If the name “Bergman” isn’t a dead giveaway: I am Jewish. I am not very religious, but I did celebrate my “coming-of-age” by becoming a Bat Mitzvah a month before my thirteenth birthday, and I generally observe the big Jewish holidays (namely, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Pesach). Passover was about two weeks ago, and this year was the first year I celebrated (or, rather, tried to celebrate) a Jewish holiday in a foreign country.
Granted, some states in the US might feel just as foreign as England does in this regard. But I grew up in Washington, DC, surrounded by a prevalent Jewish community. In my area, about 3.1% of the population is Jewish (which is more than three times the national rate: only about 0.75% of the US population is Jewish) (“Bethesda, Maryland,” n.d.). I was actually surprised to find that the percent of Jews in my area was not larger than 3.1%, because growing up, I experienced Judaism to be very normalized in the DC area. The school I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade, though not associated with any one religion, canceled classes every year on Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) to accommodate the large number of Jewish students who would be in synagogue for the holiday. At Passover, when Jews refrain from eating risen bread and instead eat a cracker called Matzah, local pizza places in the DC area often serve Passover-friendly Matzah-pizza. In the seventh grade, I attended Bar and Bat Mitzvahs for about twenty-five of my classmates — and there were only about seventy five seventh graders in all.
At home, I can walk into almost any grocery store and find a relatively large Kosher section year-round. In contrast, the local shops near Pickwick Hall in London — namely, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose — did not even sell boxes of Matzah during Passover. One of the only places to find shops in London that sell Passover staples is Stamford Hill, which is a neighborhood with a very large concentration of Hasidic Jews.
I spent the weekend with my mom’s cousin, who grew up in Connecticut but moved to London as an adult when she married a British man. When I told her how much trouble I had finding Matzah in London, she sympathized, and told me that not only does she consistently have trouble finding Matzah, but she can’t even find Hanukkah candles in London (her mom ships them to her from the US).
Because I grew up in an area where Judaism is so prevalent, I never understood firsthand how few Jews there are in the US or in the world. According to a 2015 estimation, there are approximately 14.31 million Jews in the world, with the Jewish community concentrated mostly in Israel and the US (about 83% of all Jews live in either Israel or the US). While in the US, there are about 7,282,000 Jews, there are only about 370,000 in the UK. The population per Jewish person in the US is 53, and 220 in the UK (“Jewish Population,” n.d.).
Being in a foreign country — and one with so few Jews — for Passover was very different from being at home for the holiday. Even though I didn’t celebrate with a traditional Passover Seder like I would in DC or at Carleton, I did have a very casual Seder in the Pickwick Hall kitchen, where Maggie Goldberger (’19) and I made our own Matzah-ball soup with supplies from Stamford Hill — and we had a lot of fun!
— Meredith Bergman ’19
Works Cited:
Bethesda, Maryland Religion. (n.d.).
Jewish population by country. (n.d.).
