In recent years, the co-mingling of the sexes has become a major source of tension on flights to and from Israel. Some very religious men are being seated next to women to whom they are not married or related, which necessitates an extended game of musical chairs before take-off. (Never mind the departure time, modesty trumps timeliness. Always.)

Now Israel’s national airline, EL AL, has pledged its commitment to its passengers spiritual safety in a new in-flight video. Never again, thank God, will a man be forced to sit next to a pesky little woman for several hours at a time. Effective immediately, every aircraft will be equipped with a “male congregation area”—and if a male passenger absolutely must sit next to a woman, he may avail himself of the use of a transparent full body protection vest to keep the lady-cooties at bay. (Added bonus: Ebola protection.) There’s even a shofar for attracting attention in the event of a safety breach. So innovative! (They don’t call Israel the “Start-Up Nation” for nothing, right?)

Read more about this ingenious Israeli solution over at our sister-site, Tablet Magazine.

The In-Flight Safety Video El Al Should Show from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

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We were two would-be vagabonds, Anna and I, traipsing our way up the Pacific Northwest to satisfy a rather urgent sense of wanderlust, charged by equal parts restlessness and East Coast disillusionment. This was in Spring 2013, around the time that Didion-inspired “Goodbye to All That” anthology was published; I had only just graduated from college but already felt worldly enough to dismiss New York outright as “not really my scene” (though, wherever that scene may be, I still do not know).

Anna, always resourceful in matters of being young and broke, took the liberty of contacting some friends-of-friends she knew from her days as a Moishe House resident to find a place for us to crash for the duration of our trip. Moishe House, for the unacquainted, is a non-denominational organization that funds groups of Jewish 20-somethings to live together and host events in their area, with the intention of fostering a sense of Jewish community and identity. We had stayed at MoHo San Francisco the previous year and, having had a fantastic time, decided to give it another shot. Thus, housemates in Portland and Vancouver woke to emails from two spunky young New York women asking if they’d be willing to put us up for a couple nights. And wouldn’t you know it, they were.

Couchsurfing via Moishe House (let’s call it Moishe-surfing) came to be my favorite means of travel. Hotels are sterile and expensive. Hostels are hit-or-miss. A Moishe House has the added bonus of being a community center of sorts—people pass in and out all the time, events take place that are genuinely interesting, and housemates are remarkably sociable (they kind of have to be). And of course, there’s the Jewish angle: each Moishe House provides a glimpse into the Jewish character of its city, from a fun, Millennial point-of-view.

My first West Coast MoHo experience was a candlelit meditation session in San Francisco in April 2012. Anna and I, two secular Russian Jews reared on good old-fashioned immigrant cynicism, reveled in the energy of the event, which was spiritual yet atheist-friendly. Chakras may or may not have been opened. Regardless, I had a good time.

The following April, we embarked on our journey up the Pacific Northwest, sampling a great deal of exceptional coffee along the way. Our first stop was MoHo Portland, to greet our hosts and engage in the first of many rounds of Jewish geography. Unsurprisingly, the network is vastly interconnected—every introduction revealed a smattering of mutual Facebook friends acquired from previous MoHo visits. At the House, we explored the joy of kosher veganism (or rather, vegan kosherism). I tried chia seeds for the first time and jammed with an observant Jew. Frolicking through the temperate rain of northern Oregon, we bonded over our mutual love of falafel and shakshuka, made with free-range eggs or otherwise.

We stopped for two nights with a friend in Seattle (which has no Moishe House right now) and made our way across the Canadian border, into the mountain-hedged city of Vancouver. Once settled in the House, we found ourselves in great company: two Israelis taking a year abroad had made MoHo Vancouver their home-away-from-home, coinciding with our stay. In customary Israeli fashion, we were greeted warmly and loudly. Yehuda and Avior initiated our stay in Canada with song and smoke. Drinks were had and YouTube music exchanged. We also compared Jewfros (Yehuda’s corkscrew mane was far superior to my own). Soon, it was revealed that Anna and I were, in fact, two Rusim: “And did you know, Avior, that balagan is a Russian word?”

My Moishe expeditions would eventually take me to the other side of the world. A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of staying in MoHo Moscow, where three charming young women from Belarus and Russia opened their home to me and a friend. Like the other Houses I’d stayed in, their apartment was adorned with Judaica, but here it seemed a bit more earnest. The sense of Jewish pride was not subtle or implicit, but overt. It reflected a trend I’d witnessed in Jewish communities elsewhere in Russia: those who hadn’t been able to practice Judaism for however many generations now relished the opportunity to make up for lost time.

