What is Passover

Miriam Tohill, a Jewish chaplain at Rikers Island, is looking forward to co-leading Passover seders for Jewish inmates for the first time.

“Passover is an opportunity to notice and ask who is being made invisible,” Tohill said. “We have congregants who have done drawings about their family that, to them, feel related to the Passover story in different ways.” “We are in the wilderness and desperately need a place to meet Hashem. I would like to ask that, this Pesach, people take the opportunity to stop pretending.” Tohill called Rikers “a broken system” and said celebrating Passover feels particularly urgent there. “When I’m having a rough day, I leave my office, go to a housing area, and people are just so grateful for even a few visits, a few minutes when I step into their housing area, or when I get to teach and engage with people, and that just lifts me up and reminds me why I do this work.” Rabbi Shmuel Tevel, who is active in the Lubavitch group, told the New York Jewish Week that he visits Jewish inmates regularly at Rikers and other prisons across the state. [Nineteen people died at Rikers in 2022](https://www.nytimes.com/article/rikers-deaths-jail.html) — the jail’s highest death rate since 2013, and the city is required by law to close it by 2027, though [whether that will be possible](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2022/12/timeline-closure-rikers-island/376662/) is unclear. “What does it promise to us if we have no access to freedom for people who are incarcerated? He holds weekly services at the jail that draw up to 12 attendees; this week’s teachings discussed the concepts of freedom and slavery as a precursor to the seders.“I’m kind of buoyed by those values,” Seed said, referring to teshuva. Corrections officers will be sitting on bleachers at the side of the room, which has a “squeaky floor, very tall ceiling, [and] terrible acoustics.” Nonetheless, Tohill expects the seders at Rikers to be filled with meaning.