A "Short" Account of a Long Passover

by Cantor CH (CPT) David Frommer I looked at the flier advertising my upcoming Seders at Bagram Airfield (BAF) in Afghanistan. “Commemorate The Miracle that The LORD Redeemed Our Forefathers and Us from Egypt, praising the LORD for all the Miracles HE has done and continues to do for us.” As a summary of how Southern Baptists like its author, the Command Chaplain, understand the holiday of Passover, it was perfect. As a reflection of my Reform Jewish approach to everything from theology to publicity, it needed some work. “Looks good, Sir,” I wrote back. “I would only recommend changing the wording entirely. How about this? ‘From musket balls to matzah balls, American Jews have observed the Festival of Passover while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces throughout our nation's history. Join the Jewish Community in a celebration of Freedom as we share songs, stories and, of course, great food!’”  It was definitely catchy, but several key points of my alternate text were also completely aspirational. With just a few weeks until the Seder, the “Jewish Community” at BAF still numbered only a single civilian, working there for the Department of Defense (DOD). And as for “great food,” that would depend on the Command Chaplain’s influence with the installation’s Dining Facility (DFAC), and he had already sent me back several emails protesting that my Special Meals Request (SMR) would be impossible to support. If so, the entire menu would consist of packaged Kosher Meals Ready to Eat (MREs)—the kind of food that not even airlines served anymore. The more I thought about it, the more the initial flier’s wording seemed appropriate. It would take a Miracle for this to work.  As major Jewish holidays go, Passover is perhaps the least compatible with the unfamiliar surroundings and limited culinary resources of a U.S. Army Area of Operations (AO) like Afghanistan. For Rosh Hashanah, apples and honey are as ubiquitous as coffee. For Purim, the Book of Esther is easily accessible on an iPhone. And for Chanukah, a dreidel and a small menorah can even be transported in the cargo pocket of your uniform. I would have been confident I could execute any of these, no matter how austere the surroundings. By contrast, I had learned from personal experience that Passover was most enjoyable when its logistical complexities were handled by professionals like Aunt Nina and Uncle Dan, my congregant Sheri at Shomrei Torah, or the Mexican wait staff at the Kosher-for-Passover resort where we stayed as guests of Monica and Gavin.  Even when I had been assigned the exact same mission for Passover by U.S. Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A) in 2012, the circumstances had been completely different. At that time, the number of troops in theater had justified the presence of a permanent Jewish chaplain as well as three augmetee chaplains specifically for Passover. My only responsibility as one of those augmentees had been a pair of Seders in Kabul, at two locations that were so close you could walk between them. Long before I arrived, all the arrangements had been taken care of by a civilian lay leader who had already been working in Afghanistan as a contractor (and organizing military Seders there) for more than two years. I had barely contributed to preparing the Seders in the first place and as the final cup of wine disappeared at the end of the Second Night, so too did any further responsibilities I had for the festival’s remaining days. Thanks to my limited involvement, the mission was a huge success. Passover definitely worked best when left to the professionals.  Unfortunately, I was the professional now, and this year the mission was a bit more challenging. To start with, our shrinking military presence in Afghanistan meant that only a single Jewish chaplain could be justified for the holiday and that in turn meant I would need to offer multiple Seders around the country to ensure as many Soldiers as possible had access to them—five Seders at four locations in seven days, to be exact. While I would be paired with an excellent Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) as my Chaplain Assistant, Staff Sergeant (SSG) C, to form a Religious Support Team (RST, Picture 1), and while each location already had an RST of its own to arrange things in advance of our arrival, none of them were Jewish so the many requirements of a Seder’s composition were a bit foreign to say the least—starting with charoset which proved impossible to even pronounce, let alone prepare.  Each location presented a different RST, a different DFAC, a different chapel and a different billet. Some locations had plenty of Kosher wine but none of the Seder Kits provided by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which included necessary items like packets of horseradish sauce which were completely unobtainable anywhere else. Some had plenty of Seder Kits, but a DFAC that refused to provide green vegetables for karpas. Some had plenty of wine and Seder Kits, but no available billet where we could sleep. It was kind of similar to a Magevet tour, where different synagogue clergy, performance venues and host families presented a variety of challenges in a short amount of time—except with one critical distinction. Our tours had been successful because I had only arranged the bookings and left precisely these other kinds of challenges to our logistical experts—much like the success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s House of Peers, where “noble statesmen do not itch to interfere in matters which they do not understand.” But with Daver and Adam otherwise engaged in real life, it would be up to me to ensure that one missing pallet of Seder Kits or one missed helicopter flight didn’t result in Passover mission failure. Realizing I was slightly out of my element, I did my best to untangle as many logistical issues as possible ahead of time by soliciting frequent Intermediate Progress Reports (IPRs)—mostly about the food since that was the most complicated piece of the Passover puzzle. “How are we doing on Seder Kits?” I asked one RST, a couple of weeks before I was to arrive. “Don’t worry, Sir,” the NCO In Charge (NCOIC) of the chapel assured me. “All our kits are from 2014, but we called in veterinary services to test them and they said the food is still okay to eat.” Okay for us, or okay for the animals, I wondered. Just because some undernourished Afghan mountain goat wouldn’t keel over from eating a two-year-old package of Kosher beef stew didn’t give me high hopes for how my own digestive system would handle it. As Andrew would have said, this could give G.I. Joe an unfortunate new meaning. It was too late to order new Seder kits, though, so I hoped the vets knew how to operate their super-scientific testing kits, or whatever it was they were using, and I let the matter drop.  “Where are we with the SMR to the DFAC? We’ll need an answer on that ASAP,” I urged another RST, trying to use as many acronyms as possible to show I meant business. “At our last IPR it was a NOGO,” the assistant replied, “but my Chaplain said you have DIRLAUTH to try to convince them otherwise.” “Check, Sergeant. Roger that.” I answered, trying to minimize the fact I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. “Er, what’s DILTHAUR?” “DIRLAUTH. Direct Liaison Authority,” he translated. “Where exactly is the SNAFU?” I pressed. I was running low on acronyms but refused to abandon my position. “It’s the Tchar-o-sit,” he said. “The NCOIC told me they can’t make anything with wine and they don’t have cinnamon anywhere in the AO.” “They shouldn’t need a special shipment from DLA just to find cinnamon,” I grumbled. “We can add the wine ourselves. And let’s keep this on the RADAR so we don’t lose track.” We ended in a tie, since radar was a borderline submission, but the DFAC ponied up the necessary ingredients in the end. SSG C and I arrived at BAF a week before the first Seder, allowing us valuable time to familiarize ourselves not only with the necessary acronyms of the native language but also with the U.S. military’s largest installation in Afghanistan, which would be our home for the next three weeks. The airfield, I learned, was first constructed in the 1950’s and sits near the ancient city of Bagram, some 5000 ft. above sea level at the foothills of the Hindu Kush. BAF had been controlled throughout the country’s chaotic history by the Afghans, the Russians, the Taliban, and finally by U.S. forces and our allies, who expanded it to support more than 40,000 personnel during the height of Operation Enduring Freedom. That number had declined sharply over the last few years, though, and of the 10,000 or so that now remained, most were civilians. Though still impressive in size, with a nine-mile circumference, the majority of its residents lived and worked along a single main thoroughfare that hugged the airstrip the way other cities and towns might have sprung up around a natural resource like a river or a well. Its vistas were dominated by mountains all around, glistening with snowy peaks on the outside but crawling with Taliban fighters on the inside, thanks to their close proximity to Pakistan (Picture 2).  We received a friendly Passover greeting from their welcome committee the morning we arrived, when a base-wide alarm started blaring out a warning that indirect fire had been launched in the direction of the installation. Thanks to technological advances in tracking these sorts of aerial attacks, the alert system could immediately tell whether the projectile’s impact would be in our specific sector (in which case we had ten seconds to simply hit the deck) or merely somewhere in the general vicinity (in which case we had plenty of time to head for the nearest shelter for cover if more was to follow). Thankfully, the attack that morning only qualified as being in the “general vicinity” if you defined that as the entire country of Afghanistan, so nobody moved with particular urgency as they brought their folding chairs and iPads with them to the bunker outside our quarters. “How often does this happen?” I asked a fellow resident, who seemed to be the only other person with nothing to read. “It had been pretty quiet for a while but the fighting season officially kicked off a couple days ago,” he said. I looked up at the skies around BAF, dotted with surveillance blimps. “How effective can these guys be?” I wondered aloud. “Don’t we track their every move?” “Yeah, they usually don’t actually fire the rockets themselves. They just set them on egg timers and hope for the best,” he explained. “They’re optimistic, though—they even named the campaign for their new offensive this spring.” The campaign’s name, I learned from USA Today, was Operation Omari, after the Taliban’s renowned founder, Mullah Omar. As our helicopter gunships thundered off in the direction of the mountains, though, I couldn’t help but wonder if the campaign would soon be renamed in honor of Omar’s distant and less significant cousin, Sydney, enjoying the peaceful life of a kebab restauranteur somewhere in Flushing, Queens. It didn’t exactly work out that way in the rest of the country, where the Taliban continued to wreak havoc, but at least on BAF there was only one other such indirect fire alert during the entire rest of our stay. After our lengthy introduction to the local bunker, we set about exploring the rest of the neighborhood. For our billets, we were assigned to the same type of Conex storage container where I had lived at Camp Arifjan during my last deployment. This time I only had half the room since I was sharing it with SSG C, but that seemed like a worthy tradeoff, given that Afghanistan was a bit more dangerous than Kuwait, and he was serving as my one-man security detail. Besides the limited personal space and the prison-like décor, there were other charming details like the rattle of our wall lockers whenever we so much as walked from our beds to the door, and the thunder of F-16s taking off once or twice a day on the runway nearby. We also had to go outside to use the communal toilets and showers, which were ruled with impunity by a special breed of fleas that can only be found in the delicate ecosystem of an Army bathroom trailer. Given that we could have been sleeping in open barracks or even a tent, though, our accommodations basically rivaled those of the Waldorf. As soon as we unpacked our belongings (SSG C’s Bible commentaries and my favorite Tintin books), we immediately set about finding the most critical resource for life-support: internet. Connectivity in our living quarters simply required surrendering the small sum of $120 to Kumar, the Indian customer service representative at the DHI Telecom booth, for the privilege of decent Ethernet access and a non-existent wireless signal. This meant that I could connect with my laptop but not my phone, which normally wouldn't have been a problem for video chatting with Carla and Aaron, except that due to the time difference my availability usually aligned with their outings around the city, when they only had access to FaceTime. I spent several hours trying to figure out how to run FaceTime on my PC but finally gave up, reassured at least by the knowledge that in this ultimately fruitless effort, I had probably downloaded so much spyware that my identity was now being passed around cyberspace like a free giveaway.  The frustrations of our personal connectivity were nothing, however, compared to those of trying to gain access to the Army’s computer systems at our temporary workspace inside the secure USFOR-A compound. To do that, we needed our ID cards to be accepted on the local network. Without such permission, someone else always had to logon to a computer with their card first, and it had to be a computer with a secondary card reader as well so that we could then logon as their guest. To grant us that personal access, though, the NCOIC in the Signal office (J6) needed copies of our training certificates in Information Awareness, to make sure we didn’t Facebook-friend any recruiters from jihadi or rival Jewish a cappella groups by accident. SSG C’s certificate was on the U.S. Army’s secure training website, which he could easily access, but alas the computer he was using wasn't networked to a printer, and the site wouldn't let him save the certificate as any kind of document. The other computer in the office was networked to a printer but didn't have the necessary second card reader for him to log onto the site. We couldn't take a picture of the screen and email it to ourselves because we weren't allowed to have any cell phones or cameras in the building. For a while we stared at the certificate on the screen. It plainly existed, but we needed a way to prove that to J6. "I've got it! We'll carry the entire monitor up to their office," I suggested. Happily, the Command Chaplain avoided the embarrassment of this Zoolander-like proposal by capturing the certificate’s image with print screen, emailing that to himself and then printing it out. I was only informed of this later, as I’d already departed in search of an extension cord long enough to accompany the monitor up to J6 on the second story of the building.  With our internet more or less in order, we turned our attention to other places we could fritter away our tax-free income. There was everything from international brands like Pizza Hut, Oakley and Ford Motors, to Army and Air Force Exchange Services (AAFES) stores for clothing, toiletries, snacks and souvenirs, to small booths run by locals who promised huge discounts on the knockoff electronics and DVDs they were selling at marked-up prices. There were two hair salons and even a heavily-monitored massage parlor, though I avoided the latter out of fear that Carla would have me assassinated by a Taliban hit-squad if she discovered I had left her alone with our three children to enjoy a relaxing vacation at the spa. As with shopping anywhere in the Middle East, haggling approached the intensity of a full contact sport. Since I had misplaced my nail clippers, I decided to buy a new pair from one of the local shops. I was successfully channeling my inner Israeli at the negotiating table until the vendor finally got so exasperated that he decided a demonstration of the merchandise's quality might convince me of its value. "You see, Sir, very sharp! Cuts very good…" he said, digging into his encrusted and discolored thumb nail, which looked like it hadn't been cleaned in years. "Okay, okay, I get the point!" I interrupted, grabbing it back. “Name your price, and throw in those alcohol wipes while you're at it!”  Much like the possibilities for private internet access started and ended with DHI’s monopoly at Bagram, our only means for washing our clothes lay with a single laundry service that took three days to turn around any order. It seemed strange that we couldn’t at least have the option of washing our clothes ourselves, as we had even done in Kuwait—especially since we’d just been briefed by a counter-intelligence agent about the dangers of Taliban operatives bribing the laundrymen to hand over our uniforms, which could then be used as disguises in terrorist attacks. I wondered how frequently that happened as I headed over to get a haircut at the salon, which was entirely staffed by women from Kyrgyzstan. My stylist’s name was Nazgul, which I thought I'd misheard until she showed me her badge. She told me it meant 'flower' in Kyrgyz, and I declined to mention that it referred to something very different in The Lord of the Rings. She had left her two children in the care of her mother to pursue the better economic opportunity of cutting hair for twelve-hours a day, six days a week at BAF. The haircut itself only cost seven dollars, though, so it seemed unlikely these women were actually making much for themselves. Maybe it wasn’t so hard to imagine the Third Country Nationals (TCNs) who cleaned our clothes and cut our hair as potential collaborators, I thought, especially if they were working long hours for little pay. I resolved to be on the lookout for any Taliban fighters with unusually stylish hair, as evidence to support my wage-increase proposal for Nazgul and her friends.  In addition to the TCNs, who usually hailed from Afghanistan’s regional neighbors, BAF hosted military personnel from several of the thirty nine countries partnered with the U.S. in the NATO coalition—a truly international array of allies featuring everyone from Montenegro to Mongolia. That number was a little misleading, though, since some nations contributed more than others. Luxembourg provided just one Soldier in all of Afghanistan, but it was also possible that he represented an enormous percentage of his country’s fighting force. “What do these groups do around here?” I asked one of the Chaplains over lunch. “Well, the Georgians have the base defense mission and the Czechs take care of route clearance” he listed. “And then there are the Romanians… nobody really knows what they do. They always seem to be sitting around drinking coffee, but if you ask them about it they’ll tell you they’re in a meeting.”  Of all the allied contingents on BAF, I got to know the Bosnians best because they guarded the compound where we slept and worked. They were also the friendliest. “Shalom, my brother!” one of them greeted me, the first day I approached the front gate. “I'm impressed! How do you know about Jewish people?” I inquired. “We know, we know. Synagogues… cemeteries,” he assured me. “My name, Goran. Nice to meet you!” “Like Goran Dragic,” I said. “He’s a great NBA player. And Goran Ivanisevic.” “Yes, he famous tennis player!” I was on a roll. “What’s your name?” I asked another of the Bosnians at the gate. “Milrad.” “Milrad? I see. Well, er… sorry, I don’t know any other Milrads. But I guess that makes you famous. You’re like a movie star.” “Milrad is movie star!” laughed Goran. “Here, try some matzah,” I offered, handing a sample to a tall, lanky Bosnian named Smriko, who tasted it politely. “This is food for birds!” he exclaimed. “Well, it’s better with a little schmear,” I admitted. “Hmm, how do you say ‘schmear’ in Bosnian…?” Eventually we covered a few important phrases, like what to say when someone asks how you’re doing (“Sta te briga nisi doktor?” – “Why, are you a doctor?”). They all got a good laugh out of hearing me say this, but I made a mental note to learn an alternate response in case I was asked the same question by a senior officer, who I doubted would find it as funny. As rudimentary as my communication was with the Bosnian gate guards and the Kyrgyz hair stylists, I often found I could follow the conversations better with them than with some of my fellow U.S. military Chaplains. One Chaplain I met was a Protestant who described his faith background as related to the “charismatic” tradition. Then he made a joke about having brought a couple of snakes on the deployment for his worship services, which I laughed at but didn't really understand. I also remained uncertain about how the term ‘Charismatic’ was related to this particular brand of Christian worship, wondering if a style actually existed that adherents described as the opposite of charismatic. It was always a term I'd simply thought of as an individual characteristic, often displayed by leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, holding court with the media, or myself, addressing a large gathering of my stuffed animals.  