In 2011, my family and I joined 1,000 other Jews, mostly young post-army Israeli backpackers, at the Yak and Yeti Hotel in Kathmandu for what’s described as the largest Pesach Seder in the world. 

Run by the local Chabad, that Seder in Nepal was certainly the most unique we’d ever been to. But if we were hoping for an uplifting, even spiritual, experience, we would be sorely disappointed. Rabbi Chezki Lifshitz essentially speed-read the Haggadah as if it were a greatest hits album. We finished the entire story and were washing for matzah in under 50 minutes – including extended breaks to sing Ma Nishtana and Dayenu. 

Nor was the food any better. No expense seemed spared to import hand-made shmurah matzah and, for some reason, gallons of coleslaw. But when it came to the meat, there were just seven small nuggets of chicken on a plate at the center of our table.

We were nine people.

The evening wasn’t an entire flop. My wife, Jody, won first prize in the pre-Seder raffle – a bungee jump off a 160-meter (525-foot) high suspension bridge. (She gave it to one of the young Israelis.)

Our Passover in Kathmandu has led to a new Seder tradition where I ask everyone assembled to recount their most memorable Pesach experience. This year I opened the question up to friends. 

Here’s some of what they shared.

Debbie Zimelman was in Leningrad in 1988, “to convince Russian Jews to make aliyah.” Like our meal in Kathmandu, Debbie’s was minimalist, consisting of just “beets, potatoes and wine. For an added bonus, I drank the water – and got a parasite. No one told me it wasn’t OK to drink the water in Leningrad!”

Sara Hirschhorn had more food than Debbie, but it was augmented by a crunchy tradition from the Seder leader, a Jew from Gibraltar, who “literally shaved a bit of brick into the charoset,” presumably to accentuate the slave and mortar metaphor. 

That might have been more appetizing compared to what Lynnsie Balk Kantor experienced at a Seder in Rome in 1982 when “instead of a little piece of bone for the shank bone on the Seder plate, they had a part of a leg of some animal – complete with fur!”

Debra Askanase found herself with food but no Haggadah while working in Nicaragua in 1997. “We were three Jews and four non-Jews at an Italian restaurant, trying to remember the words! We did the best we could and literally pointed to imaginary items on a large plate at times.” 

Tal Berlinger was on an exchange program in Germany where she “tried making Seder and explaining it to the other students. After five minutes, the stories sounded so ridiculous, I just served them dinner and sang the songs for myself after they left.”

Rachel Yona Shalev may have had the closest experience to our family’s. In 1992, she was in a Himalayan village. “We created a Seder from what they had, including burning the chapatis to look and taste like matzah.”

Debbi Hirsch Levran shared that her most memorable Seder “was actually the one year I didn’t celebrate. I was an exchange student in France. For the first night of the holiday, our group was on a trip where we slept in a monastery. The evening’s activity was…baking bread!”

Several friends noted that their Seders alone during the Covid-19 lockdowns were their most “unique” Passovers. 

“For my solo Seder, I decided to wear a beautiful embroidered green silk bathrobe,” Ruthi Soudack told me. “How often can you wear a bathrobe to a Seder? I was the best dressed host and the best dressed guest at my Seder!”

Seders are family time – even if that can sometimes conflict with Jewish Law. Leonie Lachmish relates how, at a Seder she attended in 1970, among the guests was a family who had just escaped from Lebanon. 

“The father was a magnificent pianist,” Leonie explains. “He went straight to the piano after the Seder and played the most wonderful music. We weren’t about to tell a man who was celebrating the miracle and relief of his personal freedom that, according to halacha, he shouldn’t be playing the piano on a festival. We literally danced until someone said, ‘It’s time to say the Shema!’” 

For profound Seder experiences in dark times, though, it’s hard to top that of Scott Lenga’s father, Harry, who, along with his two brothers, marked Pesach in the German slave labor camp in Wroclaw, Poland during World War II. 

The Lenga brothers were watchmakers who had fixed the timepieces of some of their captors working in the kitchen. “I asked them to give us a little flour. We mixed it with water and put the dough on the top of our little iron stove to cook three kleine matalach (little matzas),” Lenga writes in the memoir compiled by his son, The Watchmakers: The Story of Brotherhood, Survival, and Hope Amid the Holocaust (to be published in June, preorder at scottlenga.com). 

“We took turns reciting sections by heart, but quietly – in whispers,” Lenga continues. “If the Germans found out what we were doing, they would have killed us.”

When it came time for the second half of the Seder – when participants traditionally sing joyous songs of praise to God – the brothers cut their Seder short. “We weren’t happy enough. Instead, we asked God, ‘Why do you let this happen to us? We were angry at God. But we had made a Seder” – a declaration that for Lenga proclaimed, “We still exist, and we still can do a thing like that. But who knows for how long?”

