Commentary: For Passover, a liberation story for the whole world to share

By Cindy Skrzycki

I was at a table of 20 or so family and friends for the first night of Passover. There were the traditional, beloved prayers, blessings, and thanks for liberation. The bitter and the sweet. The communal seder. I am no stranger to this: It was probably my 35th year at a seder table.

My daughter, a first-year rabbinic student, is in Crimea, where she is a stranger and can't communicate without a translator. But, with another Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion classmate, she helped conduct seders for Jewish communities in Crimea. For an effort called the Pesach Project, students from HUC studying in Israel raise money annually for this trip and fan out to Belarus, Ukraine, and Crimea. This year, after a class visit to Lithuania, she headed to Simferopol, Yevpatoria, Kerch, and Sevastopol.

There were multiple seders, and much of a day was spent planting a tree alongside a highway and memorial where Jews faced mass execution. They walked the field, trying to imagine the horror that lay below their feet. There was a meeting with the Russian Jewish Youth Congress in Simferopol, a place where there are no rabbis. With translators, they will lead educational programs and learn a new culture, seeing the remnants of life in the former Soviet Union.

That's what is on the official schedule, but some of the real learning has already taken place - for my daughter, the aspiring rabbi, and for me, her Catholic mother.

In one very broken-up conversation with my daughter, she talked about experiencing the emptiness of standing in a shell of an old synagogue in Lithuania. The walls were peeling; dust and mildew prevailed in a building more than 100 years old that could tell stories.

Worlds apart, yet the same prayers, same plagues, same questions.

As the Catholic in the family, I have taken the Passover holiday for what it is about - an intense, quick escape from Egyptian masters who used Jews for slaves. Christians note the meal but never celebrate it. There is deliberation about whether this is Jesus keeping Passover in Jerusalem.

Whatever you believe, the most remarkable thing about this time is the lengths to which Jews will go to have everyone at the seder table - even non-Jews. President Obama's seder table in the White House was celebrated national news.

Many Christians who are invited to a seder wonder at the complexity and length of this meal and why matzo suddenly becomes the center of the Jewish diet.

It's not so different in Crimea. They try to get everyone to come to the table, and the Jewish community there considers the visitors role models. They want help from the visiting students, and they want to show that women can be rabbis and that rabbis are needed.

The visit comes as welcome relief to the Jews in Simferopol, who don't have a synagogue and rely on a young woman of 25 to handle questions about tradition and ritual. She's learning what it means to be a rabbi and finding it isn't a bowl of charoset, the apple, walnut, and wine concoction scarfed up at Passover. Yet she plans to be an ordained rabbi.

But when the students completed visits to the Holocaust memorials, Orthodox Shabbat services, and the preservation of a shtetl and synagogues that were spared, they were ready to celebrate the meal that marks freedom multiple times. What better place to proclaim this?

The bitter herbs had a bit more of an edge this year, remembering Jews who could not pray from the Haggadah and ask the Four Questions under Soviet oppression. Now, as a progressive Jewish culture begins to flower in those places, the prayers, food, and open community celebrating liberation seem sweeter for the students and the communities they visited.

So as I sat as a guest in an observant home, I thought about how this holiday should be marked in Crimea, as everywhere else:

"This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord - a lasting ordinance."

For this group of student rabbis, cantors, and educators, next year is not likely to be in Crimea. This learning and service excursion might, however, give another meaning to Passover in that the story of liberation is read differently in every part of the world where Jews live.

Cindy Skrzycki, a former Washington Post columnist, is a senior lecturer in the English department of the University of Pittsburgh. Skrzycki@pitt.edu