Living in suburban Washington, D.C, the mother of two children, and the wife of a physician, Allison Green still has close ties to Prairie Village, not the least of which are her parents, Barbara and Bob Frager, who still live in her childhood home.
Passover has traditionally been a homecoming with two Seders that have as many as 40 guests, including immediate family, other relatives, and guests. That didn’t happen last year because of the pandemic.
But the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine means that Green will not again have to miss this cherished time with family, though it will happen on a smaller scale. She and her family flew into Kansas City this week for Seders that will only include about a dozen members of the immediate family, including her brother, who lives in Leawood with his wife and their three children. (They have a sister in New Hampshire who is not making it in.)
Through a variety of avenues, everyone will have received COVID vaccinations, except the youngest nephew, who is 15.
Green’s 24-year-old daughter, Yael, and her 21-year-old son, Noah, received vaccines as residents of Israel.
Green works with her dermatologist husband, Larry, so they both received shots as healthcare workers. Her brother, Scott, received his vaccination through his job as a Leawood police officer.
“We feel very lucky, very blessed, that all of us are vaccinated, and that we can go home and kind of have a normal Passover and be with our family,” she said. “It just feels good.”
They were even lucky last year to have Yael and Noah with them in Maryland; the two kids made it out of Israel on one of the last flights before travel shut down. The seder was just the four of them, but they did have a Zoom gathering with a lot of participants. “It was very lonely, very cold,” Green said.
“I had to clean and buy all new stuff because we had always done Passover in Kansas City,” she said.
This year, her son will see his grandparents for the first time since he left for college in Israel in October 2019.
But even though the traditional Seders are out once again this year, with COVID precautions still very much in order, Green and her family have devised a plan where all of the smaller gatherings will still have all the great food.
Everyone is going to make their speciality — for Green it is the chopped liver — and they will deliver it to the different households. Her mother makes sweet and sour cabbage.
“Everybody wants a little bit of the tradition even though we will not be together,” Green said.
Outside Kansas City
Green and her family are part of a larger trend happening nationally among Jewish families as we prepare for pandemic Passover 2.0.
One example is the Darvick family, which did Jewish holidays by videoconference long before a pandemic forced them.
“We call it Skypanukkah,” Elliot Darvick told The New York Times in December 2011, when the family was featured in an article about celebrating Hanukkah over Skype. So when Zoom Seders suddenly became standard last year, the Darvicks were prepared.
But this Passover, the Darvicks will be together again.
By the time the holiday begins, both Debra Darvick, 64, and her husband, Martin, 73, will have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, as will one of their children. Those vaccinations are making the couple feel comfortable getting together with their kids and grandkids from Chicago and New York at their home in Birmingham, Michigan.
“We’ve Zoomed with Olivia a lot. I haven’t felt totally bereft,” Debra Darvick said of her oldest granddaughter, whom the Darvicks had hoped to visit every month or so but mostly saw over Zoom. “But I know what we’ve missed.”
While Purim 2020 may have been the first Jewish holiday to be altered by the then-novel coronavirus, Passover was likely the one in which the most North American Jews felt the impact. As the most widely observed Jewish holiday ritual in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 study of American Jewry, Passover Seders mark a moment where large family get-togethers double as an opportunity to pass down traditions from one generation to the next.
For many households last year, those gatherings were replaced by small Seders among members of the same households or conducted over Zoom.
But this year, with some 54 million Americans having received at least a first dose of the vaccine as of March 4 and with the rate of vaccinations ramping up to approximately 2 million doses a day, some families are considering ways to celebrate in person.
Many experts have said those who are vaccinated can likely gather in small groups with others who have taken the COVID shot without taking on major risk.
“Interactions of people who are fully vaccinated with other people who are fully vaccinated (or immune due to previous infection) likely come with a very low risk for everybody involved,” Florian Krammer, a vaccinologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, wrote in a recent Twitter thread about how vaccinated people should think about changing their behaviors.
Different approaches
But in the absence of clear guidelines on how to balance the risks with the benefits of gathering, many have come up with their own plans to gather as safely as possible. For some families, those plans include a strict schedule of quarantining and testing before gathering. For others, vaccinations or recent COVID infections and positive antibody tests mean they feel safe getting together.
For Lesley Herrmann, 74, who lives in Manhattan with her husband, this year’s Seder may include as many as 10 people. The Herrmanns have already been vaccinated, as have many of their relatives with whom they normally share a Seder. Others in her family who may attend have recovered from COVID and still have antibodies.
For Herrmann, who said Passover is her favorite holiday, this year will still be smaller than the usual 15-20 person Seder she usually hosts. But it will be a major improvement over last year, when she and her husband stayed home and did the Seder by themselves with family joining over Zoom.
“We made haroset and chicken soup, but it was sad,” Lesley Herrmann said. “I’m thinking this year will be a lot more cheerful.”
For Joel and Fran Grossman, 66 and 70, Passover this year marks a few significant milestones.
To see their son for the first time since the pandemic started and their daughter for the first time since last summer, the couple will fly from Los Angeles to New York and spend the Seders with their children in Brooklyn. The couple wouldn’t have considered making the trip before receiving the second dose of the coronavirus vaccine last month and are still taking precautions — like buying upgraded seats to ensure adequate distancing and holding the Seders outdoors.
They say it’s worth it for the opportunity to see their children again after such a long separation.
“Every single mundane task I have to do, maybe normally I’d say what a pain in the butt,” Fran Grossman said. “Now I’m saying I’m the luckiest person to be able to afford a safe ticket, to be able to have been vaccinated.”
She added: “I’m feeling such gratitude for being able to be in the place and time to be able to do this.”
Spreadsheets
For Adina Avery-Grossman, 59, of Teaneck, New Jersey, planning the Seders is usually a multiweek project replete with spreadsheets to manage her menus and grocery lists. This year, a vestige of those huge spreadsheets lives on in the color-coded calendar she’s prepared to keep track of the quarantine and testing schedule her family will undergo to assemble this year.
“We had a meeting and we went over this, and first we called the doctor,” Avery-Grossman said of her plan.
The plan requires the guests to limit their activity starting about two weeks before Passover, be tested about a week before the Seder and then stay home while awaiting test results until arriving at the Seder. Adding to Avery-Grossman’s peace of mind is that some of her Seder participants will already be vaccinated.
“We told everybody, if it’s not really conducive to you, we’ll pick it up next year,” she said, noting that the plan requires strict adherence to the rules. “But everyone wanted to be together.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency contributed to this report
