Passover in Tough Times through History, from the Egypt to the Inquisition to the Holocaust to the USSR

Jews who escaped from Poland to Russia, baking matzah for Passover, USSR, 1943. Yad Vashem Photo Archives 7995/1

There’s no denying that for most of us, this is going to be one weird Passover. Social distancing means no getting together with friends and family for seders, and grocery shortages (not to mention the risk involved in going shopping these days – or even getting delivery) will likely lead to lackluster menus for lots of us.

It certainly will be strange for me, alone in my little studio, without my awesome Haggadah collection (which I left with my parents, not expecting the apocalypse, as one doesn’t) – possibly without even a box of matzah, if Fresh Direct won’t let me schedule a delivery window in the next week.

Made by Rebekah’s #NextYearInPerson campaign

But if you’re feeling down that you may not be celebrating the way you’d like to, take comfort in the fact that while this is a totally unprecedented experience for most of us living today, Passover observances in extremely difficult circumstances are nothing new to the Jewish people.

From the very first Passover, when the ancient Israelites had to pack up and flee without even letting their bread rise, through the years of the Inquisition when crypto-Jews tried to observe the holiday as best they could without being discovered (and, as time passed, with limited knowledge of Judaism), to the Holocaust when Jews celebrated Passover in hiding and even in concentration camps, and in the Soviet Union when Passover observance – even if it involved little more than eating matzah – was a touchstone of Jewish identity for many, there’ve been many, many times when “normal” holiday observances were severely disrupted.

There were plenty of more mundane Passover challenges too, in years of famine and plague – more like what we’re facing today. Some Ashkenazi rabbis permitted the eating of kitniyot (grains and legumes other than the five explicitly prohibited on Passover, traditionally avoided by Ashkenazi Jews only) during Passover at times when food was especially scarce, for example, during the Great Famine of 1770-71 in Czech lands.

Anyway, I know comparing coronavirus with the Holocaust has been a hot topic in some circles lately. While I am in no way trying to compare coronavirus with the Holocaust or any of the other historical tragedies under discussion in this post – and indeed, all four are categorically different from the COVID-19 crisis in that it isn’t due to oppression that our celebrations are being disrupted this year – there are valuable lessons to be learned – and inspiration to be drawn – from how Jews throughout history have done their best to mark the holiday in the face of adverse circumstances.

Taking a historical view, you can see that observing Passover the “right” way can mean different things at different times, in different circumstances. Sometimes it means risking it all to obtain matzah. Other times, it might mean eating bread. And now, in 2020, it’s going to mean staying home. And we’ve all got to live up to that challenge as best we can.

A man reciting a blessing over a cup of wine at a Passover Seder held at 6 Leszno Street at a refugee shelter organized by the Osternhilfswerk relief committee in the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland. Yad Vashem Archives FA33/1861

The First Passover

We can’t discuss Passover in hard times without mentioning the OG Pesach–yes, the one where the ancient Israelites fled Egypt in such a rush they didn’t even have time to let their bread rise, thus bringing matzah into being.

In the words of Michael Wex in his Rhapsody in Schmaltz, “Jewish food started off with a plague”–actually, ten of them–and indeed the whole holiday is, to an extent, about remembering this first act of sacrifice, of going without for a greater cause. It’s easy to lose touch with that concept, given the abundance of delicious Passover foods available to many of us in the twenty-first century, and the lavish ways the festival is often marked. But actually, the whole narrative (at least in the beginning) centers around crisis and scarcity—doesn’t sound so different from this year when you look at it like that.

Even once the Israelites were safely ensconced in the Sinai, feasting on plentiful manna each day, they still weren’t satisfied. They complain that they miss the food they used to eat in Egypt (particular items mentioned are cucumbers, melons, onions, garlic, leeks, and fish) despite having their basic nutritional needs met perfectly well by the manna—just like some of us this year might miss Passover favorites we’ll be missing out on, either because we’re not able to spend the holiday with the person known for preparing our dish of choice, or because ingredients are scarce. (Interestingly, Michael Wex notes that “[aside from fish] the other foods that Israelites miss so much in the description are recognizable variants of the forced laborers’ diet described by Herodotus, who mentions an inscription on the pyramid of Cheops “recording the amount spent on radishes, onions, and leeks for the laborers.”)

