New Passover Seder Resource

My nuclear family is going to my mother-in-law this year for Passover, and we are responsible for the child-friendly content of the second night seder. Even though both of us have worked in Jewish education in different capacities, we’ve never been in charge of leading a seder. We’ve always been participants at family seders that older family members led. This year we’re getting trained on doing it ourselves. I don’t think we’re going to be doing it alone, though, since my mother-in-law was a kindergarten teacher for many years and is sure to have a lot to say.

Yesterday my husband went to the Jewish bookstore to get copies of some of the books that I found for the Additional Resources page for the Guide to Passover for Interfaith Families. Today my mom sent me a great resource: the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance published a booklet of activities for children and adults to enhance the Passover seder.

I have used JOFA’s materials in the past, when I was a bat mitzvah tutor for a girl who went to Orthodox day school–we used their booklet on Orthodox bat mitzvah options. I was impressed by the level of knowledge that JOFA educators thought a girl could achieve. (One girl in the booklet learned a chapter of Talmud and then had a traditional siyum, or completion party, as her bat mitzvah celebration. Wow.) Still, I wasn’t expecting JOFA to put out Passover resources that would be so useful for people in interfaith families. (I was also kind of surprised to get something from my mom from an organization with “feminist” in its name, since she usually prefaces the word “feminist” with the word “farbrenteh”– Yiddish for “burning”–but my mom is also a very experienced Jewish educator, and you can count on her to know good materials when she sees them.) It fits with my sense that we are all one big Jewish community and that there is continuity between secular Jews and halachic Jews, Orthodox and Reform, inmarried and intermarried, feminist and … not so invested in feminism. You know that if all of our families were leaving Egypt, we would have been redeemed, together.

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