It was greatly heartening that, thousands of miles away from my country, I was taken in by perfect strangers who hosted me like one of their own. In 63 cities around the world, I can find a home with that familiar Moishe House plaque on its walls, show up at an event, and be welcomed. If you ask me, that’s a pretty good incentive to travel—as if you needed any more.

Samantha Shokin is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

(Images: supplied by the author.)

Related: “The Refusenik That Wasn’t”: My parents fled the culture of the USSR. So why am I drawn to it?

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But he would not take no for an answer. So there I sat, drinking chai and chatting with my new friend Peri, the Pakistani owner of one of my favorite Indian restaurants in Jakarta. Several sips into our conversation, I asked Peri if he knew of a print shop nearby as I still needed to print the Haggadahs, or Seder booklets, we’d be using that night. “How much do you have to print?” he queried. I explained that I had to print 30 copies of a 26-page packet. “Oh, that’s fine—you’ll just use my printer.” My protestations proved futile. He led me to his office in the back of the restaurant, sat me at his desk, and directed me to use his printer. I pleaded with him to let me pay since I’d be using so much paper and ink. “You’ve obviously never met a Pakistani if you think I’m going to let you pay,” he quipped. He never even asked what I was printing. I wish I had told him.

If I had to sum up this year’s Seder in a word, it would be substitutes. The papadum was just the beginning. Jakarta is not exactly a haven for facilitating Jewish ritual. There is no Chabad here, no synagogue, no kosher meat, and certainly no matzo. But there was no way I was going to pass over Passover. Parsnips filled in for maror (sprinkle a bit of chili and your parsnips will go from mild to mind-blowing), lamb chop for shank bone (my mother approved!), water crackers for matzo meal, and halal meat for kosher.

Though many Jewish rituals have fallen to the wayside this year, my resolve to hold a Seder was borne of an ever growing desire to give voice and credence to a tradition and religion that is virtually absent here. Two days prior to the Seder, a couple of friends and I embarked on an adventure we dubbed “Find the Jews of Indonesia.” We devoted a day to winding our way through mountains in North Sulawesi in a quest to discover some of the only physical symbols of Judaism in Indonesia, hoping to speak with at least one or two of the 20 or so Jews left in this country of 240 million people. We were successful on one front but not the other.

Two hours after giving our driver the very specific directions of, “help us find orang yahudi” which may as well have been translated as “help us find a needle in a haystack,” we pulled up to a small, fairly inconspicuous structure with a sign in Hebrew and English that read Beit Knesset Shaar Hashamayim. But the gate was locked and the building shuttered. There were no signs of life. After inquiring with a neighbor nearby, it turns out the synagogue is rarely used—the Jews have moved to the city, she said.

We then resolved to find the 62 foot menorah erected on a mountaintop back in 2009 and paid for by the government of the North Minahasa regency. Again, we found the menorah but no Jews. At first, I was exhilarated to discover such obvious Jewish symbols in a country where it often feels Judaism has little to no place (dancing around the menorah to Fiddler on the Roof songs may have also contributed to the initial exhilaration). And yet, the structures seemed to mean little without people. A synagogue is simply a shell for communal spiritual cohesion, for gathering together in spiritual unison. Families are meant to gather around a menorah on Hanukkah and light the candles together, to share in the tradition that emanates from the flames—to sing and eat together. In that way, it was heartbreaking to come across these symbols and see them absent of people.

The Seder remedied that absence, if only for a night. Packed into the apartment of two dear friends, 21 people from all walks of life sat cross-legged on the floor and for six hours shared together in the retelling of the Exodus. Amid the most nontraditional of circumstances, a tradition unfolded. We read the four questions, drank four cups of wine, dipped parsley in saltwater, munched on charoset, opened the door for Elijah, ransacked the apartment in search of the afikoman, sang dayenu. But most importantly, we challenged notions of slavery, historical and modern, and the role of God in the epic. We each dug into the recesses of our backgrounds and personal histories to relate to the “wicked” child and questioned the roles of the oppressor and the oppressed.

Before the Seder began, I skyped with my mom as I prepared to substitute my Jakarta family for my American family. “Just remember who you are, Sarah” she said as I stood chopping walnuts for the charoset. In many ways, being in Indonesia, in a place so devoid of Judaism, where it’s often so easy to forget, urges me to do just that.

The views expressed above are the author’s own and do not represent those of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State.

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