By Tara Kyle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — As Jews across the city recognized the first night of Passover on Monday with services and gatherings commemorating the biblical exodus from Egypt, one congregation was turning its focus to welcoming Jews with little familiarity with their faith.
At Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, at 125 E. 85th St., Associate Rabbi Elie Weinstock was preparing for a Seder that prioritizes making the contents of the Haggadah, a religious text over 1000 years old, applicable to day-to-day life.
It’s all part of Passover Across America, a six-year-old campaign of the National Jewish Outreach Program. Weinstock, who has participated since the program’s inception, estimates that 75 percent of attendees at his Seder would be Jews who are not members of the congregation.
Instead, it was to be populated by Jews from around Manhattan and farther aflung who may not have set foot in a synagogue in years, if ever.
“Hopefully the Seder experience, the Passover experience, is an opportunity to reconnect with one’s tradition, maybe explore it a little more in greater detail,” Weinstock said.
Weinstock planned to make the service accessible by delivering it in English, and providing books in English and transliterated Hebrew. He was hoping to keep the ceremony from running too long and was set to offer questions relating ancient times to current events.
“The idea of how we respond to difficult times, whether they be on a macro level or a micro personal level, always come up at the Seder,” Weinstock said. This year, Weinstock planned to ask attendees to compare the exodus and other past persecutions of the Jewish people to modern calamities such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.
Reflecting on Passover Across America’s ability to impact lives, Weinstock recalled one businessman who attended a couple years ago while on a trip from San Francisco. He hadn’t attended a Seder in two decades, and came to Kehilath Jeshurun on a whim.
Months later, he wrote Rabbi Weinstock describing how the experience had compelled him to seek out more Jewish opportunities in his own communities.
“It was sort of a reunion. We’re not his family, but he reconnected with his people, with his tradition. And Passover just provides that opportunity,” Weinstock said. “It was really something quite memorable.”
