Jonah Raskin: More than 60 years after he celebrated his first Passover with his own family of origin, he’s getting ready to celebrate Passover again with the family he’s created with Estella Habal, an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at San Jose State University.
Jonah Raskin: How will you celebrate Passover this year?
Hilton Obenzinger: We usually hold some kind of combined Pesach-Easter-Spring feast. When our kids were younger we would do an abbreviated Seder. But now it’s 4 adult kids and 7 seven grandkids, pre-school to high school, and extended family, so the prayers and stories have gotten even more abbreviated. It’s a raucous crowd of Jews, Filipinos, Chinese and more, loud and lots of fun. We tell the story with an illustrated Children’s Bible: first slavery and the escape-from-Egypt and then Jesus-and-the-last-seder, crucifixion and resurrection stories, and then the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and we make sure to sing “Let My People Go.” We describe the bitter herbs and all the other special foods and the matzo and we pour out plenty of wine. We toast the arrival of spring and then shout good wishes for the Palestinians, Native Americans and everyone else running for freedom. We end with the final declaration from a version of the Haggadah I had written: “Next year in Jerusalem delivered from bondage.”
"Professor Estella and Isaac Obenzinger riding on Jeepney owned by Habal family."