I felt confident I’d have more to talk about upon meeting a Unitarian Universalist Chaplain, one of only six in the Active Duty Armed Forces, and the product of a Reform Jewish father and a Methodist mother. He had graduated from Antioch College with a degree in Philosophy and I scored major points by mentioning that Diana had gone to Hampshire (“Cool! Antioch is like the Hampshire of the Midwest.”). Unfortunately, when he tried to explain his concentration of existential phenomenology, the conversation ground to a halt as my brain quickly overheated and could only seem to generate single word responses in Bosnian. I hoped to stay in touch, though, as it seemed like the same social governors suppressing the number of Reform Jewish clergy serving in military chaplaincy were at work in the Unitarian Universalist community as well. Though I still had no idea what existential phenomenologists believed, if they came from Antioch College I was pretty sure we needed more of them in our Armed Forces. All this was well and good, but unless I got down to the business of building Jewish community, the only people at my Seder were going to be Kumar, Milrad and Nazgul. Before leaving California, I had joked with my congregants that if I didn’t find any Jewish personnel it would be more risky to return home and try to justify my absence to Stephanie than it would be to stay in Afghanistan. I had brought several Army yarmulkes with me, in the event that I needed to “convert” some non-Jewish Soldiers for a quick photo-op, but I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. As I circulated around BAF in the first few days, I tried to advertise my own camouflage yarmulke as much as possible, pushing it higher and higher on my head until it resembled a small umbrella. I also kept an eagle eye out for any names that might signal a Jewish identity. “So, Colonel Weinfuss… am I pronouncing that correctly?” I would usually begin. “Yes. It’s a German name.” “I see, I see, and what’s your mission here in Afghanistan, Sir?” “I’ll be the Chief of Medical Staff at the Joint Theater Hospital.” “A doctor? How interesting! Well, um, I’ll be leading Passover Seders… if you know anyone who would like to attend…”  Notwithstanding my clumsy recruitment efforts, which probably scared away more people than they attracted, our community started to grow. At our Friday evening Shabbat service (Picture 3), the DOD civilian and I were joined by two Jewish Air Force officers, as well as a Christian civilian and by the time I led Havdalah on Saturday (Picture 4) and Torah study on Monday (Picture 5), we had added two Jewish contractors and an Army officer who was Catholic. Everyone came with a different story. The Catholic officer’s sister and Jewish brother-in-law were raising their children at a Reform synagogue and the Christian civilian was in attendance to explore his family’s Jewish roots. One of the Jewish Airmen was married with six children and stationed at McConnell Air Force Base, near Wichita, KS. “Anything we try to do that’s Jewish as a family, we pretty much have to do on our own,” he explained. “The nearest Reform synagogue is about eighty miles away in Oklahoma.” “There must be one closer than that,” I said, confidently opening up a Google search. “Why here’s one right in Wichita itself. I knew it! Let’s see… L’chaim B’Yeshua Synagogue. Wait, is that…?” “Yes, that’s definitely Messianic Jewish,” the officer politely confirmed. “Yikes. Well, maybe you guys really are on your own…” I admitted, as I quickly closed the search window.  Though they came from different backgrounds and for different purposes, everyone shared a desire to get involved. Our first opportunity to represent the Jewish community at an installation-wide event came on the day before Passover, when BAF held a memorial service for Holocaust Remembrance Day. If this seems both impressive and unexpected, it is and it isn’t. Back in 1994, the Secretary of Defense first laid the groundwork for what would later become the DOD’s Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity (ODMEO), which sounds about as exciting as the Ministry of Magic’s Department of International Magical Cooperation. Part of ODMEO’s mission is to assist military units in offering a series of federally recognized heritage events throughout the year, honoring such minority populations as African Americans, Native Americans, and so on. I have no idea how the current list of such events was assembled but, interestingly, every other group’s event celebrates cultural achievement (Women’s equality, LGBT pride, Hispanic heritage, etc.) while the Jewish event specifically focuses on the Holocaust. I had never been particularly excited about these observances since the whole concept seemed a little artificial, and I had also harbored serious reservations about emphasizing Jewish suffering at the expense of more positive accomplishments in our history. Until, that is, the Equal Opportunity planning team at BAF reached out to me with an invitation to be the keynote speaker at the service. Suddenly, the event was as significant as a state dinner, and I was of course honored to offer some remarks on such a serious and important subject! As it turned out, I found the proceedings to be more moving and inspiring than I could have imagined. Not a single Soldier who organized the observance was Jewish, and yet they dedicated massive amounts of time and energy to ensure it was executed to the highest of standards. The officer who narrated the proceedings told the remarkable story of Roddie Edmonds, a non-Jewish U.S. Army Master Sergeant (MSG) who was imprisoned at a Nazi POW camp with 1,275 other Soldiers in 1944. The Nazis ordered him, as the senior NCO, to have all his Jewish subordinates report to a separate formation the next morning. Edmonds gave the men a different order and when the Nazis arrived to collect the Jewish personnel, they found every one of the 1,275 Soldiers standing at attention. “They cannot all be Jews,” the Nazi officer hissed at Edmonds. “We are all Jews here,” he answered. “Have your Jewish men step forward or I’ll shoot you on the spot,” the Nazi shouted, aiming his pistol at Edmonds’ head. “If you shoot me, you’re going to have to shoot all of us, because we know who you are and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war,” he calmly replied. MSG Roddie Edmonds’ valor saved over 200 American Jewish service members that day. It seemed like a story that was difficult to believe but the more I thought about how these non-Jewish Soldiers in 2016 had dedicated themselves to executing this event in the first place, assuming a duty that was purely voluntary for a cause to which they had no personal connection, the more I believed that they too would have acted with the same courage as MSG Edmonds, had they been in his place some seventy years ago.  