Thursday, March 30th 2023 |
By RABBI JOSEPH H. PROUSER
A Haggadah I consult each year provides the precise measurements required to fulfill the Mitzvot of the Seder: a minimum of 3.3 fluid ounces of wine for each of the four cups; consumption of Matzah equal to an area 7 by 6.25 inches (7 by 4 inches for the “Hillel sandwich”); for Maror, 1.1 fluid ounce of horseradish [be careful!]… or a romaine lettuce leaf...
By RABBI TZVI HERSH WEINREB
“SHABBAT HAGADOL AS INDEPENDENCE DAY”
I remember well when the age at which one could vote or drink was 21. From my perspective when I was a child, and frankly eager to do these things, it seemed to be an injustice to set the age bar so high. 21 seemed a long way off.
As time progressed,...
By RABBI JOSEPH H. PROUSER
Passover persistently presses us to strive for our potential.
Passover is…
Zman Cheiruteinu – “The Season of our Liberation.” The freedom our ancestors embraced was neither libertinism nor moral chaos. Freedom meant the potential to achieve national greatness and distinction. The former slaves took forty years and endured many hardships before reaching the Promised Land. There, freedom could be translated meaningfully into morally responsible and...
By RABBI JOSEPH H. PROUSER
The closing days of Passover, like all the Pilgrimage Festivals, are inaugurated with recitation of Kiddush: a blessing over wine, accompanied by a liturgical declaration of the sanctity of the holiday.
The Festival Evening Kiddush (to be recited Friday night) includes the phrase l’sasson u-l’simchah: asserting that the Festivals are intended “for gladness and joy.” Rabbi Avigdor Nebenzahl, the late Rabbi of the Old City...
(JTA) — A 13th-century Sephardic haggadah from Catalonia, Spain. A 15th-century haggadah from Prague. A 20th-century haggadah from Fez, Morocco.
For the first time, a selection of some of the most historic haggadahs from the National Library of Israel’s Haim and Salomon Judaica Collection — the world’s largest collection of the book that guides the Passover seder, at about 15,000 in total — are available for download, for free.
One...
By SHIRA HANAU
(JTA) — Wine from a West Bank settlement was on the menu at this year’s White House Passover seder hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Dough Emhoff.
But a spokesperson for Harris said the choice should not be construed as a political statement about Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
“The wine served at the Seder was in no way intended to be an...
By RABBI DAVID WOLPE
Ask most schoolchildren the meaning of Passover and they will say “freedom” or perhaps, “freedom from slavery.” They aren’t wrong, but the answer is incomplete in a very important way.
The famous Passover phrase, “let my people go,” is abbreviated. The full sentence is, “Let my people go that they may serve me.” The historian of Ideas, Isaiah Berlin, made a famous distinction between being “liberated...
By RABBI JOSEPH H. PROUSER
The retelling of the Exodus, as presented in the traditional Passover Haggadah, begins with the passage “Ha Lachma Anya…This is the bread of affliction, which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
Rabbi Chaim Palaggi (1788-1868), the much revered and scholarly Chief Rabbi of Izmir, Turkey, customarily read the first word of this passage not as...
By CNAAN LIPHSHIZ
(JTA) — Between air-raid sirens in Odessa, Svetlana Niselevitch, an 84-year-old Ukrainian-Jewish Holocaust survivor, has been preparing to join a Passover seder for the first time in her life.
“We didn’t observe Jewish traditions in my family,” Niselevitch, a poet who was born in Kharkiv, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But she said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, convinced her that “every...
By ALEX WEISLER
(JTA) — When the war came, Galina Chornobyl fled so fast she left her teeth behind.
That’s one of the first things she shared with me when I met Galina at the Siret border crossing in Romania late last month. Kyiv had become untenable — too much time spent inching down five flights of stairs to her basement bomb shelter, too much fear after watching the TV...
