It's daunting to keep kosher for the holiday

Picture this: you're hosting 20 or so family members and friends for Thanksgiving dinner, and you must follow these rules:

Remove all the dishes, cookware, flatware, serving pieces, pantry staples, just about everything from the kitchen, not more than 48 hours in advance of the dinner. Pack it up, put it away and replace essentially your entire kitchen with dishes used only during Passover. Only then can you start cooking and baking.

Nothing you prepare, serve or have in the house may contain yeast, beans, rice, flour or wheat. That goes for dessert and beverages, too.

If you're making a turkey (or brisket), the rest of the menu must be free of dairy products. No cheese with the hors d'oeuvres, no cream with the after-dinner coffee.

Got that? Now you have a glimpse of what home cooks go through to keep kosher at Passover, the 10-day holiday marking the exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in ancient Egypt.

The holiday is commemorated primarily with a service, or seder, in the home, using certain foods as symbols through which the story is retold. A feast, roughly on a par with Thanksgiving dinner, is served in the middle of the seder. So food is really at center stage on Passover.

And making sure that food is kosher for Passover is the biggest challenge.

About 15 percent of American Jews keep kosher year-round, and they have to eat from paper plates in the homes of nonkosher friends or relatives.

But on Passover, many more Jewish families keep kosher. It's a daunting task, says Arlene Lewis of Mount Laurel.

When she was growing up in East Flatbush in Brooklyn, Lewis says, 98 percent of the neighbors were Orthodox Jews and everybody kept kosher.

"There was a kosher butcher on practically every corner, so it was simple. When we moved down here, we found just the opposite. There are just a handful of Jewish people in my neighborhood and we are probably the most observant family."

Now Lewis' kitchen is kosher only on Passover - especially for the sake of her 77-year-old father, who lives in Cranbury, N.J. and visits on the holiday.

"It's important to me that people who do keep kosher can feel comfortable in my house," Lewis says. "Plus, Passover is my favorite holiday. I love the story of freedom and the idea of passing the traditions from one generation to the next."

Although they do not keep kosher year-round, Lewis and her husband, Michael, emphasize Jewish culture in their home, and each has held leadership positions in their congregation, Beth Tikvah in Marlton.

In addition, their adult daughter, Sara, started keeping kosher recently. So the Lewis family always has paper plates and other disposables to make the kitchen kosher-friendly.

Here's an idea of what it takes to keep kosher.

Year-round, a kosher kitchen is like a sterile operating room. All the ingredients, the work surfaces, the equipment - down to the food processor and its beaters - have been "purified." Introduce a single element that isn't kosher, and the integrity of the whole space is compromised - everything has to be sterilized again from top to bottom.

Meat and dairy are never served at the same meal, so kosher cooks need two separate sets of dishes, flatware and cookware for those year-round.

Passover brings an additional set of rules. On Passover, two

different

sets of meat and dairy dishes are needed. (Yes, that's four sets of dishes.)

And no bread is eaten. The Jewish people hightailed it out of Egypt under tremendous time constraints. Instead of making bread and waiting for it to rise, they made a kind of flat bread called matzo to carry on their journey. So only unleavened bread is eaten at Passover, and every product label has to be examined for ingredients such as yeast or baking powder.

Every drop of soda and every piece of candy must be certified kosher for Passover. Only nonporous pots and pans can be used (no cast iron) and every inch of the kitchen has to be scrubbed.

"I think what people don't realize is how much preparation goes into this holiday," Arlene Lewis said. "All the cereal, bread, crackers, rice and flour have to be removed from the home, all the dishes have to be changed. On the days before Passover, it's easier to eat out or use paper plates."