After I offered a musical interlude of the Partisan’s Hymn, Zog Nit Keynmol, accompanied by members of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division Band, we held a candle lighting ceremony with participation from our Jewish community and Army leadership (Picture 6), and I delivered my keynote address on the life of Holocaust survivor, Tibor Rubin. Rubin was sort of a 1940’s and 50’s Hungarian Jewish superhero. As a teenager, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust but managed to survive the brutal Mauthausen labor camp for fourteen months, until it was liberated by American Soldiers in 1945. That day, he promised himself he would join the U.S. Army, to give something back for saving his life—a promise he eventually made good on after compensating for his poor English by cheating on the enlistment entrance exam.  By 1950, Rubin was stationed in Korea, serving under an anti-Semitic sergeant who regularly assigned him the most dangerous missions, like covering his unit’s retreat from an isolated hilltop with little chance of relief. During one such action, overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops assaulted his position but he inflicted a staggering number of casualties, single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing his unit to complete its withdrawal successfully. Eventually wounded by shrapnel in his chest and leg, Rubin was captured and spent 30 months in a Chinese POW camp. Testimony from his fellow prisoners detailed his willingness to sacrifice for the good of others, sneaking out at night in search of food for his comrades despite the risk of certain torture or death if caught. As impressive as this was, I imagine Andrew would have proven even more successful than Rubin, and somehow won the release of all the prisoners by successfully challenging the Chinese commandant to a high-stakes, Casino Royale-style game of Bridge. For his heroic actions as both a Soldier and a POW, Rubin was recommended more than once for the Medal of Honor but each time the same sergeant deliberately ignored the orders from his own superiors to prepare the appropriate paperwork. It wasn’t until thirty years later that Rubin’s case was re-opened, largely through the support of his non-Jewish fellow veterans who came forward to attest to his mistreatment and to see justice done. He was finally awarded the Medal of Honor in 2005, becoming the only Holocaust survivor to ever receive our nation’s highest military honor. It boggled my mind to think of what this Jewish super-soldier would have accomplished if his only mission had been to organize Passover Seders in Afghanistan and I made a note to research potential genealogical ties between the Rubin and Fenves families (since their names are very similar). After the Holocaust Remembrance event concluded, everyone was invited to a reception featuring a well-meaning but slightly muddled smorgasbord of “traditional Jewish foods” like brisket, challah and falafel. “Hey, what’s corned beef doing here?” Sergeant O’Findley asked. “I thought that was Irish!” “Definitely,” I explained. “But at some point we realized it was so good we needed it in our delicatessens as well.” “Well, I understand,” he said. “I guess you couldn’t have bacon, so this was the next best thing!” Finally, after weeks of preparations, the First Night of Passover finally arrived (Picture 7). Thanks to the work of SSG C, the room was beautifully decorated with artwork donated by Shomrei Torah’s Nina Bonos and posters from Jewish Lights Publishing. The turnout far exceeded my expectations, with twenty eight people in attendance, including three Protestant Chaplains, one Catholic Chaplain, the NCOIC for the Holocaust Memorial service and assorted other non-Jewish guests, many of whom were attending a Seder for the first time. In addition to our local Jewish personnel, two Jewish Soldiers joined us from other installations around the country. Though I would actually be performing Seders near their respective duty stations in a few days' time, the availability of air assets had rendered it easier for them to travel a farther distance to BAF for the weekend than to travel a shorter distance to a closer location later in the week.  In a classic case of Army efficiency, it was more feasible for one of these Jewish visitors, stationed at the Kabul International Airport, to hop on a rotating helicopter flight all the way to BAF, thirty five miles away, than to try and find a special flight from the airport to the American Embassy, near where my Seder would be held, just two miles away! In 2012, when I had first visited Kabul, we hadn’t so much as needed a single tactical vehicle, let alone a convoy, to travel between various military installations around the city. Now, with our numbers of troops in theater so significantly reduced, the Army did not feel it had the manpower to secure the roads so even a distance of a few blocks could only be traversed by helicopter. Of all our Jewish attendees that night, perhaps no one had a more unexpected story than a junior Soldier who had actually been born and raised in the Haredi community of Borough Park. I didn’t believe him until he showed me a picture of himself as a teenager walking around Brooklyn with peahs and a shtreimel. He had eventually separated from the Orthodox community and now in his mid-twenties he was starting a new chapter of his life as a combat medic in the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army. Like a lot of Jews from traditional backgrounds I met in the military, he tried to observe a stricter form of Kashrut for Passover, so I was glad to be able to provide him with Glatt Kosher charoset, hard-boiled eggs, and other delicacies, shipped specially by Jewish support organizations like Aleph, MSAWI, and KosherTroops.com.  For the rest of us, a delicious gluten-free meal was provided by a joint civilian-military team of five heroic DFAC personnel, who not only delivered the food to the chapel at two different times (cold items before we started, hot items during the meal) but also stayed until the very end, enduring all thirteen verses of Who Know One, to help us with the cleanup. I was extremely grateful for their support, as it enabled us to leave the Kosher MREs from the well-aged Seder Kits off to the side for only the most dedicated enthusiasts—one of whom turned out to be a Protestant Chaplain with a baffling addiction to gefilte fish! “I’m impressed, Sir,” I told him. “Not even most Jews like that stuff. We just eat it once a year as a tradition.” “I know exactly what you mean,” he answered. “In my tradition, we do the same thing with haggis for the Burns Supper.”  