Sunday, Jul 12th 2026
Australia, NZ & worldwide Jewish news that matters

Pesach recipes: a link to the past

Does memory have a taste? Anyone who has tried to replicate their favourite family dishes without a recipe will tell you it does.

When you eat food ‘like grandma used to make’, it transports you—just like Marcel Proust’s madeleine—back to another time and place. Irris Makler looks at history, food and intergenerational trauma, focusing on three Australian Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Food is an important part of Jewish culture, and right now Jewish families and communities all over the world are preparing for the Passover meal.

It’s the most joyous celebration in the Jewish calendar, when Jews retell the biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt. The religious requirement is that every person must see themselves as if they had escaped from Egypt and must personally experience the transition from being slaves to being free.  For Australian Jewish Holocaust survivors—for many other refugees and migrants to Australia—that experience has been a lived reality.

As a teenager, Eva Grinston was deported from her hometown of Bratislava in Slovakia to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, where her mother, sister and aunt were killed.

Story courtesy  ABC Radio National

Read more/…

 

Got something to say about this?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Popular Categories

Advertisementspot_img

Discover more from J-Wire

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading