In the Middle of a World War, a Mystery Seder in North Africa

On Pesach eve in 1943, my father, Staff Sergeant Barney E. Miller, and two Jewish buddies serving with the Allied Forces, trucked into an unnamed city in North Africa for their three days off. It was already around six in the evening when they started looking for a synagogue in this city with 35,000 Jews. One of the people they stopped for directions turned out to be the chazzan of one of the town’s 14 synagogues.

In his April 22, 1943 letter, my father wrote, “The chazzan gave us front row seats at the services. The fervor the worshippers put into their services is really something to see — from the youngest to the oldest. After the services, these wonderful people were actually arguing and fighting to get the American soldiers to come home and eat and sleep with them.”

I learned about this wartime Pesach when I found a two-page letter, among many others, that my father sent home to his fiancé, Shirley Barish, during his three years of service with the Army Air Force. He started that letter by explaining that if his family wanted to know where he was, they’d have to refer to a previous letter. “At that time we were allowed to give names,” he explained, “but we aren’t allowed to now.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find that letter, which we found in a box among my late aunt’s family mementoes. By the time I read the letters, 70 years had passed since that seder. But I was still moved by the connection forged between my father, a Jew from a small town in the Midwest, and Jews in a city in North Africa on Pesach. I needed to discover the name of that censored city and maybe even find some of the descendants of those generous host families. And I did.

A Vibrant Community

The Jews of North Africa, thanks to the Allied Forces that had recently freed the region from the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, were able to freely celebrate Pesach that year. The Allied invasion of North Africa, called “Operation Torch,” saved approximately 400,000 Jews in French North Africa from mass deportations to extermination camps. Jewish soldiers from this liberating army were welcomed as heroes during the Pesach festivities, creating a different kind of battle, the battle over which family would have the honor of hosting these revered soldiers for the Seder.

I wondered if the mystery city might have been in Tunisia. I knew he had been stationed there at one point, and I wanted to know if he was hosted by a member of my son-in-law Haim’s extended family. Although he was born in Israel, Haim’s family was still in Tunisia during World War II. It’s comforting to know that my father was active in the battles that freed Tunisia and my future son-in-law’s family from Nazi rule. When my daughter, Sarit, met Haim, he introduced us to Tunisian and North African dishes — foods my father had likely never tasted.

Dad was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1912, but his family soon moved to Manhattan, Kansas, where for many years, they were the only Jewish family. My grandparents, who had emigrated from Eastern Europe as young teenagers, were not Orthodox but observed the holidays with traditional meals and some Yiddishkeit, though not necessarily by praying in synagogues. What he experienced in North Africa was nothing like back home.

“They [the worshippers] were in a variety of dress. One with overalls, some in regular business suits, some in hats and some in yarmulkes, some in wing collars with derbies and some in the native bloomer-type of pants with the red hats (Shriners type).” Regardless of attire, he pointed out that “they were all praying hard. They went through things that I have never seen or heard of and with the excitement of a crowd at a Nebraska-Minnesota football game!”

The family of the chazzan won the fight to host the soldiers. They had the respect of the community with three generations of chazzanim: His father was the “chief chazzan of the city,” and a younger brother was also an aspiring chazzan. “What a gathering at the house. I still don’t know where one family ended and the other began,” my father wrote.

Dozens of aunts, uncles and children welcomed them into a home so different from their own, yet here was the Seder just like back home — almost. “The table was about a foot above the level of the floor,” he wrote. “We were told to take off our shoes — they had their shoes and stockings off. We sat on the floor around the table.

“The grandfather was head man [leader of the Seder]. He is partially blind. Those kids certainly knew the Seder. They practically used no books at all. Oh, how they went at it! One seven-year-old boy was tops. He asked the Four Questions. After a time, the wine got to be too much for him, and he passed out like a light. Boy was he drunk.”

My father and his buddies must have missed the aromas of the Ashkenazi dishes, matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, brisket and, of course, the stinging aroma of fresh horseradish. (North African cuisine is known for its spices, such as cumin, cardamon, cinnamon and turmeric.) Some things, however, are the same everywhere. “They had the piece of chicken, celery, lettuce, matzo, etc. in a large metal [seder] plate about 30 inches across,” he wrote.

But then, some mystifying additions. “At one time in the ceremony, they passed this plate around over the heads of the people. At one time the grandfather took the piece of chicken, shook it and then passed it around for all of us to shake. My father didn’t understand the meaning of that ritual and neither did I — yet, but we could both relate to the next one with the ten plagues. “They really got wound up when they were pouring the wine out of the glass and cursing Hitler and Co. …. Man, what spirit.”

