By Roger Bull, The Florida Times-Union
Leah Kurinsky was explaining some basics to the children gathered there for Sunday school.
“The Jewish calendar has many holidays,” she said, “and do you know what the next one is? It’s Pesach.”
And quickly a hand went up, followed by that most-important of childhood questions: “Are there presents with Pesach?”
No, there’s not. But there is matzah.
Pesach, known to most people as Passover, doesn’t begin until April 9. But the children at Chabad at the Beaches in Ponte Vedra Beach got an early lesson in matzah, the unleavened bread that is part of the tradition and ritual of the holiday. They started with whole stalks of wheat and ended with cooked bread coming out of the oven.
But first, Rabbi Nochum Kurinsky gave them a quick history lesson: When the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt (after calamities such as a river of blood and a plague of frogs, which the children were quick to point out sounded pretty gross) they left in such a hurry that they didn’t have time to let their bread rise.
Matzah, or matzo, is the unleavened bread eaten to mark and remember that time.
Kurinsky has been doing this annual demonstration for about 12 years, the past five at the Chabad center in Ponte Vedra. In the past, he had to drive to a farm and feed store in Palatka to get the whole stalks of wheat. This year he stumbled upon them in Michael’s, apparently destined to become someone’s craft.
“It’s amazing what you can find if you look,” he said.
The children rubbed the whole wheat in their hands, releasing the kernels. Then they blew upon it to send the chaff – along with plenty of the kernels – onto the floor. They ground the wheat in a small stone mill. They mixed the flour along with some from a bag, because there’s only so much wheat a group of 3- to 11-year-olds can grind, with water and only water.
They kneaded with their hands, rolled it on the table. The rabbi instructed them to perforate their flattened pieces of dough using what he called a “holy poker,” which looked suspiciously like a plastic fork.
Then the adults put it into oven to bake it into matzah, but they didn’t quite make that. Jewish rules dictate that the process must be completed in 18 minutes or it’s not really matzah. Apparently, the ancient laws do not allow for 10 small children armed with rolling pins.
“As soon as it’s been 18 minutes,” Kurinsky said, “it’s not matzah, it’s bread. It’s kosher, it’s good and you can eat it the rest of the year. But not on Passover.”
The children, of course, ate what they had made, matzah or not.
The rabbi will lead a matzah-making demonstration at public and private schools – not just Jewish schools – all week.
“God put the stories of the Bible in there as life lessons,” he said. “The Jewish people have been slaves many times, but there are different kinds of slavery.
“You can be a slave to ego, to addiction. Dealing with it is important to being a good Jew, a good person.”
