Spanish Passover
With Pesach soon upon them, Jewish community members in Madrid found themselves in a desperate situation. There was an acute shortage of horseradish. (Now we all know that horseradish is a key seder ingredient of that fiery condiment for gefilte fish also called chrain.)
A hue and cry arose and the entire community was mobilized in an effort to prevent this shanda (shame). All the European Union countries gave them the same reply, “Sorry, we have none to send.”
In desperation, the chief rabbi phoned one of his yeshiva friends in Tel Aviv and begged him to send a crate of horseradish by air freight to Madrid. Two days before Pesach, a crate of “grade aleph,” tear-jerking, Israeli horseradish was loaded at Ben Gurion Airport onto El Al Flight 789 to Madrid, and all seemed to be well.
Unfortunately, when the rabbi went to the Madrid airport to claim the horseradish, he was informed that a wildcat strike had just broken out and no shipments would be unloaded for at least four days.
As a result: The chrain in Spain stayed mainly on the plane.
History of horseradish
While few of the traditional seder foods trace their origins as far back as matzah, it should be noted that the lowly horseradish root also crossed the Red Sea with the fleeing Israelites.
As impoverished slaves, they had access to few vegetables and the hard and woody horseradish was a household staple.
While most of the Israelites carried with them horseradish, there is a story told of one family who, while gathering up their few belongings, discovered that they had no horseradish left in their house. The wife sent her husband into the field to dig up a large horseradish root, but in the darkness and confusion, he unearthed a large ginger root by mistake.
The story continues that after 40 years of wandering in the desert, the Israelites finally entered the promised land. But it was another year before the family with the ginger arrived to settle among the rest of the Israelites.
When asked where they had been, the matriarch of the family, now grown old, shrugged and answered, “My husband insisted on taking an alternate root.”
Why is this night different?
During one of my many trips to London, I became friends with a very wealthy, yet very modest, Jewish chap named Hyman Goldfarb.
On one visit, Hy told me that because of his large donations to charities through the years, the queen wanted to knight him, but he was going to turn it down.
“That’s a great honor,” I said. “Why would you turn it down?”
“Because during the ceremony you have to say something in Latin,” he said. “And I don’t wish to bother studying Latin just for that.”
“So say something in Hebrew. The queen wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Brilliant,” Hy complimented me, “but what should I say?”
“Remember that question the son asks the father on the first night of Passover? … Can you say that in Hebrew?”
“Of course,” he said. “Ma nishtana ha laila hazeh. Thank you, old sport, I shall become a knight.”
At the ceremony Hy waited his turn while several of the other honorees went before the queen. Finally, they called his name. He knelt before Her Majesty, she placed her sword on one shoulder and then on the other, and motioned for Hy to speak. Out came “Ma nishtana ha laila hazeh.”
The queen turned to her husband and said, “Why is this knight different from all the other knights?”
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