Pesach

Preparing your Home and Selling Chametz

Join our pre-passover celebrations

People Get Ready: Pesach Preparation, Celebration and Inspiration for the Shaarie Torah Community

Sunday, April 5, 5:30 pm on zoom

We’ll start with Passover fun with Rabbi for kids and families and share some ideas to keep your kids and grandkids engaged during the Seder. Then we’ll gather virtually as a community at 6:00 pm while the Cantor and Rabbi share some spiritual insights and melodies to enrich your Seder. See you there!

Feather & Spoon: Pre-Passover Cleaning Together

monday, april 6, 7:00 pm on zoom

Preparing your home for Passover is an annual ritual that some dread and some embrace. In a first ever (as far as we know!) experience made possible by our strange virtual moment, we will gather together to share tips, tricks, to kvetch, or simply to just look up from the pantry floor and see another face that says “I get it.” Open to those who are battle-hardened cleaners and those who haven’t a clue how to do it and want to know how to get started.

Shalom Friends, The lead up to Passover is such a spiritually intense period, as is the preparation for it. We are getting ready for the journey from Mitzrayim to freedom, searching our hearts for the various incarnations of Pharaoh in our lives, internal and external. Nearly as intense, however, are the physical preparations and obligations that fall upon us at this season. Preparing our homes, cooking, cleaning, the trips to the stores to get what we need. This information will help you along the path. For this year’s Passover services, Seders, and more, check our calendar. For access to the prayer book, Lev Shalem, that will be used during our virtual Passover services this year, click here. This year we have made the decision not to host an online Second Seder. As your Rabbi, I feel that I don’t know how to manage a virtual second seder with a large group in a meaningful way. As part of our Shabbat B’Bayit Program, we are connecting congregants for virtual Second Night Seders. If you would like to host or be a part of one, please email Linda at cst@shaarietorah.org by April 1st. Rabbi Rose

1) Preparing our homes for Pesach. You may remember a couple of years ago that Conservative Movement decided to permit kitniyot (beans, corn, millet, peas, rice, soy, among other things) on Passover. Traditionally these foods have long been permitted by Sephardic tradition, but not Ashkenazi. The shul will continue to follow the Ashkenazi practice that prohibits kitniyot, and that remains the practice in my own home.

For more information on how to prepare your home for Passover please click here.

2) Selling chametz (leavened products and all foods prohibited on Pesach). As you may know, we are to rid our homes of chametz in advance of Pesach (in fact by the evening before Pesach all chametz should be out of our possession). One of the ways that this can be done is by selling your chametz. The chametz, along with any utensils that cannot be kashered for Pesach, should be gathered in an enclosed space that will not be entered or opened during Passover. Use our Sell Chametz form here to authorize Rabbi Rose to sell your chametz on your behalf and return them to you after Passover.