VA’s Ban on Seder Wine Has Rabbi Seeing Red

For 34 years, the part-time Jewish chaplain at the Veterans Administration medical facility had served small amounts of wine at an annual Passover Seder for patients.

A week before this year’s ritual meal, Rabbi Benjamin J. Elsant was handed a terse memo: “Administration wishes that no wine be served at the Passover meal.”

Normally, the Passover dinner calls for drinking four glasses of wine, but Elsant said that he limited the wine for each person to three-quarters of an ounce in plastic medicine cups.

“I’ve given wine to thousands of people in 34 years with not the least adverse effect as far as I know,” protested Elsant. “If a patient had to abstain from all alcohol, he didn’t get the wine.”

A spokeswoman for the VA Southern California System of Clinics, which took over the former hospital last year, said the new administration decided to halt distribution of wine to patients, staff and guests in what officials regard as a “clinically uncontrolled environment” on government property.

“We service some substance abuse patients,” said Public Affairs Officer Kalautie JangDhari, adding that the decision was taken after consultation with the chief physician of the Sepulveda Outpatient Clinic and the chaplain’s office in Veterans Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C.

She said that Father Patrick O’Hagan, the clinic’s Catholic chaplain, is provided sacramental wine for Communion but that no wine is served to worshipers. He drinks the wine himself after the conclusion of the rites, JangDhari said.

State prisons for many years have prohibited inmates from drinking wine at religious services, said Rabbi Gilbert Kollin of Pasadena, who directs the chaplaincy service of the Southern California Board of Rabbis.

Noting that Elsant is an Orthodox rabbi, Kollin said some Orthodox rabbis have declared that grape juice may be substituted for wine at Seders.

Elsant said he was upset by “that cold, cruel memo” handed him near the end of March without consulting him beforehand. About 100 people attended his “model Seder” on April 2, a scaled-down Passover meal of the kind often held before the weeklong holiday, which this year starts tonight.

“No wine for the Jews!” wrote Elsant in a lament he titled, “The Empty Cup,” and printed along with the memo sent via the Catholic chaplain. “The wine of the Sanctification cannot be here. The prayers over the wine cannot be said.”

Elsant also was disturbed by the last line in a “fact sheet” sent to to The Times by the VA Southern California System of Clinics, which described Elsant as a fee-basis chaplain who works three hours weekly “and has a contentious past relationship with his employer,” referring to the Sepulveda clinic.

“That is completely unfair, unwarranted and false,” Elsant said. “I’ve had beautiful relationships in the past, and now they are glad to harass me.”

* BALANCING ACT

For interfaith couples, Easter and Passover is a time for balancing religious beliefs. A1