The small Jewish community in Japan will celebrate the Seder, despite the tsunami catastrophe, as Chabad scurries to bring in safe food supplies while distributing food to non-Jewish earthquake victims.
“People are starting to come back slowly,” said Chabad-Lubavitch of Japan director Rabbi Mendy Sudakevich. “Their jobs are here.”
His family was evacuated days after last month’s deadly earthquake and tsunami claimed tens of thousands of lives and left a nuclear power plant spewing radiation from its damaged reactors, the Chabad.org website reported.
Rabbi Sudakevich’s wife and children now are in Israel, and he has re-settled temporarily in Hong Kong before returning to Tokyo.
The crowd for the Seder on the eve of Passover will be smaller than usual, he says, but approximately 100 people are expected. The rabbi is avoiding all local produce while the Fukushima nuclear power plant still leaks radiation into the sea, air, and surrounding countryside.
“There are things we can get and other things that we are being advised to avoid,” explains Rabbi Sudakevich. For example, there is no more kosher meat, and the supply of kosher chickens is dwindling. “There’s matza and wine. That’s the minimum that we need for a Seder,” he said.
The IDF deployment of relief teams helped out by bringing along Passover goods for local Jews, and Rabbi Sudakevich hopes to receive another shipment from the United States in time for the holiday.
In the meantime, he still gives Torah classes and runs children’s activities, hosting 30 people for prayers and dinner last Shabbat. The meals’ traditional challah bread came from Sendai’s Arpajan Bakery, which is baking bread and distributing it free of charge as part of the Chabad Relief Initiative.
Rabbi Sudakevich this week took an 86-year-old Jewish man, who has no family, home from the hospital where he had been hospitalized since suffering a heart attack last year.
The rabbi hired someone to help the man around his home for the next week. He’s trying to find a way to finance full-time care for the man.