Lodz, Poland, Matzah distribution in the ghetto, 1941. Yad Vashem Archives 37BO8

The Inquisition

Jumping forward a few millennia brings us to the Inquisition, when many Jews in Spain, Portugal, and, eventually, their colonies, were forced to convert to Catholicism. Risking fear of death if caught and denounced by the Inquisition, many secretly clung to Judaism and attempted to observe Jewish traditions, even as the years passed and much religious knowledge was lost. Passover was especially risky, because inquisitors and their informants were especially attuned to holiday observances and special foods consumed in relation to them—so much so that characteristically Jewish foods come up again and again in Inquisition trial records.

According to Chaim Raphael in A Feast of History, these crypto-Jews “had no Hebrew books, no Haggadah, and little or no instruction. But they had the Bible—in Latin—and tried to apply its instructions literally, without benefit of the rabbinical formulas to which we have become used. The Bible said that a lamb was to be roasted whole—so they did this, and ate it, like the ancient Jews in Egypt… They had no idea when the month of Nisan came exactly, so they took the fourteenth day of the first full moon in March and hoped for the best. The general baking of matzah in advance might have given them away, so they baked it a few days later than the fourteenth.”

David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, authors of A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews, “For crypto-Jews, matza essentially defined the Passover, a fact reflected in many of the names commonly given to the holiday. Among Spanish speakers it was Pascua del pan cenceno; among the Portuguese, Pascua do pao asmo and Jejum das filhos; and in Cataluna, Pasqua del pa alis.

Gitlitz and Davidson go on to recreate a number of matzah recipes that appear in Inquisition trial records. Like the matzah we know today, most were based on flour and water, but unlike our matzah they were often enriched. Honey, pepper, oil, eggs, white wine, and clove are all potential matzah additions noted in trial records, but perhaps the most interesting is finely ground dirt, which may have been intended to emphasize that matzah is meant to be “the bread of affliction.”

Sometimes, materials for traditional matzah weren’t available, and in those instances crypto-Jews worked with the ingredients available to them. There are records of matzah being made from cooked chestnuts in Portugal in the late sixteenth century, and in colonial Mexico crypto-Jew Luis Carvajal testified in 1589 that on Passover “because he did not have unleavened bread he ate corn tortillas, since they had no yeast.”

Jews at a Passover Seder at Dzielna 7 in the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland. Yad Vashem Photo Archives FA33/1863

The Holocaust

There are countless heart-wrenching stories of the ways Jews strove to acknowledge Passover against all odds during the Holocaust, whether in the ghettos, in hiding, or in concentration camps. Needless to say, the holiday as observed during these years tended to look very different from what came before or after. Chaim Raphael writes in A Feast of History that during Passover of 1944 inmates of the Belsen concentration camp—authorized by rabbis who were their fellow inmates to eat bread in order to survive—recited the following prayer to explain their actions to God: “We pray to Thee that Thou mayest keep us alive and preserve us and redeem us speedily so that we observe Thy statutes and do Thy will and serve Thee with us a perfect heart. Amen.”

Here are just a few accounts by Holocaust survivors, the first of Passover in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the second recalling a seder held by a group of partisans hiding in a forest. Both of these excerpts were taken from the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivors Memoir Program:

“We existed … by hiding, until April 19, 1943 [the night of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising], Erev Pesach, the eve of Passover, which was also the eve of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. That day, there was an alarm. The few telephones that existed in the ghetto were still somehow working — these were mostly in apartments where doctors or other people deemed important lived — and the Polish underground resistance on the outside who were working with the Jewish underground phoned someone in the ghetto to say that the Nazis were coming in to take everybody out. By that time, there were already lots of bunkers in the ghetto. We had also prepared a bunker underneath the ruins at the front of our building. The caretaker and the men in our building, including my father, had dug it out, creating a middle section as an entrance and a room on either side. They didn’t want to give up and be taken by the Germans and so they put in food, electricity and water and air vents so the bunker couldn’t be discerned from the outside. My father and mother prepared us children for when we would have to go there. They told us that when the time came to go into the bunker, we were to ask no questions and we must get ready as quickly as we could.