The Burns Supper, as he explained, celebrates the life of poet Robert Burns, and sounded similar in ritual and ceremony to a Scottish version of the Seder. It involves songs, recitations, and toasts, all set to a specific order, and culminates in a festive meal highlighted by a platter of haggis, which is dramatically brought to the table in a processional that includes a bagpiper. Though everyone enthusiastically welcomes the haggis’ arrival at the Burns Supper, they apparently spend the rest of the year avoiding it at all costs. I tried to show the same eagerness for a piece of gefilte fish at the Seder but quickly set it aside when I smothered it with two-year-old horseradish sauce and it started fizzing like a science experiment. All told, the Seder lasted two and a half hours but morale remained high and everyone stayed through the end. At first I thought this was because they were just as excited as I was to sing every line of Adir Hu, but eventually I realized it probably had more to do with the rare opportunity to drink alcohol on their deployment. Even after we finished the fourth cup, people hung around to see if there’d be a fifth one to preview the next night’s Seder, like a teaser to a sequel that’s shown at the end of the credits. As they left, I distributed greeting cards designed by my Shomrei Torah congregants, Margo and Jerry Picture 8), and many of the non-Jewish guests shared how glad they were to have been included. Of course, this being the military, these conversations usually spun off in unexpected directions. “Thanks so much, Chaplain Frommer. This was way better than the first Seder I went to,” one of them said. “That’s very kind of you,” I replied. “I…” “That one was Messianic Jewish,” he continued, “so it just wasn’t the same. The rabbi started off by joking that everyone had to be circumcised…” “Well, I, er… glad you had a good time,” I concluded. “Chaplain Frommer, great job,” an Air Force Colonel told me. “My family will be celebrating Passover back home without me so it was really nice to be here with everyone.” “That means a lot, Sir. Does your family belong to a synagogue where you live?” I asked. “Oh, I’m not Jewish,” he replied. “Oh, okay. That’s marvelous,” I said, still trying to figure out if the rest of his family was or was not Jewish and, if not, whether they were eating gefilte fish or haggis as part of their observance. After a smaller Second-Night Seder the next evening, it was time to pack up our haggadahs and take our traveling Passover show on our first (and last) road trip of the season.  The next morning we arose at 4:45 am to catch an early flight and, as if that weren’t a cheerful enough start to the day, we were then pulled over by the Military Police (MPs) while driving the five blocks from our billets to the airport. We were borrowing a vehicle from the chapel for the first time and no one had told us that the main road was closed to traffic every morning for exercise. “I’m sure these guys mostly harass the TCNs. They’ll probably let us go once they see we’re American,” I confidently informed SSG C as he rolled down his window. That might have been true, had the MP been American himself. As it turned out, he was Romanian. So that’s what they do around here, I realized. “This road closed,” the MP announced. “You have permit?” “We’re sorry, we’re new here…” we tried to explain. “Where you going?” “The airport. Our flight to Kabul leaves at 7:00. We have an important Passover mission…” “License and registration,” he said. “Isn’t this guy supposed to be getting coffee somewhere?” I muttered, as SSG C handed over his ID card and I opened the glove compartment to get the registration. Naturally, it wasn’t there. “Ask him if he wants the owner's manual instead,” I suggested. After ten minutes, the MP determined that in spite of our lack of permit or registration, we weren't trying to steal the vehicle—a beat up Land Rover that clunked and chugged like Horace and Jasper’s milk truck in 101 Dalmations. “Ok, I give you warning ticket this time,” he announced. “I will escort you to the airport.” “Thank you. We actually also have to drop this vehicle off at the chapel afterwards…” Luckily we were able to wear him down with innumerable complications in our travel situation, and he finally waved us along.  We arrived in Kabul later that morning, our helicopter landing on a soccer field adjacent to the Operation Resolute Support Headquarters (RS) in the middle of the city. In contrast to the expansive footprint of BAF, RS was a tiny military enclave that comprised only a few square blocks next to the U.S. Embassy. After fifteen minutes of exploration we had covered its entire layout. It was here in the RS Chapel that I had led my first military Seder four years ago, though strangely I couldn’t find any sort of plaque commemorating such an historic event. (The location of my second Seder that year in Kabul, Camp Eggers, was closed in 2014.) The RS Chaplain was holding a service in the chapel that evening so he had secured a conference room for the Seder instead. There also hadn’t been any transient billets available that evening so he invited us to sleep on a couple of the spare beds in his room—an arrangement I was not excited about until we discovered the building had indoor plumbing!  When he showed us the chapel’s Passover supplies that afternoon, however, a meager assemblage which included a single plastic Seder plate and some disposable tablecloths stowed in a box marked ‘Honika,’ my elation turned to despair. We had piles of Seder Kits at BAF but we hadn’t brought any because we’d been told they would be sent ahead of us to RS, and there was no time to go back for them now. Just as I was about to start chanting from the Book of Lamentations, the Chaplain reappeared and announced that the shipment of Seder Kits had accidentally been sent to the wrong location in Kabul but had just arrived on the latest helicopter. It felt like a miracle. Maybe those Baptists knew what they were talking about after all. The rest of the day involved the usual series of Army speed bumps but the recent deus ex machina had invigorated me with a new sense of optimism. We stopped by the DFAC to inquire if they could spare some tablecloths but they swore their entire inventory had just been used for an event and couldn’t be cleaned in time. We then headed to the Base Operations Cell to sign out a Gator utility vehicle for transporting the food, but discovered that the Georgians had beaten us to it and wouldn’t be back until after the Seder had started. Fortunately, though, the entire cell was staffed by mobilized reservists from Iowa where SSG C had recently moved, and after I unsuccessfully tried to win their support by singing a few bars from The Music Man (“Oh, there’s nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you when we treat you which we may not do at all…”), he stepped in with some secret Hawkeye handshake and secured us the personal Gator of the Base Ops NCOIC himself. We motored back to the DFAC and located our food and linens at the entrance, only to find they had declined to make any charoset and the tablecloths they had graciously provided for us really did bear the stains and wrinkles of some apparently wild toga party. We hastily collected some apples, honey and cinnamon from the dinner line, then swung around to the chapel to grab the disposable table cloths, and sped back to the conference room where we began a furious charoset production line in the rapidly dwindling time before the Seder (Picture 9). Unlike our last two Seders at BAF, which had been mostly attended by military personnel, our Seder at RS was almost entirely attended by Jewish Department of State (DOS) civilians who were working at the embassy. The unofficial leader of their small community was a Foreign Service officer who was just four years older than me and had even grown up on the Upper East Side, where he’d attended Ramaz. We had already been in touch when he had emailed me a few weeks before, asking if he could arrange to bring the famous last Jew of Afghanistan, Zebulon Simantov to the Seder as a guest. I was moderately familiar with Zebulon's story, which wasn’t hard since it had been covered at one time or another by media outlets around the world, including Ha’aretz, Al Jazeera, and The Washington Post.  