Perhaps the biggest treat for the soldiers was the chance to sleep in real, soft beds for the first time in over five months, since Operation Torch. No less a luxury was the tray of coffee brought to their beds in the morning. “Yeah man,” he wrote.

The soldiers joined the family for morning services at the synagogue. For the evening services, a different family won the honor of taking them home for the second Seder. Now, they were prepared for the commotion of dozens of family members for the meal.

They stayed at the American Red Cross the second night because they didn’t want to impose on the community, which was clearly suffering economically. Although they didn’t want to offend anyone by offering money, Dad wanted to have something to hand out to the kids in the town. Forgetting about kashrut, he started handing out fruit flavored candies. He knew he had “screwed up big time” when the Jewish kids “turned them down in a hurry. But boy, they wanted those candies.” He did, however, succeed with the adults when he left cartons of cigarettes “scattered around.”

On Wednesday, before the noon pick-up time back to the base, Dad “splurged” by getting a haircut, shave and shampoo, all for thirty francs (sixty cents). He was looking his best in front of the Red Cross club when the Jewish community came to bid the soldiers farewell and good luck.

“The army was nice to us,” my father wrote. “Those encamped nearby were taken to the city by truck and those stationed farther out were flown in.” Apparently non-Jews knew a good thing when they saw it. “There were plenty of guys named ‘Murphy’ who rode in with us on the gravy train. They got wise to the fact that by answering ‘yes’ to the query of being Yiddish, they could get a good meal and a place to sleep!”

Rediscovering the Seder

During the Pesach holiday a few years ago, I became more curious about where my father’s seder had been. I had to solve this mystery.

I became more curious about where my father’s WWII seder had been.

I knew my father was attached to the Army Air Force 301^st Bomber Group, 352^nd Squadron. So I decided to look up the bomber group on the Internet. After some disappointing searches, I clicked on a link and found declassified documents detailing the whereabouts of the 301^st throughout the war. Every detail. I only had to match up the dates in his letters to the dates and names of cities of each deployment. I discovered where he had enlisted, which U.S. bases he had trained at, when and on which ship he was deployed to Europe — and the same for his return in 1945.

I discovered that although my father had indeed spent time in Tunisia, on this particular Pesach, he had been in Algeria. That was a start. I contacted the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv and from the details I gave them, it was clear that the mystery city was in Algeria: Constantine!

The museum put me in touch with Benyamin Meir Khalifa, a descendent of Constantine Jews. Benyamin, a young father of three living in Israel, has created a website dedicated to the heritage of the Jews of Constantine (https://constantine-minhagim.com/). The site includes music, liturgy and traditions of the community and, most importantly, the Pesach Haggadah. From Benyamin’s site, I learned the meaning of passing the plate. It comes directly from the Haggadah, under explanations in Magid.

 The plate is passed around three times over everyone’s head, preference being given to the wife to pass it over her husband’s head three times and to the single girls for luck in finding a groom. All the while participants are singing (at least three times or until the plate has been passed three times) “Yesterday we were slaves in Egypt and today we are free. Today we are here. Next year in Yerushalayim Habenuya.

Benyamin wrote about my father’s Pesach on the Facebook page for descendants of Constantine, explaining that I was looking for the families that had hosted American soldiers. There were immediate responses from several people who had been very young at the time but were old enough to remember the American soldiers in their homes or had heard the stories.

A few families sounded like they could have been the family, based on the chazzanim dynasty, the blind grandfather and memories of the time. One descendant still had a picture of one of “their” soldiers, and I was terribly disappointed that it wasn’t my father.

Apparently, the Jewish community had hosted many Jewish soldiers after the liberation, so Benyamin and I decided that the best way to possibly reach those families was for me to write a letter of appreciation and thanks from one descendent of the soldiers to descendants of the hosts. Benyamin translated the letter to French and posted it.

But even more rewarding than finding that lost community was the feeling of belonging and oneness that my father’s letter gave me, of how amazing we are as a people. The bond among the People of Israel unites us, meaning that an Ashkenazi Jew who was raised in a small Midwest American town with little formal Jewish education and an observant Sephardic family in the Western Desert of North Africa did, despite some cultural differences, find that their Jewish roots united them as one people.

Chag Sameach. 

Galia Miller Sprung, who moved to Israel in 1970 to become a pioneer farmer, is a retired high school teacher, writer and editor.