The Kaplan Collection brings Passover to life

• Published date: 26 April 2024
• Author: DAVID GEFFEN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Sarna points to the uniqueness of what the Kaplans have done. "Their collection, as a result, highlights wide-ranging facets of early American Jewish life, embracing social, political, economic, cultural, and religious history."

The Kaplans continue to add to the collection, which today has grown to 13,000 objects – paper and items of all types – and soon it will all be digitized. I met this special couple for the first time in 2003; we have met a few more times since my wife and I returned to Israel. My last words when visiting their home in Florida: I promised that I would see them again. In 2022, my son and I were in the US, and I kept my promise.

While visiting family in Florida, we made a special trip to see the Kaplans in their home north of Sarasota. What a wonderful reunion. They were, just as I recalled, always collecting.

A few minutes after we arrived, Arnold began to show me and my family members accompanying me new finds – documents and objects to be transported to a special permanent home at the University of Pennsylvania. I felt renewed seeing this couple – most unusual, dedicated, and philanthropic individuals.

In 2024, a Jewish and secular leap year, I decided it was an opportunity to focus on a few of the Passover-related objects in their collection.

The Kaplan Collection's Passover items

Making matzah was a delicate art in the 1850s, the decade before the Civil War. S.R. Cohen, located at the corner of Pike and Cherry streets in New York City, advertised in the weekly newspaper The Asmonean. The ad was illustrated with a drawing showing matzah being baked and produced in a matzah machine Cohen had made. In 1858, Doesticks – the pseudonym of the once-famed journalist and humorist Mortimer Neal Thomson – wrote a descriptive story titled "The Matzah Process," which was illustrated for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Surrounding the text were six images showing how matzah was made, how matzah meal was prepared from cracked matzah, and an image of people with their grocery baskets lined up to buy round matzah.

Sarna quotes from the description in the newspaper pointing to observance of the holiday with "punctillious exactitude by all, old and young, no matter how rich or poor." The matzah bakeries were situated in non-Jewish bakeries that Jews leased and transformed for Passover use.

"Every part of the machine that touches the bread is taken out, and others substituted that have never been used for anything else. Thus separate rollers...