Kind of puts into perspective those seven little chicken nuggets in Nepal.

I originally shared stories of exotic Seders around the world at The Jerusalem Post.

“Enough. Just enough. Get on the damn planes.” 

That was the unequivocal response from local Facebook pundit Paula Stern, who posted just minutes after news broke about the shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue, north of San Diego. 

The planes Paula is referring to, of course, should be heading to Israel.

“It isn’t about money,” Paula implored her American Jewish readers. “It isn’t about the homes or cars you may have now or may or may not be able to afford at the beginning. It’s about your very lives and those of your children.”

Is Paula right? Have the twin shul attacks in Poway and six months before that in Pittsburgh laid bare the existential danger of living as a Jew outside of Israel in a time of resurgent anti-Semitism? 

On the face of it, the argument – “move to Israel where itâ€s safer” – hardly seems valid. Far more Jews have been murdered by terrorists in our tiny slice of the Middle East than in the Diaspora. 

So, unless you include the Holocaust in your calculations, or you have a crystal ball accurately predicting the time and place of a new wave of international pogroms, how can you claim that Jews are somehow safer today in Israel? 

On the contrary: the existential threat is here, with hundreds of thousands of missiles aimed our way from Lebanon and the potential of nuclear annihilation from Iran always lurking just around the JCPOA corner. 

Of course, thereâ€s more to living with meaning and purpose than staying safe at all costs. But that didnâ€t stop our family from fantasizing about escape one Friday night.

Our daughter, Merav and her husband, Gabe, are no strangers to danger. Merav has written eloquently about her life dodging missiles in Sderot, where she is a student at Sapir College. After a particularly brutal few days earlier this year, the couple sought refuge in Jerusalem. They invited friends to drop by after dinner. 

“If you could live anywhere, where is the safest place?” one person asked. The young people, world-weary before theyâ€d even finished their degrees, began listing off regions and countries.

Europe was out – the jihadists had made sure of that. Post Pittsburgh, so was the U.S.

Southeast Asia had seen enough attacks to cross the region off the register even before the Easter massacres in Sri Lanka.

“New Zealand!” one person said triumphantly. “We traveled there after the army. Itâ€s a paradise. The police donâ€t even carry weapons.”

Then Christchurch happened. 

Although that shooter targeted Muslims, the ideology to which he subscribes makes clear that, thereâ€s no love lost between white nationalists and the Jews either. 

The friends around our dining room table became quiet. In a world where no place is safe, the question becomes less about outright prevention than of who do you want around you when tragedy strikes?

Are you more comfortable if the first responders are Israeli? Does it give you solace to know that some of your fellow citizens will be armed and well-trained to take down a shooter (while in a country that maintains strict gun control laws)? Are you reassured that there is a Jewish army to protect you (even if that force sometimes falls afoul of its own high moral standards)?

Moreover, does the shared trauma and experience of living in a “dangerous neighborhood” actually better prepare Israelis to deal with the violence that will inevitably come, no matter where in the world we may be?

That seemed to be one of the messages from the San Diego shooting. Among those in attendance at the Chabad of Poway synagogue were members of a family who had moved to California from Sderot. (That irony has not been lost on anyone: “We left Sderot because of the rocket fire,” the father of eight-year-old Noya Dahan, who was wounded in the attack, told Israeli radio. “We left fire for fire.”)

Almog Peretz, Noyaâ€s uncle who was also injured, commented to Israelâ€s Channel 12 that, “this is sad,” but given that heâ€d lived not far from the Gaza border, “we know a bit about running from Qassam rockets.” 

Peretz credited his experience rushing to bomb shelters for honing his instincts, adding that he “took a little girl who was our neighbor and three nieces of mine and ran.” He hid the children in a building out back, then returned to rescue another family member who was stuck in the bathroom. 

Israeli Shimon Abitbol, who was visiting Poway for a family simcha, said “without thinking twice I lay down on my grandson and protected him.” Abitbol is a deputy director for the Magen David Adom ambulance service and was the organizationâ€s station chief in Kiryat Shmona during the Second Lebanon War.

So, is Paula right – but for the wrong reasons? “Get on the damn planes” – not necessarily for your physical safety but to know youâ€ll be in good hands when needed?

I donâ€t share Paulaâ€s reproach that Diaspora Jewish tragedies like Pittsburgh and Poway should necessarily compel Jews to emigrate en masse. Aliyah is a nuanced and highly personal decision that isnâ€t right for everyone. Ideally, it shouldnâ€t be made as a defensive reaction to horrific events but as a carefully considered choice coming from a proactive desire to belong to a people and a place. 

Still, if current events contribute to such reasoning, as we celebrate 71 years of independence, those of us in Israel will be more than happy to welcome you.

I first commented on Pittsburgh and Poway at The Jerusalem Post.