Passover

Thursday's "Tech Life" story incorrectly spelled the name of Raina Merchant, a physician developing a mobile-phone app for giving CPR instructions. A story Monday on Passover gave an incorrect number of days for the eight-day festival. A story Thursday about the press tour of a Ride the Ducks vehicle wrongly reported that the captain did not physically don a personal flotation device during his safety demonstration. Norman Schultz did put on the vest. The Inquirer wants its news report to be fair and correct in every respect, and regrets when it is not. If you have a question or comment about news coverage, contact assistant managing editor David Sullivan (215-854-2357)

Passover week starts at sundown today, and traditionally extended families gather in homes for a recounting of the Jewish exodus from Egypt and the sharing of the seder, a ritual meal with courses steeped in symbolism. The story is retold, typically read from a text called the Haggadah, of how God, angered by the pharoah's refusal to release the Jews from slavery, killed the first-born sons of Egypt, but "passed over" Jewish homes. After the parting of the Red Sea helped the Jews escape, God gave Moses the 10 Commandments and the people wandered the desert for 40 years before reaching the promised land of Israel, according to biblical accounts.

Lila Bricklin is director of development at North Light Community Center in Manayunk Monday night during the seder meal, Jews worldwide will relive the redemption of the Israelites as written in the book of Exodus. The Haggadah - the book used to guide the seder and a word that means to tell, or the telling - says that in every generation each Jew must feel personally redeemed; we're supposed to embrace the exodus from Egypt as part of our own experience. As history has played out the last three months across North Africa and the Middle East, I feel like I've borne witness to the Passover story on my TV and laptop.

Are you tasked with the dessert course for the Passover meal? These Pistachio Macaroons from Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America are simple and delicious. Or try local cookbook author Aliza Green's Majorcan Lemon-Almond Cake, a moist and non-mealy Passover dessert. It's from her book Starting with Ingredients: Baking . PISTACHIO MACAROONS 3 cups shelled pistachio nuts 1 cup sugar 3 egg whites Sugar for dusting Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Whirl the pistachios in a food processor until ground but not pureed.

The small gray loose-leaf binder is tattered. The typewritten letters - yes, from a typewriter - are fading. But for Jane Portnoy, that book is a vital taproot to her passion for cooking. It holds the recipes she started collecting growing up on the South Shore of Long Island, a mostly Jewish enclave, the place where her mother, Helen Zuger, a superb cook, diligently taught her daughter. The lessons took. Through college at Mount Holyoke, in the early years of marriage, when she worked as a French teacher, through medical school at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, and over the years cooking for her family, Portnoy has referred to that little gray book.

The Gershman Y increasingly positions itself as a purveyor of top-quality art shows, and its current offering, "Had Gadya: Paintings by Archie Rand," is a prime example. Putting it together was a major undertaking, as indicated by the Y's publication of a 26-page catalog, whose featured essay by University of Pennsylvania art history professor Larry Silver makes lofty claims for the work of this Brooklyn artist. Rand is showing 10 large-scale paintings plus preparatory works that explore the many verses of "Had Gadya," a traditional playful Passover folk song about a small goat, a cat, a dog, the Angel of Death, and the Holy One. This old song, so full of symbolism, historical reference, and emotion, has been traced back to the 15th century, when it helped keep children awake at the conclusion of the Passover seder.

To adorn his Passover table, J.A. Joel could find no sweet paste to represent the mortar that Jews used to build Egyptian storehouses. Instead, he used the closest symbol he could find - a brick. Joel had no choice but to improvise. He was in the Union Army on the front lines of the Civil War, but still he found a way to observe the festival that marks the Israelites' freedom from slavery. That scene, which Joel later recounted in a letter, was reenacted last week as part of a yearlong program in the Philadelphia region to illuminate the lives of Jews during the War Between the States.

Skies were dark and the morning air cold as Samuel Domsky and Allan Stock pulled into their synagogue yesterday with 420 chickens. It was the morning of the day before Passover, which begins at sundown today - and a morning like no other for these two. Each year since 1997, they have helped distribute thousands of seder meals to Jewish families across the region. "The majority are elderly, single and female," explained Stock as he threaded his way through the synagogue's noisy main hall, where 80 volunteers in an assembly line were stuffing food into shopping bags.

A brisket the size of Kansas was always lying in a thick gravy. At my grandmother's house, that hefty Passover brisket was somehow synonymous with the Goldene Medina, The Golden Land. America. My grandparents, Gertrude and Joseph Goldberg, were Eastern European immigrants, part of that vast wave that washed on these shores in the early years of the 20th century. They had fled anti-Semitism, grabbing whatever they could carry from the shtetls where they lived. In these frantic departures, many seized even the most humble Sabbath candlesticks, their taproot to Judaism.

Like many academics, Ligia Rav? turned to writing fiction after a career as a professor (teaching architecture at Penn and Tulane). Unlike many, however, she developed a new expertise along the way: Sephardic Jewish food. Rav? developed her culinary expertise while researching her debut novel, Hanah's Paradise, a family saga recently published by Philadelphia's New Door Books. The book centers on the Ravayah family and its mystical Galilean homestead, known as Hanah's Paradise.