Musya Kudryavtseva Andreeva
Illustration from a haggadah Farbman created with other rabbis for Jews from the former Soviet Union.
When Rabbi Michael Farbman prepares for Passover each year, his mind flashes on the seder he’ll never forget — one that helped set him on the path to join a modern exodus of Soviet Jewry.
Passover begins at sundown Friday with the seder meal, the annual ritual that more than any other draws observant and non-observant Jews alike.
Farbman kind of participated in that ritual growing up in Vitebsk, Belarus (from which the painter Marc Chagall hailed).
Belarus was part of the Soviet Union then. It wasn’t encouraged — wasn’t even considered safe — to practice Judaism.
Still, every Passover, he went to a Passover meal at the home of his grandmother Genya (Golda). They didn’t drink the four cups of wine. They didn’t recite prayers or read the story in the haggadah of the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt.
They did have matzah. And gefilte fish. And matzoh ball soup. That was the extent of Farbman’s ritual Jewish upbringing.
Until he was 16 years old.
Chagall’s depiction of a seder.
Grandmother Genya had passed away the year before. As Passover approached, it looked as though he wouldn’t be attending even the cursory seder to which he’d grown accustomed.
Then he got a call. Two Canadian-born Jews were visiting from Israel on an American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee-sponsored trip to conduct seders for foreign communities. They were holding one in a rented room at a Vitebsk university.
“You want one place?” the caller asked Farbman. Just one. No room for even his parents.
He said yes, then joined 70 other Jews in drinking the ceremonial cups of wine, reciting the berachot, dipping greens in salt water to remember the tears of slavery, reading the book about the Jews’ journey to freedom.
Farbman had had no idea about all those rituals. He was blown away.
“I always think about that seder,” he recalled during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Chai Haven” program. “And remember that remarkable feeling of being totally overwhelmed.”
“Everything was different. The tastes were different. The matzoh tasted different; it was the matzoh that they sent from Israel packaged in boxes. … It most certainly was the first Jewish religious observance that was introduced to me as a religious observance.”
And it planted a seed.
The year was 1990. The Soviet Union was in its dying days. Farbman went to study in Moscow in 1993 after the fall of the USSR. Then he joined the modern-day exodus of Soviet and former Soviet Jews leaving behind a lifetime of religious restrictions and in some cases persecution in their native lands.
The seders end with Jews saying, “Next year in Jerusalem.” At that first seder, Farbman thought to himself: “Maybe one day I will see Jerusalem.”
On the other hand, “at that point, and at many later points, if somebody told me I was going to become a rabbi, I would have laughed.”
Paul Bass Photo
Rabbi Michael Farbman at WNHH FM.
Farbman did end up seeing Jerusalem.
And he landed in rabbinical school in London in 1996. His family eventually relocated to the U.S., and he ended up as the popular guitar-strumming rabbi in the pulpit at Temple Emanuel on Route 34.
Farbman organizes activities geared toward Russian Jews who have relocated to the New Haven area. As with any topic Jewish, they have many different opinions on how their story matches the one in the Haggadah.
“I have observed both the former Soviet Jews embracing that narrative and saying, ‘This is our narrative.’ And [others] saying, ‘Don’t paint this as the slavery we were all liberated from.’ Freedom, as we know it, is not all that exciting sometimes; there is a lot of hardship with freedom as well. The Jews leaving Egypt were complaining about the food.”
Which is the exactly the kind of nuanced question — about how to apply the Passover Exodus story to our modern life — that helps make our seders so rich, meaningful, and memorable.
This Friday night, as he does every Passover, Farbman will lead a seder in both English and Russian. Continuing a tradition that began when he was 16 in Vitebsk.
Click on or download the above audio file or Facebook Live video below for the full interview with Rabbi Michael Farbman on WNHH FM’s “Chai Haven” program, including the question of whether kombucha is kosher for Passover.