Israeli Women Make a Clean Sweep of the Holiday

Passover is meant to be an exalted holiday, a spiritual remembrance of the Jews’ release from bondage in Egypt. But for many Jewish women here, the celebration of freedom has become a monthlong enslavement to a ritual housecleaning that leaves them on the verge of collapse at the Seder table on the first night of Pesach.

Jewish law requires that a house be purged of all traces of hametz, or leavening, before Passover begins. Over the centuries, however, the search for wayward bread crumbs has evolved into a frenzied assault on grit and grime, dust balls, pocket lint and anything remotely regarded as schmutz.

This is spring cleaning run amok. Women--and it is almost always women--turn their houses upside down, beating rugs, emptying closets and whitewashing walls. They pull clean dishes from cupboards to boil them, scrape the cracks between floor tiles and even dust spines of books, in case a family member has eaten a cookie while studying sometime during the year.

All the while, mothers battle to keep their vacationing children from snacking in rooms that have just been scrubbed. The house fills with a potent cocktail of cleaning fumes. If the lemon-pine-floral blend of ammonias does not land these women in the hospital, anxiety and exhaustion sometimes do.

“We call it Pesach neurosis,” said Amalia Oren, director of social services at Shaarei Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem.

Women arrive at emergency rooms with asthma attacks and chest pains. Others show up with dark circles around their eyes, sunken cheeks and weak knees.

What do doctors prescribe for the weary? “Rest,” Oren said.

Not likely. At least not before the final inspection for hametz--with a candle and feather--and the Seder, when parents fulfill the commandment to “tell your son” the story of the exodus from Egypt.

Some of Israel’s leading rabbis insist that this mega-cleaning is necessary to comply with Jewish law, and they cheer women on.

“If there is a crumb in the kitchen hiding in the corner, you should do everything to remove it,” former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu lectured women in the Mahane Yehuda neighborhood recently. “If need be, you should take a hammer and chisel and destroy the wall until the crumb comes out.”

His opinion seemed to go beyond even the 16th century Shulhan Aruh, or table of Jewish laws that in pages and pages details: where to clean for Passover; how to carry out the Bedikat-Hametz, or final inspection by candlelight; and what to do in the event a mouse should drag a bit of bread into a home already cleansed.

David Hartman, an Orthodox rabbi and unorthodox Jewish scholar, said many of those laws were appropriate to the 16th century but not to the era of dishwashers and Dust Busters. He considers the mop-till-you-drop syndrome misguided.

“We’ve become Protestants,” Hartman said with a laugh, discussing the Pesach work ethic in an interview in his book-lined study at the Shalom Hartman Institute. “The laws are supposed to be instrumental to larger values, but they become an end that destroys the purpose of the thing. On Pesach, we worship a God who is a liberating God, but often women are so dead there’s no time for symbolic reflection.”

For most Jews, Passover is a holiday of joy, nostalgia and lots of food. It is a time of bringing the generations together for song, storytelling and reading the Haggadah, a narrative of the Jews’ enslavement by the pharaoh in Egypt and the flight to freedom under Moses.

Secular Jews, who normally do not clean their homes more thoroughly for Passover than at other times, also look forward to the holiday and keep many traditions.

They may not read the entire Haggadah, but many at least pose the four questions on how Passover is different from every other night: Why do we eat unleavened bread? Why do we eat bitter herbs? Why do we dip the herbs in salt water? Why do we recline while eating?

By answering these questions about the symbols of Passover, they fulfill their duty to pass on to future generations the story of the liberation of the Jews.

Some tired women, though, admit that by the time of the Seder they are not exactly in rapture.

“I have never fallen asleep during the Seder, but I have had to make a super-human effort to keep my eyes open,” conceded one Orthodox mother of five.

She said she takes a vacation from her office job to clean for Passover as part of the frenzy that begins after Purim and continues for a month.

“I use my week off for a thorough cleaning,” she said. “I take everything out of the rooms, clean, shake, wash, check the pockets, wash the walls, the floor, the windows, doors and closets and pass a brush through the cracks.

“The kids help, both boys and girls,” the woman added. “After the cleaning and washing, I polish. . . . I lock the door as a sign that, when you want to enter to sleep at night, you have to make sure there’s no hametz on you. The kids take off their clothes outside the room and put them on a chair by the door.

“We have one little room which remains the hametz room until the very end. We take turns eating there because we don’t all fit in at the same time. On the night of the hametz check, I thoroughly clean the whole house again. I sweep and wash the floor,” she said.

“In the week before Passover, I work more than 16 hours a day,” she noted. “But once the holiday starts, it’s a real pleasure. The house is clean, everything is done, the food is ready, and I have the holiday to rest. On the whole, I enjoy all this.”

Some wealthier women opt to meet the challenge with a Pesach cleaning service or simply by camping out at a hotel for the week. Preferably at the beach.

Still others seek to fuse the symbolic and spiritual sides of Passover, and some do so successfully.

Ruth Chai, an office manager and mother of five boys, makes the cleaning into a family affair and a kind of rite of spring.

“For me it feels like a rebirth,” Chai said, wiping picture frames as one of her sons put a fresh coat of paint on the living room wall. “We don’t have to do it. I want to do it. The cleaning is symbolic. The house smells fresh, like a holiday. It’s very spiritual.”

She even seemed to be having fun hunting hametz like a miner panning for gold. Chai lifted the sofa cushions to discover some bread crumbs and, wielding her rag, shouted with glee: “Ah-ha, you see!”

Efrat Shvily and Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.