Painting for Pesah: The Passover Cleaning Customs of Rhodesli Jews

A previous issue of la Djente featured a review of my nonno Alfredo’s wartime diary, “We Are Here! We Are Alive!”  (thank you Gloria Asher for the glowing review!). The diary sheds light on a network of unassuming heroes who saved my grandfather’s family from the Shoah. 

Yet this diary represents only a fragment of a much larger unpublished memoir, spanning Alfredo Sarano’s childhood in Izmir to his final years in Bene Berak.

The bulk of that memoir unfolds in Rhodes to which the Sarano family, along with other Turks of Italian heritage, were exiled at the outbreak of the Italo-Ottoman War.

Alfredo’s recollections of Rhodes are meticulously detailed, painting a vivid portrait of the island’s Jews. He portrays a culturally diverse yet socially cohesive community with its own “particular way of doing things”.

In the way of kashrut,  typically the strictest facet of Sephardic tradition, Alfredo recalls that the rabbis of Rhodes were uncommonly lenient, even permitting certain foods cooked in non-Jewish establishments. But come Passover, leniency would give way to uncompromising rigor. 

As Alfredo describes it, it would seem that on ereb Pesah the Jews of Rhodes would be driven into a frenzy. They would scrub down furniture, boil their glassware, toss used china, and even recoat their pans at the blacksmith! These stringencies are extraordinary considering commonly accepted leniencies in the Sephardic world. 

Generally, the Sephardic tradition treats glass as non-absorbent and requiring no special preparation for Pesah, whereas most Ashkenazim maintain that glassware cannot be cleaned for Pesah at all. The Rodosli custom reflects a middle position, likening glass to metal—absorbing flavor yet still capable of being cleaned^[1].

Regarding the recoating of metalware, this practice may reflect pre-industrial European methods, when blacksmiths sealed pans with an earthenware adhesive. Earthenware cannot be cleaned for Pesah at all. It is possible the rabbis of Rhodes were concerned lest hametz contaminate this adhesive layer and thus required all metalware to be recoated. This is an extraordinary stringency^[2].

Most strikingly, Alfredo reports that the Rodosli replastered their homes “inside and out” before the holiday. Haham Marc Angel likewise attests to this practice in his history of the community^[3]. 

From a rabbinic standpoint, there is no obligation to repaint one’s home for Pesah, so this custom initially appears to be a distinctive Rodosli quirk. Yet it occurred to me that there is historical precedent for such preparations. The Mishnah records that before Pesah the Jerusalem Temple was replastered so that it appeared to pilgrims “like a mountain covered with snow.”^[4]

Nowadays, the Jewish quarter of Rhodes is stained and weathered,  but on a night of Pesah, not so long ago,  La Juderia gleamed white and pristine, our very own snow-capped mountain rising from the sea.