The table was set with matzo, greens, bitter herbs, charoses and wine — grape juice, really — for the Seder.
Next, hands whisked away, temporarily, the festoons of Easter — the eggs, bunnies and chicks covering the walls of the Heritage Club senior living center in Greenwood Village. It was time Wednesday for a dozen elderly Jews to observe Passover, the holy days commemorating liberation of ancestors from bondage in Egypt.
In the days leading up to Passover, which began at sundown Wednesday, Jewish Family Service volunteers scrambled to 22 care centers in the Denver area to bring the Seder to the old, infirmed and isolated.
Para-chaplain Barb Hahn led an abbreviated but lively service at Heritage Club, as other para-chaplains did all across the metro area. Nursing-home kitchens did their best to provide some version of the traditional feast.
Donna Lutz, in her 18th year as Jewish Family Service coordinator of nursing-home outreach, laughed and said that sometimes one gets sour cream rather than Passover maror or horseradish, and braided challah rather than unleavened bread, but it’s OK.
“We go with it,” Lutz said. “If I don’t see a spiral-cut ham, we’re good.”
Lutz pulled out her guitar — named Frei lich, a Yiddish word for joyous — and before the Heritage Club Seder began, she offered a rousing chorus of the folk song “Oifn Pripitchik.”
Resident Jerry Ginsberg read many prayers in Hebrew. Everyone took turns reciting in Hebrew or English. All sang.
“Why is this night different from all other nights?” the reading goes.
The response: “We celebrate Passover because with a strong hand God brought us forth from Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
Heritage Club resident Rose Schein said she valued the Seder and counts on the monthly Sabbath services provided here by Jewish Family Service.
Jewish Family Service also keeps the faith at Yom Kippur and Hanukkah.
Throughout the year, Lutz, one thinly stretched rabbi, a community chaplain and a cadre of para-chaplains and other volunteers visit 125 to 150 clients at 42 sites. Some also visit hospitals, hospices and Denver clients’ own homes.
Lutz, a counselor and advocate for Jewish clients in nursing homes, has far-ranging and unpredictable duties.
Lutz once hitched a free ride on a small plane to a Fort Lyon facility in southeastern Colorado to deliver matzo, bagels and lox to one elderly Jewish woman. She spent the day with her.
The larger Jewish community is still here for these people, Lutz said, even if they are the solitary Jew in a place.
One nursing-home resident, despairing because it was impossible for her to keep a kosher diet in her nursing home, told Lutz: “I can’t live and I can’t die. I can’t die because God’s forgotten about me. God’s forgotten about me because I don’t eat kosher.”
A rabbi went to assure her God hadn’t lost track.
Lutz recalls one Hanukkah party she arranged at an Alzheimer’s disease care center. She walked into a room with five people. One woman was crying inconsolably. One man was snoring loudly. Another man had laid his head down on the table.
“I asked myself, ‘Why am I even here?’ ” Lutz said. But she pulled out her guitar and started singing an old song in Yiddish.
A man who hadn’t spoken to anyone in a year pulled himself up straight and joined her in singing.
“I was so choked up, I could barely go on,” Lutz said.
“At the end of the song, he said, ‘Again.’ “
