Lions and Tigers and Sidelocks, Oh My!

Three years ago I read an article in the New York Times about the Ringling Brothers Circus going Kosher for Pesach. I can’t link to the full article anymore because you need to be a TimesSelect member to read it, but here are some highlights:

With Cotton Candy And Potato Kugel, A 3-Ring Passover By JOSEPH BERGER Published: April 9, 2004 Here's how to make the circus kosher for Passover: Sell hot dogs without rolls and buy two brand-new cotton candy machines — uncontaminated by any leavened products — so thousands of observant Jewish children can have this circus treat. Insist there be no female performers, including the Lycra-clad star aerialist and horse trainer Sylvia Zerbini, a k a the Circus Siren, since the most rigorously observant Jews require modest dress of women. That's how an Orthodox group in Brooklyn made it possible yesterday for 19,000 men, women and children to exult in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus at the Garden, and fulfill the Torah commandment to be joyful on Passover. It was Ringling Brothers' first kosher performance. But was it a real circus without the Circus Siren? ''It's not because we don't like ladies,'' said Rabbi Raphael Wallerstein, a yeshiva principal in Brooklyn who has become the reigning impresario of such Orthodox holiday events. ''I'm married with 13 children and over 30 grandchildren. We love ladies. It's out of respect for them.'' The Greatest Show on Earth had its ethnic flourishes. The band started the afternoon by playing ''Dayenu,'' a rousing song at the Passover Seder that children love. And David Larible, the master clown they call the Prince of Laughter, wore a yarmulke to perform a miracle that more than one youngster must have thought was right up there with the parting of the Red Sea and the Ten Plagues: he turned another performer into a goat for several heart-stopping seconds. But mostly the children shrieked, gasped, guffawed and gazed in wonder like all children who experience a circus, maybe more so because most of these children don't have televisions and have never even seen a circus program. ''It was very scary,'' said Lazer Schlesinger, a 12-year-old from Flatbush with side curls, after seeing the lion tamer, Jason Peters, put his head in a lion's mouth. ''I was scared he was going to rip him up and eat him.'' The circus also agreed to the special accommodations, letting the organizers bring in their own food, including potato kugel, and reserve areas in the Garden for those men and women who want to sit only among members of their own sex. Circus officials said they had performed for private groups before, but that yesterday's show was the first in the circus's 134-year history that has restricted female performers. Rabbi Wallerstein also asked that the music be less hard-driving and that Crazy Wilson Dominguez, who crosses himself as he begins his gravity-defying walk on the whirling Pendulum of Pandemonium, do so out of audience view. Tim Holst, Ringling Brothers' vice president for talent productions, said that as a result of these requests, the show had to be restaged in spots and extra rehearsals held. But the performers, he said, were ''very respectful to the requests of this audience.'' The Torah commands Jews to enjoy themselves on Passover and two other festivals. During the four intermediate days of the eight-day Passover holiday, when they can travel and spend freely, Hasidic and other rigorously Orthodox Jewish families stream through the Bronx Zoo, ride bicycles and navigate motorized sailboats in Central Park, fill seats at the baseball stadiums and frolic through the region's most adventuresome amusement parks. But there probably has been no holiday event on the scale of yesterday's extravaganza.

Okay, so a Kosher for Passover circus is pretty cool, but I can’t find any mention of it recurring this year. To be honest, though, I’m still recovering from the circuses that were my family’s seders, which included, among other things, Passover Plagues masks, repeated viewings of The Animated Haggadah, and a carbon monoxide scare which summoned a bunch of firemen who walked around my grandmother’s house waving sensors around and telling us to open windows and go to the hospital if we got headaches that wouldn’t go away. Dayenu is right.