Zebulon was born in 1959, in the western Afghan city of Herat, which was once a major center of the country’s 800-year-old Jewish community. Its population had steadily declined throughout the twentieth century until a final wave of emigration after the Soviet invasion of 1979 had reduced their numbers to only a handful, and twenty years later, Zebulon and another Afghan Jew, Ishaq Levin, were the only two Jews remaining in the country. Somehow, the two men outlasted the Civil War of the early nineties, as well as the Taliban regime it spawned, resisting its violent proselytizing with unexpected ripostes. “One Taliban told me they would give me $50,000 if I became a Muslim,” he told the New York Times. “But I said I would give him $80,000 if he became a Jew!”  Unfortunately, in a classic Jewish tale of both tragedy and comedy, the two men “lived at opposite ends of the synagogue, refusing to speak except to exchange curses,” despite all they had been through, according to The Guardian. Their mutual hatred was so strong that they regularly reported each other to the Taliban on charges of espionage, for which both claimed they were regularly imprisoned and beaten. When Levin finally passed away in 2005, police suspected Zebulon of murder until an autopsy revealed his nemesis had died of natural causes. I was eager to meet this indomitable survivor, since it was hard to imagine I would have endured Taliban captivity as successfully has he had. As one might have predicted, Zebulon turned out to be a truly memorable guest. He arrived with an entourage of two Afghan assistants, one of whom spoke broken English and functioned as his translator and the other of whom spoke no English and whose job was unclear until we realized it was to show everyone videos of Zebulon on his phone. At first, as he quietly shuffled in, it seemed he would be little more than a decorative ornament at the Seder, but I learned this was far from the case as soon as he’d thrown back a couple of glasses of wine. He frequently interrupted the proceedings with emphatic comments that his translator struggled to relay. Though generally in good spirits, he was disappointed that we didn't have green onions to use in the Sefardic custom of beating the person sitting next to you, as the taskmasters did in Egypt. “I'm sorry I didn't bring them,” I apologized. “I never practiced that tradition.” Apparently, his translator communicated a version of my words that implied nobody practiced that tradition, which he vehemently contested and sent his video assistant over to show me some footage of Zebulon beating himself with some green onions at the first-night Seder he had held in the Kabul synagogue for himself and his staff. He was also pretty upset that we didn't have any salt to sprinkle on the matzahh, and I promised to bring some next year, along with the missing onions. Communication proceeded in the same vein for the whole evening. “How long have you lived in Kabul?” I tried to ask through the translator. “Two thousand years!” Zebulon replied, after the translator relayed my question. “No, I mean him, specifically…” I tried to clarify, but to no avail. I was concerned that he would be mostly lost in our English Haggadah but he instead took up the Art Scroll Hebrew version and followed our progress with pinpoint accuracy (Picture 10). This was something of a mixed blessing, as it allowed me to call on him to chant paragraphs here and there in his Afghan nusach, which gave me ethnomusicological goosebumps of excitement, but it was also difficult to get him to stop, once he'd started. “Zebulon will now do us the honor of chanting the paragraph explaining the Passover offering in Hebrew,” I announced. As he neared the end of the paragraph, I attempted to regain control and invite another reader in English but was swept along by the current of his enthusiasm. “Thank you, Zebulon,” I tried to interrupt. “And now if we could have a volunteer to read the next... (still chanting) Wait, I... Zebulon? (more chanting) No, he's definitely still going. He's into the paragraph about Matzah. He's unstoppable! Ok, everyone, follow the English and hang on for the ride!” We concluded the Seder with Chad Gadya, in which Zebulon of course played a starring role. I started out by explaining we'd need ten volunteers to make the sounds of the things named in the song. “Who can make the sound of a goat,” I asked. The translator relayed the message and the video guy immediately made a perfect goat noise. It was our most successful moment of communication all evening. “Ok, you’ll be our goat,” I said. “Goat! Baaaa!” Zebulon interjected. “Yes, very good, but that's your cameraman’s sound,” I explained. “You can be the cat.” “Cat!” Zebulon repeated. “Right,” I said, “but what sound does it make?” “Akcje smckdndn,” the translator said. “Meow!” responded Zebulon. “Excellent,” I said. (We seemed to have no problem conversing as long as animal sounds were involved.) “You'll be the cat. Now we need a sound for a dog.” “Woof!” barked Zebulon. “Uh oh,” I muttered to the group. “I think I've created a monster.” Somehow I impressed upon Zebulon that his only responsibility was the sound of the cat while everyone else was eventually assigned a sound of their own. “Ok, here we go,” I began. “One little goat, one little goat, that father...” “BAAAA!” bleated video guy, and he burst into laughter along with the rest of us, until we finally managed to sing Chad Gadya a couple times for the chorus. “Then came... (I paused for effect)… the cat!” I dramatically motioned to Zebulon. “Cat!” He exclaimed. “No, no! The sound, what sound does it make??” “Meow,” said the translator. “Ah, meow,” echoed Zebulon. “Good,” I said. “Moving on... That ate the goat!” “Baa-hahahaha…” laughed the video guy. He could barely compose himself. By the time we came to him again, the translator had downloaded some kind of app that made a goat sound and played that instead.  