In the days leading up to Passover, I find myself thinking of a message I heard within the words of a young Druze soldier.
Shuki lives in a mountaintop home in the village of Beit Jann, overlooking the Upper Galilee. I first met Shuki and his family in November 2023. He’d suffered a serious head wound and was hospitalized in intensive care at Hadassah-University Medical Center, in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem. His IDF unit had discovered another tunnel in the sands of Gaza. The booby-trapped blast door exploded as Shuki approached. Fortunately, seconds before the detonation, Shuki had put on his protective glasses. They saved his eyes.
Shuki’s hospital room was always full of visitors from Beit Jann – men and women in black cotton garb, the men with tarbooshes wrapped with a white turban cloth (called a lafa – like the bread), the women with delicate white scarves draped over head and shoulders. Patriots all.
Beit Jann is known for its outstanding school system, and Shuki’s mother is a school principal. She and I bonded. I promised her that the first Hadassah mission from the US that could go to the North would visit.
Although solidarity missions from the US and Europe visited Israel’s beleaguered South; the North was off limits. Finally, it became possible to tour Israel’s northern border in March. Shuki’s mother said of course we should come. And so, the adept bus driver navigated the steep byways up Mount Meron.
Visiting Beit Jann
I had been in Beit Jann more than 40 years ago to interview the family of abducted (and murdered) soldier Samir Assad. This time, the driver paused in front of a tall stone monument with the names of fallen IDF soldiers from Beit Jann, Assad among them. As of November 2023, Beit Jann had the highest percentage of IDF soldiers fallen in battle of any community in Israel, with a total then of 64. At least three more Beit Jann soldiers out of 12 Druze soldiers have given their lives for Israel since then.
Shuki met our bus, looking so whole and handsome, I could hardly recognize him. We finished the climb to the large house with an overview of the Galilee at nearly sunset. Beit Jann sits 940 meters above sea level. You can’t get much higher than that in Israel or have a better view,
Inside, a kosher feast had been prepared for the American Hadassah women. “We want to welcome you and thank you,” Shuki’s mother said in Hebrew. “Your hospital saved our son.”
With everyone sitting in the living room, Shuki stood and told his story, adding personal details he hadn’t shared in Jerusalem, where he had been visited by former American ambassador Jack Lew.
Here’s what struck me: Before Shuki reported to his unit after Oct. 7, he made a quiet tour of his home. He went from bedrooms to kitchen, to living room, to dining room, to pause, thank and say goodbye to each part of the home where he’d grown up. Only when he’d expressed appreciation to his home did he say goodbye to family and friends. Of course he wanted to survive the battles ahead, but he couldn’t be sure.
His mother said she steeled herself for the idea that he might be wounded or even killed. She prayed that the worst wouldn’t happen – that he wouldn’t be captured by Hamas.
THOSE WORDS kept coming back to me as I got ready for Passover – the mother’s prayer and Shuki’s appreciation of his home, as well as his loved ones. That’s because Passover requires an intense encounter with each room of one’s home. It goes beyond spring cleaning. The frequently proclaimed statement that “dirt isn’t hametz – the commandment is to get rid of all foods that contain or have come in contact with leavened grain” is, of course, correct, but the reckoning with the accumulation of unnecessary objects and neglected projects amid the compulsory search for prohibited food is intense. I have heard people say that you don’t really know your home until you’ve made Passover in it at least once.
I’m a grandmother who no longer has to scrape Play-Dough out of Lego, so the physical work is less difficult than it once was. Nonetheless, there’s no holiday like Passover to take you down memory lane. Some of those impossible-to-throw-out knickknacks or even disabled Barbie dolls bring back a flood of memories.
Jews, mostly women I think, have been doing this forever.
I think of Passovers past. I have a fuzzy image of my maternal grandmother, Esther, standing on aching legs cooking borscht in her long, narrow kitchen in New London, Connecticut. Grandpa Moshe was washing sorrel and scallions for schav in an outdoor sink. That’s as far back in my family as I can go. I wonder how my grandparents prepared for Passover in their hometowns of Novgorod or Svisloch, both today in Belarus, but Poland back then. Did they change the straw inside their mattresses for Passover as I’ve read was a common practice? Was their matzah a luxury item, rationed six to a family by the local baker? When they prepared for Passover, did they think back to the rooms they’d forever left behind, escaping pogroms for the unknown?
How pleased they would be to know of us living in Israel.
Grandpa Moshe sat at the head of the long family table and conducted the Seder in Yiddish-accented Hebrew. We kids couldn’t follow. So why, if I was indifferent, did I insist, for so many of my adult years, on using his tune for the Seder piyut of “Had Gadya” before eventually yielding to the more familiar Israeli ones our children preferred?
When the Seders moved to our home in Connecticut, all the long Haggadah passages were recited in English. We went around the table, taking turns reading. My sister Charlotte and I hoped we wouldn’t get the embarrassing passage with the word “bosom” when it was our turn to read aloud.
And then, it was my last Passover in my childhood home in Connecticut. Like always, the boxes of dishes and pots were carried up from the cellar. My favorite white pearl hobnailed dishes for dairy came out of newspapers, one by one. By now, I was already living in Israel and had imbibed the zealousness of Israeli Passover cleaning, which I imposed on my mother. I have a strange memory of clipping off the “Do not remove under penalty of law” tag on an upholstered couch pillow which my cleaning had damaged.
Thankfully, Shuki is home, reunited with his home and family. I want to thank him, not only for his devoted military service but also for inspiring me to take these moments of appreciation, room by room, for having a home, for living in Israel, and for taking the time not just to hunt for crumbs but to gather fragments of precious memories.
Chag sameach.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.
