Celebrating Passover in Siberia and Other Memories

Image supplied by the author.

With the rapidly approaching Passover holiday, I am remembering things about my early years. World War ll had just begun and we were living in Siberia as “enemies of the people.”

In the winter, young children were not allowed outdoors. The snow was too deep. For entertainment, we played “school.” That meant we made notebooks out of packing paper. We cut up the paper, sewed it together into a notebook and lined it. When the notebook got filled up, we’d erase everything and start all over. There were three of us in our log cabin: me, an older girl and her younger brother.

My mother also taught me to sew and mend socks. We made dolls and doll clothes. We told stories and had cockroach hunts. No matter how much we cleaned, the roaches always found us — they were drawn to the heat!

Each one of us would start with an empty matchbox and a pin. We’d spear the roaches and save them in the match box. At the end of the day, we’d dump out what we caught. Whoever had the most was the winner and the winner got to dump the whole catch on the stove. The roaches made a popping sound, similar to popcorn.

At that time, school in the Soviet Union started at age 8. Pre-college education was 10 grades, not 12, like here in the US. Our local school, however, had only four grades. In any case, I was still too young to attend school. Besides, if the snow was too high, it was too dangerous to walk to school. There was no such thing as school buses. You walked.

When the snow melted, we were all eager to go outside. One of our outdoor activities was to pick mushrooms and blueberries in the woods. One of the older girls had a picture book of edible mushrooms, so no one got poisoned. My mother made the most delicious mushroom soup.

The mosquitoes in Siberia were ferocious. The only place I’ve ever seen anything like it was in Alaska’s Denali Park. For these excursions in the woods, we donned a special getup. Every part of our bodies was covered. On our heads, we wore hats covered with netting. The net went over our faces.

A word about the seasons in Siberia: There were basically only three — first, there was winter with lots of snow; then came the snow melt (I guess that was spring). The snow melted quickly. Then came summer. It was daylight almost all the time and things grew quickly. Russia is enormous, so the seasons may differ in other areas, but the part of Siberia where we were (Sverdlovsk and its environs) was as I described.

Sanitation was non-existent. I had a friend who was four years older but smaller than I. One day I saw her relieve herself in a field. In her excrement there were live, wiggly things. I realize now that she had worms. There was no medicine for that. Years later, I met her in Israel. She looked fine and healthy. She had a son in the Israel Defense Forces and worried about him. By the way, she married my “boyfriend” from sixth grade.

One day, an elderly peasant came to teach my father how to make sandals from birch bark. He stayed with us all day. When it was time to eat, he looked around for a holy icon so he could recite a prayer. (He did not realize that praying was against the law.) But there was nothing on the walls, except for an artistic baby picture of me in an ornate frame. There was a shadow around my head that he most likely mistook for a halo. Anyway, he got down on his knees and prayed to my picture. No one told him he made a mistake. He enjoyed the meal and thanked us. I’ll bet I am the only person you’ll meet who ever had someone pray to his/her picture!

So now spring was here, and it was time for Passover. Observing any religious holiday, in any way, was against the law in the Soviet Union but most of the women gathered in our cabin to bake matzah because we had the best stove. The matzah looked a lot like the shmura matzah from Monsey, N.Y. Shmura means “watched” and this matzah is carefully guarded from the moment of harvesting to ensure it doesn’t become leavened.

The job of the kids was to play outside and be on guard to warn the mothers if they saw someone official coming so that the mothers could hide the ingredients they were turning into matzah. We played lots of hopscotch and jump rope until almost dark. Nobody official came, but we were well aware of our responsibility and took it very seriously.

Since our Passover observance was illegal, putting our lives in danger was a form of defiance. Today, many decades later, we are free in the US to observe yet somehow many people have become lax. For me, personally, having a seder is not so much about being religious. I have never missed a seder because it gives me a sense of history.

Every year during our Passover seder, I think of my connection to Jews everywhere. We have been repeating this ritual for roughly five thousand years! Wow! This is where I belong!

During our last Passover season in Siberia, we had a goat and many chickens. We had started out with four hens, but many chicks had since hatched. At the same time, our stay in Siberia was coming to an end. Negotiations were underway to make Polish people something other than “enemies of the state,” although not quite citizens. We would, however, soon get permission to leave Siberia. So my parents planned to sell the goat and chickens.

The problem was that a hen pecks to death a chick that is imperfect–and there were three of those. So, I took them into the house, and they became my pets. I even gave them names. But my parents had another plan for them. Since no one would buy a lame chick, much to my dismay, those pet chicks became part of our Passover meal. I was miserable, but my parents tried to console me by telling me that if we didn’t do that, the chicks would die anyway.

So, Passover was festive but also sad, like life in general.

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Miriam is a member of the Hadassah Writers’ Circle, a dynamic and diverse writing group for leaders and members to express their thoughts and feelings about all the things Hadassah does to make the world a better place. It’s where they celebrate their personal Hadassah journeys and share their Jewish values, family traditions and interpretations of Jewish texts. Since 2019, the Hadassah Writers’ Circle has published nearly 500 columns in The Times of Israel Blogs and other Jewish media outlets. Interested? Please contact hwc@hadassah.org.