The Seder thus ended on a high note, whereupon we rose to say our goodbyes and Zebulon proceeded to help himself to a souvenir bottle of wine. This was minimal compared to his entourage, who were loading up on Army-purchased Passover food like it was their Last Supper. It seemed like Zebulon had promised them they'd be paid for the evening in kosher packaged meals and grape juice. At first I hesitated, but soon decided if they were that excited to eat two-year-old Kosher MREs, who was I to stop them? They had earned it with their spirited participation and besides, they seemed to be taking good care of Zebulon (whatever the exact details of their arrangement) so it seemed like a worthwhile gesture of my gratitude for their services. For all of the evening’s hilarity, it was actually the most powerful reminder of how holiday rituals will find ways to bind Jews together in spite of seemingly insurmountable differences like language, culture, and the omission of green onions. * Back on the road again, we traveled via Wandering Aramean Airlines for one of our longer flights, which afforded me the welcomed change of actually being able to talk to other passengers on the plane—a simple pleasure that was impossible on helicopters due to the tremendous racket of their propellers. “What do you do here in Afghanistan?” I asked an Army captain sitting next to me. “I’m with veterinary services,” she answered. “You don’t say!” I declared. “I’m here leading Passover Seders and I think your Soldiers were the ones who tested our Seder Kits to make sure they were edible.” “Yes, food safety analysis is an important part of our mission,” she affirmed. “I’ve always wondered what kind of chemical testing apparatus you use to check the food,” I inquired. “I should probably get one for our house. Our bread seems to go moldy all the time… ha ha.” “Oh, we don’t use anything scientific,” she clarified, to my shock and alarm. “If the food looks okay, smells okay and tastes okay, it probably is okay!” “That’s your method of analysis?? I… er, how reassuring…” I stammered. Considering how much of this food I’d already ingested after three Seders, I declined to speak to anyone else on the flight for fear of what further revelations might await me, and instead spent the rest of the trip attempting to discern if a sudden bout of stomach cramps were merely psychosomatic or a portent of disastrous things to come. We finished up our Seder circuit with stops at Operating Base (OB) Fenty near the city and airfield of Jalalabad in the mountainous east (Picture 12), and at Kandahar Air Field (KAF) in the desert region of the south. At Fenty, a relatively small installation, we toured the chapel which still bore the scars of an indirect fire attack, far more accurate than the one that had greeted us the day of our arrival. The shell had exploded right next to the chapel but, in several different miraculous events, its shrapnel that punctured the building’s wall had missed the only Soldier inside, along with three other personnel who were sleeping in a tent that got shredded around them nearby. At KAF, by contrast, the damage and ruin all around its sprawling layout was less the result of enemy action than of the neglect and decay which accompanied our severe reduction in troop levels there over the last few years.  The most vivid example of this was the post's central attraction, the boardwalk. It was a raised, wooden promenade that ran in a giant square, surrounding an AstroTurf soccer field, two volleyball courts, a picnic area and the remnant of what used to be a roller rink. The entire outer perimeter of the boardwalk had once been full of shops and restaurants, but they had mostly been shut down and removed long ago, and only a few remained. The signs of neglect were everywhere—the wooden planks had warped, the paint was peeling, old canvassing that had once provided shade now fluttered in tatters in the wind, birds’ nests filled the rafters, weeds populated the empty plots and stairs that had once led up to the walkway had crumbled away. The entire installation was permeated with that eerie feeling of a once-vibrant civilization now turned into a ghost town. At first it seemed to represent the tragedy of our failed ambitions in Afghanistan but the more I thought about it, the more it came to reflect the ultimate success that our leaders had finally started to turn this mission over to the Afghan people where it belonged. The real tragedy of this decrepit boardwalk, I decided as noon approached, was that there were no longer as many options where I could eat lunch! I must admit, by the time we headed to Fenty and KAF after our first three Seders, the novelty had started to wear off, and I’d begun to feel like Harold Hill, traveling from one town to another, hawking the same spiel (“…Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Passover!”). In each location, while I was more than happy to educate a group of Mormon participants about why Jews don’t believe they’re going to Hell, or politely entertain the complaints of devout Christians who felt we needed to join forces against the government’s war on religion, it was the individual Jewish Soldiers I met who continually renewed my commitment to this mission. Not only were they were far away from their families back in the States but often, due to simple numbers and geography, they were also the only Jewish person serving in their particular region of Afghanistan, a country bigger in size than France (Picture 13). They were genuinely excited to share and enjoy the music, the stories and the traditions of a favorite holiday they’d grown up with at home, even if only for a few hours with a makeshift community of largely non-Jews. “I really enjoyed the Passover Seder,” a Jewish signal officer from Cleveland wrote to me a few days later. “I'm really happy you came to OB Fenty, and it's very awesome you traveled around Afghanistan hosting Seders. Definitely cool to get back in touch with Judaism for a little bit while here.” He was also interested in becoming certified as a designated Army lay-leader, which would allow him to organize religious and cultural activities in the future should additional Jewish personnel be stationed at his post.  Moments like this not only comforted me in times of homesickness and frustration but helped assuage my guilt at having left Carla alone with our three adorable but increasingly monstrous children for an extended period of time. Passover challenges us to remember the stranger, for we were all strangers once in a strange land. Despite our best efforts as civilians, it’s easy to forget about the Jewish men and women serving in our Armed Forces—a land that is stranger to many of us than ancient Egypt. And yet, in the same way that Jews have done throughout our history, these men and women cling to their heritage and build community wherever possible, defying all inconvenience and improbability—a truer miracle than the parting of any sea or the delivery of any Seder Kit. As difficult as the burden on my family was, as annoying as military life can be, and as eager as I am to come home, I feel honored to have witnessed that miracle at Passover this year. CH (CPT) David FrommerBattalion Chaplain223rd MI BN (L) 100 Armory Dr. San Francisco, CACalifornia Army National Guard