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.

Our family desperately wanted to spend Pesach together. But like many Jews around the world, COVID-19 was making that difficult.

When the new regulations regarding sheltering-in-place were taking hold in Israel, we had four people living at home: my wife Jody and me, 22-year-old music student Aviv who is now studying online, and our oldest son, 28-year-old Amir, who had moved back home to save money while building a startup. Our daughter Merav and her husband Gabe have their own apartment in Sderot.

As long as the four of us stayed in our lockdown, not leaving the house except to shop or walk the dog, we should have been fine. We didnâ€t know if Merav and Gabe would be able to make it home for Seder – trying to plan anything even a day in advance these days is an exercise in dashed expectations – but we figured we could read the Haggadah together on Zoom. 

The problem was that Amir has a girlfriend, Tal, and she has her own apartment – not far from ours in Jerusalem but definitely more than a 100-meter walk.

The real issue was not the distance but rather our understanding that mixing households is about the worst thing to do if you want to keep this virus at bay. Every additional person you meet means potential exposure to everyone theyâ€ve been in contact with. 

In Talâ€s case, that meant her family (in another city, so all the people from that town who her parents and siblings might have been exposed to) and Talâ€s roommate (and all the people sheâ€s been exposed to).

This was not just a theoretical exercise in how best to flatten the curve. In my case, thereâ€s real danger: Iâ€m in several of the most at-risk categories, which includes those who are over a certain age, have a pre-existing medical condition or are immunocompromised. 

My cancer is no longer in remission and past treatments have left my white blood count so depressed that if I came down with COVID-19 – at least at this early point when we still know little about how to treat the disease – I might not make it. 

Indeed, in the U.K., follicular lymphoma patients like me have been getting text messages from the National Health Service telling them to plan for a self-isolation period of up to 12 weeks. While that might not be what Israelâ€s Ministry of Health ultimately recommends, Iâ€ve been taking it seriously. I havenâ€t been out of the house for weeks and Iâ€m ready to keep that going for as long as necessary.

So, when it came to being together for Seder, no one wanted to be responsible for getting me sick. 

Clearly, given the risks, we couldnâ€t invite Tal to stay at our house, and Amir couldnâ€t go back and forth between their two apartments, especially since we couldnâ€t restrict where Talâ€s roommate might go, even if that was just to buy groceries.

That put Amir in a dreadful dilemma. He had to choose between his girlfriend and his father, both of whom he loves.

The safest thing for him to have done would be to stay at home and not see Tal – at least until Seder. I love my son but Iâ€m also quite fond of Tal and I didnâ€t want to stand in the way of their budding relationship.

The next option would have been for Amir to move in with Tal but not to come home. I would have missed him terribly, but I would understand.

Could there be a third, more out-of-the-box option? 

“What if Tal and I strictly self-quarantined ourselves for the two weeks prior to Pesach?” Amir proposed. “Weâ€d do our shopping in advance and not leave the apartment.”

The idea made a certain epidemiological sense: if they showed no signs of infection in that fortnight, which seems to be the average incubation period for COVID-19, they should be OK to come home for Seder.

But where could they self-quarantine? They couldnâ€t go to Talâ€s because her roommate presented an uncontrollable vector. They could try to rent one of the many vacant holiday apartments in Jerusalem, but that would be expensive.

What about Sderot? Merav and Gabe live in a student village attached to Sapir College. With many students now at home with their parents, there were plenty of empty apartments. Could they do their self-quarantine there? 

The irony was not lost on any of us: in order to keep me safe from coronavirus, two of my children and their partners would be living under another threat, that of missiles from Gaza.

To sweeten the pot, Merav and Gabe also volunteered to go into their own two-week self-quarantine.

Merav found a friend willing to rent out her place to Amir and Tal for a low rate. 

Before Amir left, he said solemnly, “You know that if thereâ€s a complete lockdown in place by then and the police have checkpoints at the entrances to cities, we might not be allowed to come home for Seder at all.”

“I know,” I replied. “But itâ€s the only compromise that makes any sense in this crazy time.”

The deadline for this column was several days before Pesach, so I canâ€t report how the story ends, whether the kids were able to make it for Seder or whether we were alone together on Zoom. 

But I will never forget the incredible self-sacrifice my children made to keep me safe and to give our family the best chance to be together for the holiday.

I first wrote about our Pesach calculations for The Jerusalem Post.