Interfaith Families Blend Easter, Passover Rituals

Like many interfaith couples, Valerie and Myron Orleans didn’t give much thought to their unmatched Lutheran and Jewish backgrounds when they married. They were in love; they figured things would work out.

It wasn’t until later, with each holiday, with each family gathering, with the birth of each child, that the questions came.

“At first, his family wondered if I would convert” to Judaism, recalled Valerie, now 16 years into her marriage. “They wanted to know how the children would be raised. And we didn’t know. We hadn’t figured it out yet.”

This weekend, as the important holy days of Passover and Easter coincide, couples such as the Orleanses, of Anaheim Hills, find themselves again discussing how to blend their beliefs and pass on meaningful traditions to their children.

Most Jewish homes observe Passover with a ritual Seder meal on the first night, which this year is tonight. At the same time, many Catholics and Protestants will attend noontime or evening Good Friday services that reflect on the crucifixion of Jesus. On Sunday, the biggest crowds of the year will pack churches.

For religious believers, Passover and Easter are central to each faith. The holidays commemorate, respectively, God’s rescue of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt and Jesus’ resurrection. Their theological significance is, in both cases, greater than those of either Hanukkah or Christmas.

Because of that, logic would seem to suggest that tensions would be at a peak during the two springtime holidays for families in which one spouse is Jewish and the other is Christian.

That does not seem to be the case, however, according to clergy, academic students of religion and some of the families themselves.

The reasons why reflect several of the major changes in how Americans approach religion and its rituals.

The fact that the central celebration of Passover--the Seder--is focused on the home, not the synagogue, makes that holiday more easily fit the country’s do-it-yourself mode of spiritual pursuits.

Melding Traditions Fits Broad Trend

Families who combine traditions from both religions fit into a broader contemporary trend. Donald Miller, a sociologist of religion at USC, recently observed that a growing number of faithful see no problems with observing practices of different religions in the same time frame. Still others, he said, stay within a particular faith but are selective in what they believe and fashion their own practices.

“If you say there’s only one right way, I think that’s what causes a lot of problems,” said Brian Brown of Seal Beach, who with his wife, Rosie, is raising their 3-year-old son with both Jewish and Catholic traditions. “What we’re doing helps develop tolerance. When the two people you love most have different beliefs, your mother and father, then maybe you think it’s OK.”

For now, that means young Will Brown attends a Jewish preschool, where he played a slave in the annual Passover pageant, and still learns about the meaning of Easter from his mother and her deeply religious parents.

On Thursday, in what is becoming a tradition, he colored Easter eggs with his Jewish father in preparation for a Sunday egg hunt with his Catholic mother’s family. “It is just getting to the point where my husband and I are talking about the confusion of it,” said Rosie Brown, who is expecting a second child in October.

Like her husband, she rarely attends religious services. Although she can’t bring herself to convert to the Jewish faith, she is wondering whether the family should soon choose a single religion for their son--and expects it would probably be Judaism.

“One day he’s going to come home from school and ask me why we’re not celebrating Purim,” she said, “and I don’t even know what Purim is.”

Kim Hurwitz of Encino, a Christian married to a secular Jewish husband, said she considers herself “very religious” and yet has no qualms about participating in rituals of her husband’s faith.

She said friends in her age group--in their 30s--do not believe “that celebrating someone else’s religion takes away from your own.”

That sort of blending is easier because the two holidays have common threads, such as the renewal of spring or the passage through danger into safety.

“All the symbols in Passover--the egg, the lamb, the matzo and wine--have just been reinterpreted to fit in with the story of Passion Week,” said Rabbi Allen Krause of Temple Beth El in Aliso Viejo. “The motif underlying both holidays is springtime, when you get rid of the old and bring in the new. It’s a celebration of the renewal of life.”

Finally, the potential for conflict may be reduced, in part, because Easter’s secular symbols--chocolate rabbits and colored eggs notwithstanding--don’t have the market clout of their Christmas cousins.

“The Easter Bunny never made it to the status of Santa Claus,” said religious studies professor Patrick Nichelson of Cal State Northridge.

“Easter doesn’t overwhelm society--it just sort of comes and goes with very little commercialism,” said Krause.

Or, as Hurwitz put it, the springtime holidays can be enjoyed “without getting your credit cards maxed out.”

In the case of the Orleans family, enjoyment of the holidays will mean a Seder tonight and Easter dinner on Sunday. Their son, 15, and daughter, 11, are being exposed to both faiths, Valerie Orleans said, with the idea that they can choose later.

“In some ways it’s nice, because they realize that Daddy believes these things and Mommy believes these other things, but they’re both respectful of each others’ traditions,” she said.

“Sometimes, if you don’t give children a religion, they end up believing in nothing. So we’ve sort of created our own traditions. After a while, you learn to adapt and compromise.”

Her sister, Shelly Schatzen, also grew up Lutheran and married a Jewish man. But the Schatzens, of Irvine, followed a different path.

“Even though I haven’t officially converted, we go to temple as a family,” said the mother of four. “We have a Seder and talk about Passover. My kids do get Easter eggs. They do the fun secular stuff. But at Seder, we don’t talk about Jesus at all.”

The family will spend Easter on the ski slopes at Mammoth this year, distracting Schatzen from any qualms she may have about missing a Christian celebration, she said.

Some Churches Now Hold Seders

Pam and Elliot Maggin of Van Nuys have been able to handle the springtime holidays by enjoying a little of each tradition.

When the couple lived in New Hampshire in the 1980s, they went to mountaintop Easter sunrise services together and celebrated Easter with her family, said Elliot. He is Jewish but had no nearby synagogue to join there.

“We actually kind of switched when we came out to Los Angeles,” said Pam, a schoolteacher with a Protestant background. Elliott, a writer, wanted to join a temple “and we decided it would be better for our kids to go to one place together,” she said.

But it is not only mixed-faith families that are experimenting with blending the two celebrations. Some churches hold Seders before Easter, as St. John Eudes Catholic Church in Chatsworth did for the second year Wednesday night.

“We do it to deepen our understanding of the roots of the Mass,” said Father Robert McNamara, the pastor. The Haggada--a book containing the Exodus narrative and the Seder ritual--used at the church was one approved by a rabbi-priest committee from the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago.

Some religious authorities hold that Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, commemorated at many churches the night before Good Friday, was a Seder. Scholarly opinion is divided on that question, in part because the Gospel accounts are not unanimous.

Nevertheless, the eating of unleavened bread and drinking of wine at both meals have led some clergy to marvel at two similar, religiously significant rites of the two faiths.

Episcopal priest Gregory H. Frost, who is rector of a parish in Granada Hills that shares its building with a Reform Jewish congregation, recalled the experience on a Thursday night two years ago of a simultaneous Seder attended by 100 to 150 Jews in the parish hall and a Lord’s Supper service attended by about 60 Christians in the sanctuary.

“You could stand in the courtyard between the two services and through the glass doors and windows you could see the Hebrew Bible on one side and the New Testament on the other,” he said.