8 | APRIL 18 • 2024 
J
N

PURELY COMMENTARY

essay
My ‘Different’ Israeli Passover 
W

hen I was a child, 
we joined the family 
seder at my father’s 
parents’ apartment in the Bronx. 
Grandpa led the ritual; Grandma 
produced feasts on 
successive nights 
for 12 or 15 people 
in that narrow 
kitchen. When 
Grandma died, the 
big family seder 
moved across the 
Bronx to my par-
ents’ house, and my 
mother had responsibility for the 
feast; later my sister inherited the 
responsibility. She had learned 
how from helping Grandma. My 
father led the ritual, as he had 
learned it from his father. 
When I married and had chil-
dren, my wife and I could not 
keep going to the family seders. 
We were on our own; my wife 
produced the feasts. We did the 
ritual as we had learned from 
my grandfather and our other 
teachers. 
Then one year, we happened 
to go back to the Bronx for the 
seders; at the end of the second 
seder, my father surprised us 
by announcing that next year 
the family would come to us in 
California. And so it happened, 
with the unexpected change that 
my father died that fall. Now 
my sister came to us a few days 
before Passover to help my wife 
prepare the family seders; and 
they worked together nearly every 
year for the next three decades. 
Now it has changed again: We 
have moved to Israel. 
To recreate the ritual, we adapt 
and change. The seder remains, 
enacted by a changing cast of 
characters as we come and inevi-
tably, eventually, go. 
Why is this night different 
from all other nights? Let me 

count the ways.
We will have one seder this 
year.
After many years as the hosts of 
the seder, implementing the ritual 
(with my wife) as we learned it 
from my grandfather and our 
other teachers, we now plan to 
be guests at the seder as my son, 
his wife and their children have 
developed the ritual. My grand-
parents will be present among 
the streams contributing to their 
seder. 
And what else will be different: 
Instead of unpacking the pots, 
pans, dishes and silverware, red-
olent with memories of Passovers 
past, we intend to buy, all new, 
the few utensils we will need for 
the intermediate days and the 
last days of the festival. Buying 
new should be easy: We expect 
the housewares stores in this 
neighborhood to stock up for the 
onrush of customers who need 
pots, pans, dishes and silverware 
in time for Passover. 
Now, as I write, Purim has 
just ended. The past few days, all 
across the neighborhood, I have 
seen people in costume. Passing 
strangers, not necessarily Jewish, 
greeted me “Purim Sameach” 
(Happy Purim). Broadcast and 
internet news programs began 
and ended with that greeting; the 
announcers and talking heads 
started and ended their inter-
views with that greeting. On the 
roads, sound trucks rolled by 
from time to time, playing Purim 
music. The public space gets 
occupied by Purim here the way 
the public space gets occupied by 
Thanksgiving in Michigan. 
When Thanksgiving ends, the 
public space in Michigan gets 
occupied by the next big national 
holiday. When Purim ends in 
Israel, the public space begins to 
get occupied by Passover. 

Purim has ended, and now 
the website for our local super-
market, Shufersal (the name 
means “Beauty basket,
” but some 
English speakers read the name 
as “Supersal” = “Super basket”) 
leads with a banner advertising 
products for Passover: cleaning 
products at 50% lower prices, 
reduced prices for wine, wine 
vinegar, cooking oil, kosher-for-
Passover baking ingredients and 
baked goods, canned foods, all 
sorts of prepared foods, and also 
specials on locally grown fruits 
and vegetables. 
I checked the website of a com-
petitor supermarket and found 
some advertising for Passover 
products, but not yet as extensive 
a promotion; not yet. 
When we ordered grocer-
ies from the supermarket in 
Michigan, a habit that we got into 
during the COVID lockdown, 
we had to tell the shoppers, “No 
substitutions.
” That applied all 
during the year: Without that 
message, who knows what we 
would get when the market 
did not have exactly the item 
we ordered. “No substitutions” 
especially applied to shopping 
for Passover; the market typically 
had a small kosher-for-Passover 
section in aisle after aisle of other 
foods. Here in our neighborhood 
in Israel, all the supermarkets 
have only kosher foods, and, for 
Passover, only kosher-for-Pass-
over. Just about every minimarket 
(in Hebrew, “Makolet”) also. 
If the store’s shopper substitutes 
an item, at worst it will contain 
“kitnyot,
” edible seeds that are not 
leavened grains (“chametz”), but 
which Ashkenazic Jews avoid eat-
ing on Passover. The substitution 
will not include anything we need 
not to own on Passover. 
And the supermarket will have 
plenty of those products made 

with kitnyot. Most Jews in Israel 
are not Ashkenazi; the ready-
to-eat prepared foods under the 
Passover banner include rice-
based dishes, pastries made with 
rice flour, soy flour, chocolate 
crunch bars with rice, rice-based 
breakfast cereals. The canned 
foods include green peas and 
beans. Those who want to keep 
the Ashkenazic customs need to 
remain alert as they order their 
provisions for Passover. 

Louis 
Finkelman 
Contributing 
Writer

TOP: A container of hummus with 
a prominent “Kosher for Passover” 
label. The label specifies “for those 
who eat kitnyot.” Most Michigan 
Jews come from Ashkenazic 
families, who, on Passover, 
traditionally avoid eating kitnyot 
products such as hummus, made 
from chickpeas. The majority of 
Israeli Jews, from Sephardic, Mizrahi 
or other backgrounds, generally 
would eat hummus on Passover.
ABOVE: A container of tahini with 
rabbinic certification for Passover. 
A similar story. Ashkenazic Jews 
typically would also avoid eating this 
since it is made of sesame seeds. 
Non-Ashkenazi Jews generally do 
not have that restriction. 

