Our Own Private Pesach

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shafranBy Rabbi Avi Shafran

One day during my teenage years I began to think about what my father, may he be gezunt, had been doing at my age. The thought occurred too late for me to compare his and his family’s flight by foot from the Nazis in Poland at the outbreak of World War II to my own 14th year of life – when my most daunting challenge had been, the year before, leining my bar-mitzvah parsha.

But I was still young enough to place the image of his subsequent years in Siberia – as a guest of the Soviet Union, which deported him and others from the Norardkhok Yeshiva in Vilna – alongside my high school trials for comparison. At the age when I was avoiding homework, he was avoiding being made to work on Shabbos; when my mesiras nefesh consisted of getting out of bed early in the morning for davening, his entailed finding opportunities to study Torah while working in the frozen taiga; where I struggled to survive the emotional strains of adolescence, he was struggling, well, to survive. As years progressed, I continued to ponder our respective age-tagged challenges. Doing so has lent me some perspective.

As has thinking about my father’s first Pesach in Siberia, while I busy myself helping (a little) my wife shop for Yomtov and prepare the house for its annual leaven-less week.

In my father’s memoirs, which I have been privileged to help him record and which, be’ezras Hashem, we hope will be published later this year, there is a description of how Pesach was on the minds of the young men and their rebbe, Rav Leib Nekritz, exiled with them, as soon as they arrived in Siberia in the summer of 1941. Over the months that followed, while laboring in the fields, they pocketed a few wheat kernels here and there, later placing them in a special bag, which they carefully hid. This was, of course, against the rules and dangerous. But the Communist credo, after all, was “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and so they were really only being good Marxists. They had spiritual needs, including shmurah matzoh.

Toward the end of the punishing winter, they retrieved their stash and, using a small hand coffee grinder, ground the wheat into coarse, dark flour.

They then dismantled a clock and fitted its gears to a whittled piece of wood, fashioning an approximation of the cleated rolling pin traditionally used to perforate matzohs to ensure their quick and thorough baking. In the middle of the night the exiles came together in a hut with an oven, which, as the outpost’s other residents slept, they fired up for two hours to make it kosher li’Pesach before baking their matzohs.

On Passover night they fulfilled the Torah’s commandment to eat unleavened bread “guarded” from exposure to water until before baking.

Perspective is provided me too by the wartime Pesach experience of my wife’s father, I.I. Cohen, may he be well. In his own memoir, “Destined to Survive” (ArtScroll/Mesorah, 2001), he describes how, in the Dachau satellite camp where he was interned, there was no way to procure matzoh. All the same, he was determined to have the Pesach he could. In the dark of the barracks on the Leil Shimurim, he turned to his friend and suggested they recite parts of the Haggadah they knew by heart.

As they quietly chanted the Mah Nishtana other inmates protested. “What are you crazy Chassidim doing saying the Haggadah?” they asked. “Do you have matzohs, do you have wine and all the necessary food to make a seder? Sheer stupidity!”

My shver responded that he and his friend were fulfilling a mitzvah d’Oraysa – and no one could know if their “seder” is less meritorious in the eyes of Heaven than those of Jews in places of freedom and plenty.

Those of us indeed in such places can glean much from the Pesachim of those two members – and so many other men and women – of the Jewish “greatest generation.”

A posuk cited in the Haggadah elicited a novel commentary from Rav Avrohom, the first Rebbe of Slonim. The Torah commands Jews to eat matzoh on Pesach, “so that you remember the day of your leaving Mitzrayim all the days of your life.”

Commented the Slonimer Rebbe: “When recounting Yetzias Mitzrayim, one should remember, too, ‘all the days’ of his life – the miracles and wonders that Hashem performed for him throughout…”

I suspect that my father and father-in-law, both of whom, boruch Hashem, emerged from their captivities and have merited to see children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, naturally do that. But all of us, no matter our problems, have experienced countless “miracles and wonders.” We may not recognize all of the Divine guidance and chassodim with which we were blessed – or even the wonder of every beat of our hearts and breath we take. But that reflects only our obliviousness. At the seder, when we recount HaKodosh Boruch Hu’s kindnesses to our ancestors, it is a time, too, to look back at our own personal histories and appreciate the gifts we’ve been given.

Should that prove hard, we might begin by reflecting on what some Jews a bit older than we had to endure not so very long ago.

{Am Echad Resources}

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

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