Volunteers of the Jewish Community Center bring magic of Passover to Santa Rosa seniors

When the Jewish holiday of Passover kicks off April 5, many Sonoma County Jews will be gathering around the seder plates with family and friends, and commemorating the exodus of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt.

A handful of intrepid volunteers will be celebrating the holiday differently: At an unfamiliar senior living facility, with total strangers.

And that’s exactly how they like it.

These volunteers are members of the Jewish Community Center’s Friendship Circle, an organization that exists exclusively and expressly to facilitate community among older Sonoma County Jews. Every year, the group runs a program where volunteers prepare and serve food, fan out into the community and read through the Haggadah (special prayer book for a seder) in the company of other Jews.

Before the pandemic, the Jewish Community Center’s Friendship Circle ran anywhere from eight to 10 different seders across the county every Passover. This year, program director Sandy Andresen said the group will run one, at Brookdale Paulin Creek in Santa Rosa on Thursday, April 13.

“The people we serve can’t really get out much anymore, so we bring the seder to them,” she said. “These connections are what keep our local Jewish community alive.”

Building community in Sonoma County

The Jewish Community Center’s Friendship Circle started almost 30 years ago as an attempt to extend connections to local older and single Members of the Tribe (for the uninitiated, the “tribe” is what Jewish people call the broader group of other Jewish people).

Over time, the endeavor became a sort of social club.

Friendship Circle outings include excursions to see shows and plays, group meals, museum trips and more. During COVID-19, the group organized presentations and meet-ups on Zoom. Nowadays the Zoom meetings still happen, and they’ve brought back in-person presentations, lectures, workshops and concerts.

“One of the aims of the Friendship Circle is to keep seniors active and connected,” Andresen said. “We also seek to help them avoid isolation, as research shows (company and community) can extend lives.”

She said, “Another great part of the Friendship Circle is to bring Judaism to a group of people who maybe practiced it regularly years ago but have fallen into patterns where they aren’t practicing it as much anymore. In that sense we’re really helping people reconnect with their culture and religion as well as community.”

At some point along the way — Andresen couldn’t remember exactly when — a nationwide nonprofit called the Jewish Federation started providing the Friendship Circle with small grants to create a special outreach program around holidays. Thus, the seder program was born.

The program started small, with one or two senior living facilities participating every year. Gradually, as the volunteer network grew, the program grew as well. Before COVID-19, the Jewish Community Center group ran seders across Sonoma County at two different Brookdale facilities, Burbank Heights, Oakmont Gardens, Verena at Fountaingrove, Vineyard Commons, Spring Lake Village, Villa Capri, the Vineyard at Fountaingrove Memory Care, Solstice Senior Living and Springfield Place.

Every Passover, the group has served more than 200 Jews.

Eleanor “Elly” Cohen, a Santa Rosa resident who recently turned 80, was both a participant and a volunteer.

“Family is very important and it’s also important to include your community and enhance your community in any way you can,” said Cohen, whose 101-year-old mother Evelyn Gurevitch was one of the founders of the Friendship Circle. “The program provides an opportunity to be with my peers to enjoy things I wouldn’t be able to enjoy otherwise, and (it’s) an opportunity to learn things.”

'Participants, not an audience’

Most Friendship Circle seders take about 90 minutes total — about 60 minutes before the meal and about 30 minutes after.

On paper, the seders are not much different from any other: Participants use seder plates that feature ingredients such as bitter herb to symbolize the suffering of the Jews in Egypt, they “recline” in chairs by leaning on pillows, and they ask four questions about the night of Passover is different from every other night.

In practice, however, the Jewish Community Center’s Friendship Circle seder is totally unique.

Each Friendship Circle seder is run by a “lay leader” — members from the local community who agree to lead each of the services. Each seder also has a featured Haggadah, some of these are straight off the shelves of Judaica shops, others are do-it-yourself iterations that resemble college course packs.

During Cohen’s tenure with the organization, she has assembled Haggadahs from parts of books that have resonated over the years.

“One has beautiful illustrations, another has really meaningful poems and prayers,” she said.

Elizabeth Van Nuys also has served as a lay leader. For a few years she co-led the seder with a man who was completely blind and lived in one of the local senior living facilities. She remembered coming into the seder space with bags of tablecloths and decorations only to find that her co-leader had chosen and reserved the room, consulted with staff to make sure holiday foods were available, and made sure tables were arranged with the appropriate number of chairs.

Against this backdrop, Van Nuys would let every seder take its own course, depending on the crowd and how involved they wanted to be.

“I think it’s important not to go and ‘present a program’ in a classroom-type of way, but to be there and involve everyone in a warm community experience,” she said. “I’ve always been convinced (even in my teaching career) that I wanted participants, not an audience.”

Other options for Passover

This year, due to dwindling numbers of volunteers and a lingering concern about COVID-19, the Friendship Circle is only hosting one seder at Brookdale Paulin Creek on Thursday, April 13. Of course, the Jewish Community Center’s seder isn’t the only option. Across the county, temples and other Jewish congregations offer opportunities for Jews to come together and celebrate.

The Chabad Jewish Center of Petaluma will offer a community seder on Wednesday, April 5, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets for this event are online from $60 for adults and $40 for children.

In Santa Rosa, Congregation Shomrei Torah will offer a community seder at the temple on Thursday, April 6, from 6:15-9 p.m. The event includes a Haggadah reading and a Passover meal. The event is open to both temple members at $18 per person and non-members at $36 per person. Find tickets online.

Rabbi George Gittleman, who leads the Congregation Shomrei Torah, said that while the Passover meal is not that complicated, the liturgy around it and the ritual of seder can be.

“Passover is one of, if not the most, important holy days of the Jewish year, and providing access to the greatest number of people is important,” said Gittleman, who noted that the temple expects to host about 150 people in the synagogue for the seder this year. “Something happens when you bring people together for this feast of freedom; there’s a multiplier effect.”

Gittleman added that events such as the Jewish Community Center’s Friendship Circle seder are particularly important because they serve a critical part of the local Jewish community: the older adults who serve as gatekeepers for stories of the past.

“Older adults have a lot of stories to tell about their own experiences of seder and Passover and what it means to be a slave and what it means to be free,” he said. “We have a lot to learn from them.”