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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