I have very few Jewish friends at home and from college, but the second I stepped into Buenos Aires I have found that nearly every expat is a Jew. I started my first 5 weeks of living in Buenos Aires living in a Jewish neighborhood with an older Ashkanawshi woman and have gone on to discovering long lost relatives who came over from Germany during World War II. Anyways, my connection to Jewishness has grown since I've been here mostly due to proximity. It's been easy to rally people together to participate in all things Jewish. The Jews are proud to share their culture and holidays and the non-Jews are curious and eager to learn.
It's been a tradition to spend the day of Passover in the kitchen slicing and dicing the day away with my mother. This year I tackled my first seder for 12 people. With the help of my wonderfully talented gentile roommate we brought my mother's recipes to life and served a pretty outstanding dinner. Buenos Aires in one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, yet despite the Kosher McDonald's in the Abasto shopping center I had to go on a pretty extensive scavenger hunt to find traditional ingredients for the seder. We ended up buying cheap red wine to substitute for manchevitz and avoided gefilte fish altogether but were successful in finding matzoh and matzoh meal to make matzoh ball soup from scratch.
After a great service led by my friend Hannah, we dug into homemade macaroons and tubs of Freddo ice cream.
Although the best part was searching frantically through our tiny apartment tearing up nearly every room and crawl space to find the valuable piece of matzoh known as the afikoman.
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