Destination Pesach:
There Will be Food
MATT SILVER | JE STAFF
Editor’s note: Th is article was written prior to the spate
of coronavirus-related travel cancellations, which have
included Passover-related trips.

P Sometimes dessert stations come with fruit sculptures. The buff et at
the Aidmans’ hotel included hot and cold foods, omelet stations, juice
bars and caramelized banana waffl es. “Much fancier than anything I would
have served at home,” Ayala Aidman said.

Courtesy of Ayala Aidman
16 MARCH 26, 2020
MAZEL TOV!
assover can be an ordeal. Th e mandate to scrub
every corner of the house clean of chametz can
feel like the 11th plague, the one that’s persisted
unmercifully into modernity — and that’s not even taking
the seders themselves into account.

For some, the burden can feel so great that fl ies and
pestilence begin to seem like a vacation by comparison.

Vacation ... now there’s an idea.

What if I told you about a place where all the cooking
and cleaning and top-to-bottom koshering of everything
would be taken care of for you? No fl ies, no pestilence, no
contemplating the irony of celebrating deliverance while
in thrall to a diff erent, domestic oppressor.

All that’s required is casting the convention of the
dining room seder aside in favor of a destination Pesach.

Combining Passover with a vacation isn’t a new
concept, but the concept, in the spirit of American free
enterprise, has gone grander — the food, the amenities,
the excursions, the entertainment and, of course, the
price tag.

But while the fi ve-star options attract the most press —
and for those who indulge in them the most Jew-on-Jew
scorn — the reality is that Passover resorts are not just for
the rich. Like virtually every other segment of the service
sector, destination Passovers present to the consumer a
system of tiered luxury.

If living your best Pesach means not only eating
gourmet kosher cuisine prepared by celebrity chefs but
also sharing an aft er-seder drink and intellectual sparring
session with Alan Dershowitz, then Kosherica’s program-
ming might be for you.

Even the most pared-down of Kosherica’s off erings
for Passover 2020, at the Hyatt Regency Grand Reserve,
a fi ve-star resort on Coco Beach in Puerto Rico, includes
constantly available kosher barbecue and Chinese food
and as much golf as any one human could dream of
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM