies each day.

In her native shtetl of Klobuck, Poland, recalled Gussie Zaks, the search for chametz in her house was a memorable ritual. "I would walk around with my father to search for the chametz," she said. They would look all over the house and "there wasn't any bread in the bedroom, so mother would put it down there, and he would pick it up with a feather." Once all the chametz was collected, it would be tied up in a piece of cloth and attached to a wooden stick, then burned in a bonfire, at which her family and neighbors would all gather and sing.

Jacqueline Gmach's father would receive a gift of a lamb each year from the ruler of Tunis because he was the dignitary's dentist. A rabbi would attend to the slaughter of the lamb and then — following the ancient Passover story — would mark the Gmachs' doorpost with the blood of the lamb on the evening before Passover eve. "Then we would have a big barbecue," Gmach said.

The seder, part one
 
The service for the Passover seder, broken into individual reading parts, is laid out in a special book known as a Haggadah. Gmach has collected beautifully-illustrated Haggadot from around the world, the study of which could produce many more articles on variations in Passover customs. Among her favorite Haggadot is one featuring papercuts by David Moss in which many
of the figures wear the kind of pointy hats that once were required of Jews by anti-Semitic regimes. Other Haggadot in her collection are from Tunisia and from France.

In another country of sorts — cyberspace — an interactive Haggadah today is made available to Web browsers by Rabbi Mark Hurvitz of Congregation Etz Chaim in Ramona. Illustrated by Gail Littman, longtime president of Temple Adat Shalom of Poway, where Hurvitz's wife, Rabbi Deborah Prinz, is the spiritual leader, the ever-growing Hagaddah at www.davka.org links through hypertext to other parts of the Web. Hurvitz also has a printed version of the Haggadah that is in its 25th edition.

The meanings of the various symbolic foods on the seder plate are, of course, well-known parts of the Passover seder. When Rachel Perez was growing up in Casablanca, Morocco, the plate was brought to the table with a bit of ceremony. "We would cover it with the most beautiful scarf we had, and then we would pass it around and sing a Moroccan song in Arabic, which talked of our love for Israel, and while we did this we would place the plate on a child's head and turn the plate around for everyone to see," she recalled.

Gmach said in Tunisia the ceremony is slightly different: The plate is placed in succession on the head of each participant. She said the ritual is intended to remind participants that they were once slaves who carried burdens upon their heads.

Early in the seder, matzohs are identified as the "bread of affliction" that Jews ate in the land of Egypt. At Sofia Maio Merdinger's home in Egypt, as well as in Ruhama,  Leetal Ben Zvi's kibbutz in Israel's Negev, there was a custom that a matzoh would be tied up in a napkin, like a little sack, and passed around the table from shoulder to shoulder. First, the sack would be held on the person"s right shoulder, and he or she would be asked by the leader, "Where are you from?" "Egypt," the person would reply. "Where are you going?" The person would switch the little luggage of matzoh to the left shoulder and respond, "Yerushalayim!"

Then the matzoh would be passed to the person to the left and the ritual repeated until the matzoh made its way all around the seder table.

A favorite seder-night ritual is the asking of the Four Questions, which initiates the retelling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt. By tradition, the youngest child asks the Four Questions, but in Urevich, Byelorussia, where Rose Schiff grew up, "all of us would ask the Four Questions. We would start with the oldest and come to the youngest. Every one of us knew them from memory."

Hillel Katzeff, formerly of Cape Town, South Africa, remembers how as a little boy he "dreaded the thought of standing up and doing the Four Questions. We would have to stand up and sing, and it was nerve-racking, because you wanted to do it right. I couldn't wait for a younger person to come to our family seders."

Shirley Farajzadeh, though raised in the United States, said her parents retained the ways they learned in Hamadan, Iran. Just before the asking of the Four Questions, some of the children would go out, knock on the door and then return with the youngest child. "The significance is that the youngest child is the purest one, so he could be Eliyahu," she said. This concept gives added significance to the child asking, in essence, 'what is going on in your house?'"

The questions concern why the night of Passover is different,: why matzohs are eaten, why bitter herbs are consumed, why parsley is dipped, and why people recline at the table.

Collette Schulmann, who grew up in Casablanca, Morocco, remembers how her father would dress in a white caftan for the Passover meal, and how he would be surrounded by pillows in his big chair.

Similarly, the grandfather of Fannie Lebovits, who lived in Libau, Latvia, would sit on a "hessebed—a comforter made out of goosefeathers, covered with white, with cushions at the back. My father would also rest against this thing, but we kids would sit in regular chairs."

The story comes to the recitation of the ten plagues that God visited upon the Egyptians before Pharaoh would agree to let the Israelites go. In some families, the custom is for each person to diminish his or her cup of wine by dipping a pinky into the cup and shaking off a drop of wine onto a plate or into a bowl for each plague.

Shahar Masori, a Yemenite Jew who grew up in Hadera, Israel, said at his house only his father, as leader of the seder, would diminish his cup, pouring a little bit of wine for each plague into a tin can. "Then mother would take the can into the farthest recess of our back yard and dump it,
saying, 'May this go to all of our enemies and haters.' Until she returned to the table, all of the other people were not permitted to speak."

Similarly, Michael Broudo recalled that in Salonika, people would pour vinegar into a basin beside them as the ten plagues were recited.

