Passover with a 1,000 Israelis (and one hell of an annoying American kid who happened to sit next to us)

A few weeks ago I sent an email to both Chabad Bariloche and Chabad Mendoza asking what their Chabad Houses were doing for Passover (Pesach in Hebrew).  For those who don´t know what Chabad is you can read about them on their wikipedia site or main webpage.  However in a quick brief for the purpose of this story, they are a strand of Orthodox Judaism which does a large amount of outreach work around the world, including providing different services for Jews who are traveling and away from their usual community.  The two responses I received were basically around the lines of this.  Bariloche said this will be a large seder as we are expecting between 700-1,000 people (99% of them being Israeli).  Mendoza said this is a small community seder around 50 persons (most Jews that live in Mendoza work in the wine industry at kosher vineyards).  So as we could have made it to either location we chose to go the route of most of the Israeli travelers we met and signup for the seder in Bariloche.

The day we returned from camping in Nahuel Huapi National Park (which was the  day before the first seder) I headed down to the Chabad House in town (which was conveniantly near the main street and also hard to miss as they had a large menorah in the front yard).  As I waited in line to signup and pay for the seder with a bunch of other Israelis all around the house people (a lot of Israeli volunteers, with Chabadnikim from Bariloche, Buenos Aires, and Israel supervising) were cutting a preparing veggies.  Literally every corner of this house (which was not that large) was covered in large plastic buckets full of veggies (some already mixed for salads, others still needing to be cut, and some that just hadn´t been touched yet).  After I paid and got a small lecture about the security procedure for the next night, I headed back to our hostel pretty curious about how a seder of this size would run (besides many Jewish sites around the world normally have security, in Argentina things have been pretty tight since the Israeli Embassy in Argentina was bombed in 1992 and the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires was bombed in 1994. Additionally because one of the sites of the mass terror attack in Mumbai in 1998 was a Chabad House, Chabad has brought in additional security during large events like a Pesach Seder).

The next night around 6:30pm we went searching for the location of the seder.  We found the location pretty easily (it was in Bariloche´s Sports Arena) mainly because of the large crowd of Israelis smoking outside and the street was also blocked off with police guards.  We went through the security check, which even though looked like a standard ELAL security check was actually much less intimidating and they only asked a like two questions and they looked at your passport.  So we headed inside and immediatly were shocked by the size.  We constantly heard for the past few weeks anytime we saw Israelis that it was going to be around 1,000 people but it is just pretty funny to actually finally see it.  The entire seder was setup on the basketball court with a small leveled stage in the middle for the rabbi to lead the seder and 20 or so long tables which could each fit 40+ people.  We apologize for no pictures of the event, we considered bringing a camera but weren´t sure if they were going to allow it through security and also because it is a Yom Tov we didn´t think we were going to be able to take pictures anyway.

Picture I found online of the Seder in Bariloche last year at the same place (it was setup a little different, but you get the idea)

We ran in to an Israeli couple we had met in El Chatén a few week earlier and sat next to them for the seder.  Additionally, Emily thought she was going to be the only American at the seder, but by random luck another American kid from Miami/New York sat next to us.  The kid was pretty annoying in that New York Jewish type of way.  The hagadot were in Hebrew and Spanish only, and the entire seder was in Hebrew (as 99% of the participants were Israeli).  It was kind of funny to see though, that there weren´t only Israeli post-army travelers at the seder many people had their parents and younger siblings actually fly in to Argentina for passover (in Israeli schools kids get off a week or so for Passover, it is kind of like their Spring Break, so many Israelis actually leave Israel and travel during Passover which is pretty ironic when at the end of the Passover Seder you say, ¨Next Year in Jerusalem¨).

Overall, the seder was for sure an experience.  The rabbi at Chabad Bariloche probably won´t have a voice for the next month, about a quarter of the way into the seder he needed an Israeli to begin shouting what he was saying (additionally trying to get several hundred Israelis to all be quiet at the same time is a pretty hard task that I have only seen certain NCOs in the IDF be able to do).  A large problem during the seder was they had very little serving staff so anytime food needed to be passed out it took 30 minutes or more.  Additionally, some one was not thinking and all the wine had corks in the and nobody had cork screws (the wine was all Argentinian Kosher for Passover Wine from Mendoza).  However, in the end of the day people started passing around batteries or other objects that would push the cork down into the bottle (real classy, I know).  The seder finally finished around midnight or so, with only about 30% of the original group still present.  The remainer did the traditional Passover songs: Echad Mi Yodeh? (Who Knows One?), Chad Gadya (that´s right there is a wiki site for Echad Ni Yodeh and Chad Gadya), etc.  Don´t worry the seder was complete with both regular matzah and shmor matzah, however no matzah ball soup or gefilta fish.