For twenty-five years, Menachem Katz, an Orthodox rabbi in Miami Beach, has provided Jewish inmates with the means to celebrate Passover, a holiday that begins after sundown on April 8th and which marks the liberation of the Israelites from slavery following a series of ten plagues sent by God. There has always been a certain irony to the situation—prisoners celebrating their people’s freedom—but perhaps even more so this year, now that we are all trapped inside, hiding from an eleventh plague. In recent years, Passover has become a popular travel holiday, and tens of thousands have had their “Passover Programs” cancelled due to the coronavirus. Even Katz—who spends the days before Passover toiling away in a warehouse, preparing food and prayer books and informational DVDs to be shipped to some eight hundred prisons nationwide—had planned to celebrate in Turks and Caicos, where his daughter recently opened a Chabad house. “We are all in exile,” he said earlier this week. “Just as God took us out of Egypt, he will take us out of this exile, as well—the same thing with corona.”
Katz is the director of prison programs for the Aleph Institute, a Jewish nonprofit that, according to its Web site, assists “members of specific populations that are isolated from the regular community,” such as U.S. military personnel and the incarcerated. Federal prisons supply their inmates with kosher meals throughout the year, but only some state prisons cater to Jewish inmates’ dietary needs. Katz’s team supplements what is offered by the state prisons that provide kosher food, and sends full meals to the prisons that do not. For decades, Katz’s home state of Florida refused to give its inmates access to kosher meals, but, in 2012, he petitioned the state and won. He still visits the prisons on a weekly basis, in order to insure that the needs of their Jewish inmates are being met.
However, he hasn’t been able to visit since early March. Prisons are especially vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak, as the risk of community transmission is high. Many of the facilities that Katz serves are in a state of heightened lockdown. Moreover, several chaplains who run religious services inside the prisons, and who are typically Katz’s main points of contact, had called out sick, and so he’d been coördinating with each state’s Department of Corrections instead. This year, many of the prisons were starting with nothing; volunteer visits had been halted, and care packages from home had been nixed, leaving the institutions especially dependent on Katz for supplies. “I thought I’d have so much extra, but I’m scraping from the bottom of the barrel,” he said.
Two weeks before Passover, Katz was working at a warehouse just outside Newark, New Jersey, where he was in charge of a ten-man operation. In the eight-thousand-square-foot space—three hundred of which had been donated to his team, in the lead-up to the holiday—Katz tugged at his salt-and-pepper beard, which protruded from the bottom of an N95 face mask. He was nervous, for a whole slew of reasons. He was behind on orders, for one. And the workers were slowing. And his phone kept ringing.
At around 10 A.M., he answered a phone call from Yossi, the young man in charge of FedEx shipments, who had not yet shown up to work. Yossi said that he wasn’t feeling well.
“I need you to suck it up today,” Katz told him. “I could buy you sodas. I could buy you water? I don’t know what else to do. I have Tylenol for you—you want Tylenol? Hurry up.”
He began pacing the room, circling a conveyor belt that had been converted into a table and was littered with empty cardboard boxes. His team, a group of Latino men and women, packed the boxes, which, depending on each prison’s needs, varied in their contents and size. A basic seder-in-a-box consists of matzos, seder plates, grape juice, and Haggadahs—the books that set out the order of the fourteen-part seder—but prisons often ask Katz for special items, such as desserts. The workers packed chicken soup, beef-stuffed cabbage, and Alprose Swiss milk chocolate into one box; Jennies organic macaroons, Osem instant mashed potatoes, and squeeze packets of horseradish went in another.
That day, they were preparing boxes for dozens of prisons, such as the Jimmy Autry State Prison, in Georgia, the West Tennessee State Penitentiary, and the Central California Women’s Facility. Some of the boxes would go to military bases in Europe and the Middle East. “These packages are going to England,” Katz said, pointing at a stack of six boxes. “I sent them a package yesterday. Then they sent me an e-mail saying that they just got restricted to the base, and that whatever I sent wasn’t enough, and that I have to send more.” He stopped to inspect the shipping manifest. “Uno más,” he said to a young woman working on the line. “Vámonos.”
Katz picked up his phone and dialled the Orthodox Jewish trucking company that, later in the day, would pick up the packages and drop them off at a commissary, which would deliver them to prisons in the area. While Katz waited for an answer, he waved over Jesús, the warehouse foreman. “I’m calling from the Aleph Institute,” Katz said into the phone. He explained that when the trucks were on their way, a driver should call his team and give them a heads-up. “Let me give you the contact person,” he continued. “The first person you need to call is Jesús.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then, a question: “How do you spell that?”
Jesús burst out laughing. “J-E-S-U-S,” he said, loud enough for the person on the line to hear. “I’m here to save you, son.”
Silence. “Hello?” Katz asked. “Hello? Oh, you didn’t catch that?” He hung up. “Jewish companies,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Don’t know how to spell Jesus.” Then he ran to the other side of the warehouse—beyond his team’s designated space—where Yossi, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, slouched in a corner. His eyes were puffy, his face drawn into tired folds. A six-foot-high tower of Manischewitz matzo boxes loomed nearby.
“Do you want a seltzer?” Katz asked him.
“No, it’s fine,” Yossi said. “I have water.”
“If you want seltzer, I could buy you whatever you want out of the machine,” Katz said. “Here’s two Tylenol.”
Yossi swallowed the pills, and then Katz tore off again, back to the line of workers, shouting “Checking!” It was time for him to check the packages, which meant going through and making sure that the items in each box matched what the prisons and military bases had requested. Almost immediately, he found an error: a prison that had ordered grape-juice bottles had been given grape-juice boxes.
His phone rang again. “Hello?” he answered. “Thank God. What’s up? What is this about?” A muffled voice on the line sounded frantic. “Well, I have no control over your report date,” Katz said. “That’s between you and the judge and your lawyer. O.K. Take care.” He hung up and explained that a man he’d been assisting—a first-time offender who was out on bond—had pleaded guilty and was planning on turning himself in to the correctional facility. He’d called Katz seeking last-minute counsel. (Katz’s work in the prisons isn’t limited to feeding them; he works closely with the community of Jewish inmates nationwide, as their advocate on the outside.) “It never ends,” he said.
At noon, with four hours to go, hundreds of packages were still unpacked, unsent. The mood on the warehouse floor had also grown tense; the workers were wary of Yossi, who kept coughing, and had begun complaining about him to the floor manager, Jesús. Eventually, Jesús broached the topic with Katz. “The guy who was sitting down there, I don’t know if he is sick or something, but he’s been coughing and people are concerned now,” Jesús said.