Next comes the singing of Dayenu, in which the various miracles God performed for the Israelites are recounted, with the expression that any one of the miracles would have been enough (dayenu).

In the Iranian-style seder held by Shirley Farajzadeh's parents, the Dayenu would be preceded with a fun, often hilarious ceremony in which a person would take long chives or scallions in his hands and, simulating a whip, would pretend to be an Egyptian taskmaster beating the Hebrew slaves. The scallions then would be passed to the next person, who would repeat the
ceremony, and so on around the table.

Dayenu and the other songs of Passover bring many memories. "All the melodies we sang, we helped my father," recalled Rose Schiff about her Byelorussian Pesach seders. "We were eight kids." Sometimes her father would "come out with a little violin and play the melodies," she remembered.

"The highlight of the seder was all the songs," said Fannie Lebovits. "Grandpa conducted the seder," said Ruth Sax, who grew up Brno, Czecheslovakia, today located in the Czech Republic. "He had beautiful melodies, and all of us had to sing with him."

"Every year when we were in Israel, we went to the kibbutz of my grandparents, Ruhama, and have a seder in the cafeteria, and my grandfather, who was the singer of the kibbutz, led the seder," remembered Leetal BenZvi..

Located in the Negev, where the harvest comes in time for Passover, the kibbutz also would observe a Shavuot-like ritual in which children on the shoulders of their parents would at one point during the seder wave sheafs of wheat and sing about the sea of wheat produced on the kibbutz. "Everybody came dressed in white," BenZvi recalled.

Just before the meal is served, the contents of the seder plate are displayed and explained. At her home in Egypt, remembered Sofia Maio Merdinger, "the charoset was made with dates, so that it would look just like mortar."

At Collette Schulmann's grandparents' home in Casablanca, charoset was made from "lots of nuts and cinnamon, and a little wine -- it was my favorite!"

The meal

Some of the strongest memories associated with Passover are the foods that were served for the festive meal.

"It's not so much the seder, but the matzoh ball," laughed Gussie Zaks, remembering a favorite saying from the Klobuck shtetl.

"My mother would take a cabbage and make an (imitation) herring out of it," Rose Schiff recalled with delight while recounting an impoverished youth. "It would taste like a hering, with vinegar and onions and cabbage, and it would look like a chopped herring."

"Bubbe Katzeff would stay in her kitchen and make matzoh balls that were cannonballs in size," Hillel Katzeff recalled. "I think the soup was an afterthought." Other foods served at the family seder in Cape Town included an "egg salad, chopped up with cucumbers sliced in half and placed around the cut glass plate, finely-chopped herring, sprinkled with egg whites on
top, pita and gehacte (chopped up) herring, which father would call gehargete (murdered) herring."

Fannie Lebovitz remembers particularly the geshmirte matzoh — a matzoh on which her family would spread a cheesecake-like mixture made from equal amounts of farmer cheese and cream cheese, to which eggs, sour cream, kosher potato flour, sugar and vanilla were added. After this mixture was spread on the matzoh, sugar or cinammon would be added on top.

Finding the afikomen

After everyone ate, it would be time for the children to find the afikomen — a piece of matzoh hidden away sometime during the evening.

Rose Schiff remembered that for finding the afikomen, the children would be rewarded with "nuts, big nuts, which was a rarity, and they would manage to find it for Pesach. We didn't have toys, so we would use the nuts for Pesach. We were so happy for what we had."

Hillel Katzeff remembers the time as a child he set too high a price for his grandfather to "buy back" the afikomen so that the meal could be continued. "My demand was too great, so he continued the meal without it." Katzeff said he was shocked.

The seder, part two

A highlight of the seder following the meal is the opening of the door for Elijah the Prophet, who, it is hoped, will enter the room and announce that the Messiah is coming.

Collette Schulmann's grandfather in Casablanca took the possibility of Elijah's arrival very seriously. A huge ornamented chair, brocaded with pillows, was left unoccupied throughout the seder, just in case Elijah would come. 

"He would say 'shhhhh' and everyone would become silent and we would fix our eyes on the door," Schulmann reminisced. After a while, the grandfather would say that "sometimes we can see with other things than our eyes" and that maybe Elijah had come in like a ghost, and perhaps was around us even then. "Then he would say, 'You know what? I heard a blessing. He has just
blessed you!'"

Rose Schiff remembered that everybody at the seder table would stand when the door was open "to meet Elijah."

More ceremonies, more songs and more prayers, and the seder would conclude. Sometimes the children, unable to understand the adults' insistence that every word be read, fell asleep in their chairs.

After the seder

But Passover — and the eating of only unleavened products — would continue
through the eight days.

Hannah Marx, who grew up in Hamm, Germany, recalls that she never saw square matzohs until she came to the United States. They were round, she recalled, and through the Passover week she had a favorite game that she played with them.

She and other children would cover the rims of their bowls with the round matzohs, and try to punch a hole through the middle of the matzoh without causing the rest of it to break.

"Whoever could make the biggest hole would win!" she recalled.

For Rachel Perez and other Moroccan Jews, Passover really was not over until the big Maimuna feast was held after the eighth day. "We would have a big banquet with bread and milk and buttermilk, and honey," she recalled.

The pita bread would be be dipped in honey and butter "to keep the family together" and there would be "a big buffet, a big feast, and people would stay and celebrate together till 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. in the morning."