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HOLIDAY: The search for leaven signifies a new start as Seder dinners are planned.
01:30 AM PDT on Tuesday, April 11, 2006
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Passover CELEBRATION: Passover is the eight-day Jewish celebration of the Exodus and freedom from slavery in Egypt. The celebration includes the traditional Seder, a ritual meal of specific foods that symbolize sacrifice, rebirth, the bitterness of slavery, mortar used by slaves and mourning. Prayers Before the ritual search begins for chametz — anything made with leaven — observant Jews recite this prayer: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us concerning the removal of chametz. After the search, another prayer is said to nullify any chametz that may have been overlooked: All leaven or anything leavened which is in my possession, which I have neither seen nor removed, and about which I am unaware, shall be considered naught and ownerless as the dust of the earth. Chametz: Anything that contains leaven or could ferment is chametz. Among the items considered chametz are: any grain that could ferment, anything containing wheat flour, vinegar, corn and anything with corn syrup, ketchup, soda, legumes, rice, pasta, any food item that is not certified as kosher for Passover. |
When Sandy Rosenstein's family sits down for the traditional Seder dinner of Passover in their Menifee home this week, there won't be a crumb of bread, crackers or flour anywhere.
Not in the oven, not in the countertop mixer, not in the pantry.
Rosenstein keeps a kosher home. And for Passover, that means top-to-bottom cleaning of the house to remove every speck of anything containing leavening and other food that is forbidden during the eight-day observance that celebrates the Israelites' freedom from slavery and their exodus from Egypt.
Even toothbrushes are replaced.
Tonight, on the eve of Passover, her family will participate in a 3,000-year-old ritual of hiding 10 pieces of wrapped bread in the house and searching for them with a lighted candle, sweeping any remaining crumbs with a feather onto a wooden spoon and into a paper bag. The bag and its contents - chametz, which is Hebrew for leaven — will be burned in the family barbecue.
Passover dishes, utensils and cookware will come out of storage.
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Everything that is not allowed for Passover — cooking utensils that have not been made kosher by boiling or exposure to high heat — will be stored in a spare bedroom.
Food that is not kosher must be covered or removed from the kitchen.
Those items will be sold — on paper — through her rabbi to someone who is not Jewish. Chametz that is sold reverts back to the original owner at the end of Passover.
"It's all about ritual," said Rosenstein, who is president of Temple Beth Sholom, a Conservative congregation in Sun City. "I want to be reverent to the laws and connect to great-grandmothers I never knew."
Cleaning the house to remove anything with leaven before Passover is practiced in varying degrees by observant Jewish women, Inland residents said. It is based on the biblical command that Jews have no leavened products in their possession during Passover.
"Whether people are completely observant or not is a secondary issue," said Davida Fischman, a member of Congregation Etz Hadar, a Conservative synagogue in Redlands. "The major issue is that it's done with joy and with love. If people do it with love and with joy that will lead to strengthening (faith) and to possibly observance later on, and a stronger community."
The ritual of cleaning is symbolic of making a fresh start, said Rabbi Efraim Warshaw of Temple Beth Sholom.
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Sandy Rosenstein shows a symbol on the bottom right corner of a wine bottle, indicating it's kosher to drink during Passover. |
"It's a symbol of cleaning up our lives and ... putting out all pettiness and bad feelings that
may exist between people," he said by phone. "Chametz is a symbol of that. Just like bread
rises so do our problems. Hurt relations rise and have to be cleaned out, and we have a chance
to start again."
Warshaw and Rabbi Shmuel Fuss of the
Chabad Jewish Community Center of Riverside
said they get many calls about what is chametz and what is not. They and other Inland rabbis
also coordinate the ritual sale of chametz for
area Jews who observe that aspect of
preparations for Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover.
Tzipora Fuss said she viewed cleaning for
Passover as an exciting time when she was growing up as one of 12 children in an Orthodox home in Chicago. Fuss is married to Rabbi Shmuel Fuss.
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"We would take a toothbrush to clean coat pockets, move beds and vacuum under them," she said.
"We would leaf through every book looking for crumbs. There were a lot of books. It would take us a month. ... We would stick up a sign that the room was clean for Passover; no food allowed."
Cooking pots and dishes were placed in boiling water to make them kosher for Passover, she said.
Although she cannot pour boiling water on her tile counters to make them kosher, Fuss cleaned and covered them with pieces of vinyl flooring. Refrigerator shelves are lined with foil so that food purchased for Passover does not come in contact with any chametz she might have missed.
Rosenstein and other women said modern appliances — especially self-cleaning ovens — make it easier to prepare the house.
"Cleaning the stove wasn't that easy," recalled Miriam Studley of Congregation Havurim, a Reform synagogue in Temecula. She was raised in an Orthodox home. "You had to lift the stovetop and scrub the oven."
Her mother would ask their rabbi to certify that the house was clean before bringing in food bought for Passover, Studley said.
Today, Studley does not boil her dishes. That's what dishwashers are for.
"I do what I need to do for myself," she said. "I do keep the ritual of the Seder itself."
Lori Rich of Riverside said she knows people who buy kosher dog food for Passover.
"I didn't grow up in a house that did any of this," said Rich, a longtime member of Temple Beth El, a Reform congregation in Riverside. "I do take everything out of the kitchen and clean the cabinets. Some pots and pans go through the dishwasher. I don't have separate dishes for milk and meat. I use paper."
What's important, she said, is a willingness to make the effort.
"Being Jewish, it's not an easy thing to be living in a city that is predominantly not," she said by phone. "Everywhere you go, you're reminded of that. ... You lose some of the faith and traditions. It's almost like we need to do a little bit more. ... You have to do something in your home to remind you who you are."
Reach Bettye Wells Miller at (951) 368-9547 or bmiller@PE.com