Message of Passover Learned in the Making of Unleavened Bread

The kitchen of Chabad House on Montezuma Road is as bare as a room in an abandoned home. Two large freezers stand vacant in the middle of the floor. Shelves, stripped of food and linings, lie empty. Two commercial-sized ovens are open and unused. Pots and pans are piled outside under a blue tarpaulin.

The entire room--windows, walls, light fixtures, shelves, freezers and ovens--is receiving a meticulous scrubbing in preparation for Passover, the eight-day holiday that commemorates the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt 3,500 years ago.

But for the Jews of the Chabad Lubavitch sect and other strict observers of the holiday, this thorough spring cleaning is not enough.

“Passover is the one holiday of the year that Jews have become fanatic about,” said Rabbi Yonah Fradkin, the group’s San Diego leader. As if to demonstrate that commitment, Fradkin moves to the kitchen a few minutes later and lights a propane-powered blowtorch. For the next few minutes, he plays the blue flame along the interior of an oven to purify the metal itself.

“We’re going to get the metal to be red hot, or as close to red hot (as possible), because the walls of the oven are what absorbs the leaven,” Fradkin says as he leans into the oven. “Once it has gotten red hot, it’s considered to be like a new piece of metal.”

Fradkin’s purge of leavened food is part of an ancient ritual called kashering that has occupied the weeks before Passover in Jewish homes for thousands of years. It’s a ritual as integral to Passover as the eating of unleavened food during the holiday itself.

Central to Passover is the haste of the Jews’ exit from Egypt 3,500 years ago; according to the Bible, they fled without waiting for the bread for their journey to rise. Instead, the dough was baked by the sun in the sacks they carried on their backs, creating the hard, flat cracker called “matzo” that is eaten during the holiday.

To ensure that they eat no leavened food at all during the eight-day holiday (which is celebrated for seven days in Israel), even invisible specks of leavened food must be removed from homes. Utensils used to prepare that food must be purified or set aside for the duration of the celebration.

In Jewish law, “it is dictated that there should be a total separation of chametz (leavened food) during Passover,” said Mary Greenbaum, Chabad House’s administrator. “The Torah is very strict about it. It says that whoever doesn’t celebrate Passover is separating himself from his people.”

The strictest observers will boil pots in water and burn chametz off other pans. Ovens can be purified with the heat of a self-cleaning mechanism, Fradkin said, but every year Chabad Lubavitch rabbis use the blowtorch to personally clean the ovens of about 200 Jewish families who lack such modern appliances.

Leavened food itself is gathered and stored in a closet, but for some families that is not protection enough. About 1,000 families sign contracts each year empowering Fradkin to sell the food to a non-Jew, who “owns” the commodities stored in Jewish homes for the duration of the holiday.

When the eight-day period ends, Fradkin buys back the food. Both transactions involve small amounts of money, he said.

When Chabad’s kashering process is finished, the kitchen will be ready for the preparation of 800 meals for Passover Seders, the feasts eaten on the first two nights of the holiday, which begins this year on April 13.

For the next three weeks, the group’s two rabbis also are bringing 1,500 to 2,000 Jewish children from the region’s schools, synagogues and youth groups to Chabad House for the experience of baking matzo, another of the ingenious promotional stunts for which the Lubavitchers are known nationwide.

A branch of the mystical, orthodox Jewish sect known as Hasidim, the Lubavitchers are dedicated to promoting traditional Jewish education and culture and blocking Jewish assimilation into American society. The word chabad is an acrostic formed from the Hebrew words for wisdom, understanding and knowledge.

On Succoth, a harvest festival celebrating the Jews’ wanderings in the desert after the exodus from Egypt, the Lubavitchers rig up a mobile succah and drive it around the city, offering Jews the chance to pray in the traditional thatched-roof structure. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, the Lubavitchers blow a ram’s horn--symbolic of sacrifice--in hospitals and nursing homes for Jews who cannot attend religious services.

Last week, Rabbi Yeshia Eichenblatt led two groups of children through the Chabad Matzoh Bakery, where they learned the strict rules governing the baking of Passover’s most important food and made some themselves.

“Judaism is an experience,” the effervescent Eichenblatt said. “It should be experienced firsthand. . . . I think (the children) gain an awareness that Judaism is something that is very practical and live and real and exciting.”

Jewish law requires that matzo be made only from wheat, barley, oats, rye or spelt (a primitive form of wheat), and that the flour and water not sit together for more than 18 minutes before it is baked. If the 18-minute limit is exceeded, the dough begins to rise and the main tenet of Passover is broken.

A timer is set at the moment flour and water are put together in a stainless steel bowl in Chabad House’s mock bakery. As Danny Arbel, an Israeli volunteer living at Chabad House, begins to knead the substance into dough, about 25 sixth-graders from the San Diego Jewish Academy break into spontaneous chants of “Go, Danny, go.”

Eichenblatt gives the children lumps of dough and they hurry to a long table where rolling pins await them. Earlier, they had used sandpaper to clean the wooden rolling pins of flour left over from a previous baking session.

“Do you think this flour has been on this wood for more than 18 minutes?” Eichenblatt asked the 11- and 12-year-olds. “What is that called? Chametz! Booooo. We don’t want it on here.”

After rolling out the dough and poking it full of holes, the children race to an oven where Eichenblatt bakes the matzo at 700 degrees. He distributes the food to the children in bags that include brochures for a summer camp in Israel and a Dial-a-Jewish Story phone line.

“Having a sleepless night? Can’t get to sleep? Worrying about the summer?” the rabbi asks like a television huckster. “Dial a Jewish story. Every night, six days a week, except Sabbath.”

The class’ matzo is finished with a few moments to spare. It is not technically kosher for Passover because some stricter processing guidelines have not been followed, and the flour is not made from wheat that was watched from the moment it was cut down in the fields to prevent contact with water, Eichenblatt said.

But the lesson is not lost on the excited group. Eleven-year-old Amy Feren explains that learning how to bake matzo encourages her “to remember tradition.”

“For the kids, this is a living experience,” said Judaic studies teacher Edna Yedid. “Matzo is going to have a lot more meaning for them.”