Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan – The Herald Sun
Instead of listening to someone talking about how to make matzah on Monday, students at Lerner Jewish Community Day School experienced it. They mixed the water and flour, the kneaded it, they rolled it with a pin. They punched holes it in and took it over to the outside fire for the 25 seconds it takes to bake. The whole process? Eighteen minutes. Has to be, to make sure the bread doesn’t rise.
Matzah is part of the seder, the meal of Passover, the commemoration of the deliverance of ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Matzah represents the quickness with which the Jewish people had to leave — no time for the bread to rise — to escape the Egyptian pharaoh. Rabbi Zalman Bluming of the Chabad of Chapel Hill and Durham led Lerner students through the process.
First they watched a video to see how it’s done. Bluming asked a group of fourth- and fifth-graders why they bake the matzah on Passover. A girl answered that it represents them leaving in haste. Bluming turned it into another lesson beyond Passover, too.
“We don’t put off a good Jewish deed, we rush, we do it as fast as we can,” he told the children.
Matzah is a food of faith, Bluming said. It might not be new, he said, but it is authentic. Students donned paper hats that said “I baked my own matzah at the Model Matzah Bakery” and headed outside, where a fire pit would bake their matzahs at 1,000 degrees.
The only way to impart education is to raise curiosity, Bluming said. “So much of our objective is they should be curious of traditions, of history. Passover is about the transition of our faith. We give youth exciting, vibrant ways to incorporate our Jewish identity.”
There is no Jewish word for history, he said, but rather memory. Making their own matzah makes it personal for the kids, Bluming said. “History means someone else’s story. Memory is much more current, more alive. Being involved in the practice of faith becomes my story, not his story,” he said.
Fifth-grader Anna James made her own matzah for the first time in third grade, when Bluming last brought the Model Matzah Bakery to the school.
“It’s really fun. I got to eat it and experience what it’s like and get the knowledge of how you make it,” Anna said. She’ll observe the Passover seder meal next week at home with friends and family. She is the youngest, so she will sing the Four Questions that leads to the storytelling of Exodus. She sings it every year and knows most of the questions by heart.
Fifth-grader Isaiah Kahn will observe the first night of Passover at his grandparents’ house. Itai Rivkin-Fish and Daniel Wohl both have their Hebrew birthdays during Passover. Itai said that any cake will have to be made with unleavened bread. They discussed the items on a seder plate, as each one has special meaning.
There is parsley dipped in salt to represent tears of the Jewish people; bitter herbs to represent harshness of enslavement; bone to represent the sacrificial lamb; charoset to represent mortar used by Hebrew slaves to build; a hardboiled egg to represent the holiday offering; and matzah.
Itai said that observing Passover, and learning how to make his own matzah, feels very important because Passover is a holy thing.
“It feels good to be Jewish and celebrate it,” he said.
The weeklong commemoration of Passover begins at sundown Monday.
Zalman zayer shein,
Israel links 2209
We are all so proud of you guys!
from your brother and co. from the NW
you are the best!