On April 12, around 35 students gathered in the Beard Room in Piano Row for Emerson Hillel’s Passover Seder, a traditional meal held on the first night of the week-long holiday.
Passover commemorates the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt and the Jewish liberation from slavery. Jewish students gathered to celebrate the holiday that symbolizes freedom, and the birth of a Jewish nation.
Passover is a Jewish holiday celebrated over eight days with traditions like Seder, and the retelling of the Exodus story. This year it began on April 12 and ended on April 20.
Emerson Hillel hosted several events on campus including the first-night Passover Seder and a lunch for the Emerson community on April 15. The group also collaborated with Simmons University Hillel for a Shabbat dinner on April 18.
For many students, Passover serves as a time for them to reconnect with the community, and celebrate beloved traditions. Shokrian, who comes from a big family, said that she enjoyed observing the holiday with her friends.
“Getting to celebrate with people from my Emerson community, and just getting to be with all of them was really special, because this was my first Passover away from home,” she said.
The president of Emerson Hillel, Carlisle Robbins, a senior creative writing major, said that his main goal for this Passover was to get students kosher meals. Kosher food is prepared and consumed according to Jewish law, which dictates that meat and dairy are strictly separated, and animals are slaughtered humanely. Robbins said that there’s a spectrum of how people celebrate Passover, whether they go fully kosher, or just avoid some foods.
“We wanted to have that offer of meals that were cooked in a kosher kitchen, that were kosher for Passover, that were as Orthodox as they needed to be,” said Robbins.
All of the food served at Emerson Hillel’s Passover events were from Catering by Andrew, a kosher catering company in Brookline. Robbins said that he met with members of the Emerson Dining Office to advocate for them to pay for the meals. While he eventually succeeded, he said he was frustrated by the lengthy process.
“If we’re paying all this money to be fed by this school, they have a responsibility to feed us in the way that is religiously required,” he said. “And I don’t think that I should have had to have advocated as hard for my Jewish students as I did—it should have been a given.”
The food provided were individual meals made in a kosher kitchen and were available for participating students to pick up in the dining hall. The meals included chicken, salmon, and eggplant. They were paired with fruit, a salad, and a dessert.
Beyond the catered meals, Emerson’s dining hall also had a kosher style section for students celebrating Passover that included eggs, matzah, and cream cheese. However, because the dining hall does not adhere to the key principles of a kosher kitchen, like completely separating all meat and dairy, the items aren’t kosher certified.
The catered meals were a success according to Emerson Hillel’s secretary Maya Shokrian.
“It was really nice that we got kosher Passover food,” said Shokrian. “I went to pick up some kosher snacks just in case, but I didn’t eat most of them because the food was so good and there was so much of it.”
Isaac Simon, a junior theater and performance major, and Emerson Hillel’s engagement intern, echoed Shokrain, saying that the meals were “awesome.”
“I’ve also been here the last two years, and it was a lot better than those two years,” he said of this year’s Passover. “Hopefully if we give a good shout out to the way they did it this year, they’ll keep doing it like that.”