That day, we all went down to the bunker, about 150 people in all. … My father must have brought wine, somebody else had matzos, and that evening in the bunker, they made a seder. Everyone was crying and praying. These were religious Jews who knew by heart the Haggadah, the Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover seder, and it still amazes me that, at such a dire time, they never forgot their culture and their morals. They also always made sure to shelter and look after their children.” – Pinchas Gutter, Memories in Focus

 

“In April 1942 we had twenty-two Jewish partisans in our group. Because we had all lost our own families, we felt like a family—we became brothers and sisters to one another. One of the Jews in our group, Moishe Abramowitz, who had escaped from the town of Bobruisk, had brought with him a small prayer book that he kept hidden in his boots. He helped our group cope with the difficult conditions in the forest and the tragedy of our people. Reminding us that Passover was fast approaching, he managed to obtain some beets to make a red soup to substitute for wine, traditionally used during the holiday ritual. We had no matzah, but he dug up some horseradish from nearby fields. On the night of the first seder, we gathered near our underground bunker.

As I was the youngest, it was decided that I would ask the Four Questions, the Ma Nishtanah. I knew them well since, as the youngest in my family, I had always been the appropriate candidate. Here in the forest I interpreted the answers to the questions somewhat differently. In answer to the question, ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ I replied, ‘Because last Passover all the Jews sat with their families at tables beautifully set with matzah and goblets of red wine. Last year, each of us had a goblet on our plate and listened to the oldest person in our household conduct the seder. Tonight, in the forest, our lonely and orphaned group, having miraculously survived, remembers our loved ones who were taken from us forever.’ Tears fell from our eyes. After this, we continued to keep the traditions of all the Jewish holidays, which gave us the courage and the will to survive. With God’s help, we would eventually live in this world as free people.” – Michael Kutz, If, by Miracle

Baking matzah in hiding, Lodz, Poland, 1943. Yad Vashem Photo Archives 37CO7

The Soviet Union

Jews in the Soviet Union also went to heroic lengths to observe Passover. The legal status of matzah production varied throughout the years, but all through the USSR’s existence, Jews—even those whose lives contained little else in the way of Jewish observance—struggled to obtain matzah.

The cost could be steep: at times when officials prevented Jews from importing or producing matzah, those who disobeyed faced terrible punishment. In 1923, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported that twenty Jewish Communists were facing trial for having baked matzah in secret, and in 1929 1929, eleven elderly Leningrad Jews were sentenced to hard labor for accepting 80,000 kilos of matzah from abroad.

Even so, according to Mikhail Chlenov, chairman of the Va’ad, the Jewish confederation of Russia, “matzah used to be the only visible symbol of an individual’s involvement in Judaism,” and, later in Communist rule, when matzah production was legal, at Passover Jews from across the country congregated at Moscow’s famed Choral Synagogue to purchase it. Thus, the observance of Passover—even if it consisted of nothing more than lining up to buy some matzah—did much to lay the groundwork for many Russian Jews to reconnect with Judaism in freer times.

So there you have it! In a surprise to absolutely no one, the Jewish people has been through a lot – and while sometimes spiritual survival has meant risking lives for clandestine matzah, other times the most important thing is simply to survive, and to do the best we can to ensure our fellow humans do too. This is one of those times. I hope this post has given you some (kosher for Passover) food for thought, and maybe a little inspiration for powering through the strange holiday that awaits, whatever that means for you.

Chag sameach!

Sources

“And You Shall Tell Your Children: Marking the Holiday of Passover Before, During and After the Holocaust” (Yad Vashem)

“Despite Ongoing Trials of History, Ukraine Matzah Bakery Continues Its Unique Legacy,” Dovid Margolin (Federation of the Jewish Communities of the CIS, March 26, 2017)

A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, 1999)

A Feast of History: The Drama of Passover through the Ages (Chaim Raphael, 1972)

The Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program (Azrieli Foundation)

“Is Matzah the Key to Soviet Jews’ Survival?” (The Jewish News of Northern California, April 11, 1997)

“Kitniyos and Quinoa,” Rabbi Yosef Kalinsky

Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It (Michael Wex, 2016)