28 | APRIL 2 • 2020
Making
Passover Personal
Local families create their own Haggadot to celebrate the holiday.
ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Passover
T
he Haggadah, read at the Passover
seder table to tell the story of the
Jewish people’
s liberation from
slavery in Egypt, describes, in order, each
symbolic food placed on a seder plate and
when to participate in the rituals of the
holiday. It also features traditional songs
for everyone to sing.
While many Jewish-American families
will read from the Maxwell House Passover
Haggadah this Passover, the people you’
ll
be meeting here go a step further. They
make their own Haggadot.
FAMILY HEIRLOOMS
Former Detroiter Talya Amira Woolf of
Netanya, Israel, proudly holds onto her
family’
s original Haggadah. Her late moth-
er, Harriet Gaba Drissman, was an artist
and teacher who took apart the Haggadah
from Maxwell House to include drawings
from her children and additional songs.
Drissman got her kids involved in
the project. She designed the cover and
reworked the entire Haggadah, instructing
the kids on what to draw for each page,
Woolf said.
“She would have us work very carefully
on it, sometimes with guiding lines to
help,” Woolf said. “I was the best artist of
the kids, so I was in charge of the cover,
but she still gave direction as to what
should go where. Originally, the cover
only had four kids included. After my
youngest brother was born in 1986, she
had me add him.”
Woolf speculated her mother “decided
we needed a Haggadah of our own to
make it more interesting and fun for the
kids. Passover, in general, is tough, espe-
cially the seders, which last for hours. This
helped keep us entertained.”
The Woolfs plan to add their own chil-
dren’
s drawings to the Haggadah before
scanning the book digitally and having
copies officially bound.
A WORK IN PROGRESS
Menachem Roetter of Oak Park, a mem-
ber of Beis Chabad of North Oak Park,
created his first personalized Haggadah
in 2017, updating it the following year.
Roetter went from a black-and-white book
with 60-plus pages to a color copy with
more than 160 pages.
The websites Haggadot.com, a shared
content platform for Passover material,
and Chabad.org helped him come up with
a “main Haggadah” in Hebrew and English
with transliterations. Then he found layout
ideas. Moving the project to the Microsoft
Publisher software program made it easy
to add material and pages.
A Haggadot collector, Roetter went
through them all to pull out items he
loved to put into one Haggadah.
He also wanted to include songs —
“not just the traditional ones, but the
fun school ones or parodies as well,” he
said. “I also knew a few things that most
Haggadot don’
t include but should, like
a pre-Pesach cleaning list, reminder to
sell chametz (food with leavening), sefirat
haOmer (counting the 49 days between
Passover and Shavuot) for the second
night and the Shema prayer, if you are still
awake at dawn. My family actually is at
times.”
Then, because he is a devoted uncle,
he added pictures of his eight nieces and
nephews, scanned from his 10 volumes of
photobooks. He plans to add his own chil-
dren one day.
“
At this point [the Haggadah] is fully
functional,” Roetter said, before admitting
LEFT: Menachem Roetter adds to his already-massive
Haggadah each year. CENTER: Greenberg Family
Haggadah. RIGHT: The Woolf Family Haggadah.
COURTESY OF WOOLF FAMILY
COURTESY OF ROETTER FAMILY
COURTESY OF GREENBERG FAMILY
continued on page 30
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