c. 2007 Religion News Service

PLAINSBORO, N.J. _ Here’s one sign of how demanding the preparations can be for the Passover holiday: An online guide, “Passover Cleaning Made Easy,” prints out to 22 pages.

In preparation for the holiday (which this year began at sundown Monday), Orthodox Jews are required to thoroughly clean sinks, refrigerators, ovens and stovetops, to erase all residue from “hametz” (Hebrew for leavened bread). Pots have to be immersed in boiling water. Ovens may get blowtorched, floor crevices scrubbed with toothbrushes, and brooms and pockets scrutinized for crumbs.

While some profess there is a spirituality to be found in the cleaning, a growing number of people are opting out of the preparation and instead taking a weeklong vacation at specially cleaned “Passover hotels.”

From Arizona to Florida, Israel to Italy, Malta to Mexico, and New York to New Jersey, there are more than 100 hotels that cater only to Jewish groups for the week of Passover. Hotel operators bring in work crews days before the holiday to “kasher” huge kitchens _ that is, make them kosher _ for Passover under rabbinical supervision and clean the rest of the grounds accordingly.

“Obviously, going away makes life easy, and it’s a very nice experience,” said Gila Alpert, of Englewood, one of 750 Jewish people spending the week at the Lakeside Conference Center & Hotel in Plainsboro, just outside Princeton.

“People who don’t want to bother with making Pesach (Passover) anymore see it as vacation time,” said Alpert.

Passover vacations are nothing new. But the selection of resorts has risen dramatically in the last 10 years as extended families among the Orthodox have increased in size and affluence, said Ricky Schechter, who runs the vacation week at the Lakeside hotel, and whose family has run vacations at kosher-just-for-Passover hotels since 1975.

“It’s just grown and grown and grown,” Schechter said. “They just popped up all over _ in the Caribbean islands, Arizona, Palm Beach, Palm Springs, Italy, Mexico. … There’s places to go all over the place.”

At Lakeside, Jewish guests hold their seders either in private conference rooms or at tables in four large dining areas. They will eat glatt kosher food prepared by Sharmel Caterers.

“There’s food coming out of your ears,” said Linda Gardner, who has spent Passover at Lakeside since 2005 and had gone away for Passover with her family for 30 years. “They make you feel like you’re at a bar mitzvah for eight days long. The presentations are beautiful.”

To stock three kitchens, Schechter has a food trailer that at 48 feet is so large it won’t fit on the hotel grounds. Parked nearby, its quarry is unloaded to a shuttle truck.

The load includes 100 50-pound bags of carrots, 140 rib-eye steaks, 3,500 chicken breasts, dozens of cases of kosher-for-Passover salad dressing, kosher-for-Passover ketchup, kosher-for-Passover imitation mustard, kosher-for-Passover Crispy-O’s cereal.

And, of course, there is matzah, the unleavened Passover staple _ about 900 boxes, although Schechter points out that’s less than in the past, as per-person consumption is down.

“Everyone’s Atkins,” Schechter said.

Jews eat matzah, unleavened bread, each Passover to remember how the freed Hebrew slaves fled Egypt in such a rush, according to the Book of Exodus, that they didn’t have time to let their bread rise.

At Lakeside, any time spent not eating can be filled with camp for children, Talmud study, lectures from “scholars in residence,” dips in the indoor pool, golf, tennis, and prayer three times a day in an auditorium on the grounds.

“I don’t know any other way (to spend Passover),” Gardner said. “It’s beautiful, and my kids look very much forward to it. They spend eight days with cousins and grandparents.”

A week at Lakeside is not cheap, though it is less expensive than Passover hotels abroad or in warmer climes. All-inclusive costs range from $2,200 to $2,800 per adult for the whole week. Children’s rates run about half.

By comparison, Passover at the River Maya in Mexico and at the Scottsdale Princess in Arizona start at $3,500 per person.

Not everyone endorses the idea of Passover vacations.

“For many years a lot of rabbis tried to oppose them, because this is a family holiday, and there was sort of a sense that it was losing its flavor in that fashion,” said Rabbi Shmuel Goldin of Congregation Ahavath Torah in Englewood.

He was among those rabbis, once speaking out against the vacations from the pulpit.

But as more congregants began going away for Passover _ he estimates that 30 percent of his nearly 800 Orthodox families now vacation at a kosher-for-Passover hotel _ he has altered his approach. This year, he will spend the middle four days of Passover as an invited guest at Lakeside, giving lectures on the Bible and parenting.

“It became so clear that people were going, so I sort of said, `You know what? I can play a role in making it more meaningful,”’ he said.

An added bonus: His wife doesn’t have to spend days preparing the house.

“It’s a gift I’m giving my wife,” he said. “After 30 years in the rabbinate, I try to find ways to help make her life easier.”

(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

Editors: Passover starts at sundown today

Editors: To obtain photos of Passover at the Lakeside Hotel, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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