Jews Give Thanks at Passover With Traditional Seder : Religion: Leisure World observers also recall the pain of the Holocaust.

The traditional candles were lighted, the questions asked and answered, the symbolic foods eaten, the cups of wine emptied and the prayers of thanks given to the Lord for rescuing his people from Egyptian bondage more than 3,000 years ago.

“It is an affirmation of Jewish unity and continuity,” said the cantor, Ben Isaacson, 62, of Leisure World, who led a gathering of about 90 friends and strangers Friday evening in the historic celebration of the Seder, the feast of Passover.

The Seder was held at Villa Valencia, a Laguna Hills community where the average age is 84.

Isaacson observed that this group especially appreciated the difficulty of accepting whatever comes their way, the lesson he said the Jewish people had learned during their captivity in Egypt and then their 40-year journey through the desert to freedom.

“It is an effort just to get out of bed these days,” he acknowledged. “But keep it up,” he encouraged them. “You will find out it will be all right.”

The familiar readings as always commemorated the biblical story of Exodus, in which God visited Egypt with plagues when the Pharoah refused to allow the Jewish people to go free.

“Passover” refers to the last and greatest plague, in which the “angel of death” killed the first born of the Egyptians but spared Jewish families who had placed the blood of a lamb on their doorposts. For many at Friday’s gathering, whose children and grandchildren were scattered throughout the country or who had outlived wives and husbands, the holiday evoked warm memories of very different Seders when they were young.

Those Passover meals, they said, were served at long tables to many brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, by doting mothers and grandmothers who had spent days in the preparation.

Henry Robert, 81, remembered when he was a child in Germany his grandmother, an Orthodox Jew, made her own gefilte fish and other Passover dishes from scratch.

“She taught me to cook, and my wife is reaping the benefit of it to this day,” he said with a laugh.

Miriam Fleisher, 75, said that she, like many of the people at the dinner, were remembering relatives who had died in the Holocaust.

“I’m always depressed during the holidays because I lost most of my family,” she said.

Before World War II, she said, her large and close-knit family lived in a small village in Czechoslovakia. She said everyone got new clothes for Passover and for weeks before the dinner marking the beginning of the eight-day holiday, the women cleaned, shopped and cooked.

Only when Passover arrived, she said, was there time to relax and celebrate. “There was singing and a lot of giggling among the children because we had wine that we weren’t used to,” she said. Those Seders, she said, lasted three to four hours.

Later, after her family fled to France to escape the Nazis, they still observed Passover, she said, making do with potatoes when there was no matzo, the unleavened bread eaten in memory of the flight from Egypt, when there was no time to wait for the bread to rise.

When the point arrived in the ceremony to ask what makes “this night different from all other nights?”--a question traditionally posed by the youngest at the dinner--the recruit was 53-year-old Edy Stumpf, mother of two grown children, who was celebrating Passover with her 80-year-old mother.

“It is pretty neat to be the youngest,” said Stumpf, who read the questions with some hesitation. Later she acknowledged that as a girl she had rebelled and refused to attend the Seder.

“She found her way back,” her mother said.