The Year Without a Passover

For the last two weeks I have been hunting for a suitable Seder to attend and tragically, I have failed. When you look for community Seders in my Seattle home, you are presented with endless options — interfaith and conservative and gay and Sephardic and oh, there’s a whole Smorgasbord of Seders to choose from. Not to mention the family and friends options, causing one to suffer the angst of whether to choose your neighbor’s tiny celebration or your mother’s extravaganza or your father’s where you’re sure to have to read Hebrew. There’s also the one across the lake where they won’t let you bring anything, but you do anyway. So many choices.

Here in the entire country of Austria, however, I’ve found four Seders, total. Nationwide. There’s the Chabad Seder in Salzburg, and three others in Vienna, including the Jewish Student Union Seder. That’s the one I want to go to, but in the face of all the traveling for work I’ve been doing, driving three and a half hours to have dinner with Jews feels like too much. The congregation in Graz had an educational event earlier this month, but it wasn’t a real Seder, it was more like a Seder show and tell for kids.

I contacted a number of local Jewish organizations in hopes that they would say, “You’re where now? Oh, very good. You need to call the Bergsteins — they’re just up the road from you and they’re on our Seder matching list for your area. Let me give you their number — and I’ll let them know they’ll be hearing from you! Chag sameach!

Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that this has not happened. Austria’s Jewish population is currently estimated to be between seven and eight thousand people. Most of them, an estimated 6000, live in or close to Vienna. The rest are divided between Salzburg and Graz. I can’t find any reference to a current rural Jewish population at all — i.e. no Steinbergs in my neighborhood and no Seder matching service. (For perspective, the Jewish population of Seattle is about 37,000.)

My inability to find a local Seder has been making me sad. I shouldn’t really be surprised, I mean, we all know what happened here, right? If you were Jewish in 1938 and you didn’t have the resources to get out, you died. And nothing was left of your history but ashes. Of course there’s no one to have Passover with. The few Jews left here are — what? I don’t even know, never having met any of them. There are some immigrants in Vienna from northern Africa and the Arab states, part of a reparations program to help relocate children of refugees — who are no longer children — to less hostile lands. There are some upstart Israelis building businesses in the Jewish quarter in Vienna. There are some students from other countries. There are a few old people who managed to survive, either by luck or the kindness of strangers, which was all too rare.

Somewhere I imagine there are also Jews like me, though maybe not so many. People who are here by circumstances – marriage or employment or maybe just an inescapable attraction to the snow. I wish I could find them so we could have Passover together, but I don’t know how. I have been joking about posting little note cards on the supermarket message boards, or taking out an ad, or wandering through the center of town in a sandwich board inscribed in Hebrew, but there’s something tragic about that.

The Passover Seder message that always strikes home with me is that you should be kind to strangers. Indulge me in an uncharacteristic moment of quoting from Deuteronomy:

Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that G-d has given to you and to your house, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.

This year I feel very much a stranger in the land of Egypt. I’m the resident alien. But I while I do feel a stranger, I am not alone. I’m sad to be away from my friends and neighbors and family during my favorite holiday, but it’s not due to lack of kindness on the part of the Egyptians Austrians, who, it bears mentioning, have been exceptionally welcoming and serve up excellent snack at every possible opportunity. I will have to hold a tiny Seder in my head at Easter lunch. It will be an updated version, in which the act of being kind to strangers is changed to the act of graciously receiving those kindnesses. Maybe someone will ask me what holiday I usually have around Easter, and I will have the chance to tell the story — which is really what Passover is all about.

Chag sameach. Next year in–well, time will tell, won’t it?

Last year’s Passover post is here.