Israel in Full Swing for Pesach

Preparations are in full swing for the Passover holiday that begins at sundown today, Community seders have been arranged at absorption centers for immigrants who have no families in Israel. Foreign students studying at the Beit Midrash of the World Zionist Organization’s religious education department will conduct seders for soldiers at army camps.

Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren was “authorized” by the Finance Ministry to sell the State’s “hametz” (leavened material) to a Druse soldier today, thus symbolically ushering in the holiday. It will be repurchased, for the same nominal sum, after Passover.

Passover is the traditional time for house cleaning and housewives all over the country are busy washing, scrubbing and dusting. One unhappy result has been an increase of patients in hospital emergency rooms for treatment of dislocated limbs suffered in slips on wet floors or falls from ladders and an increase in cases of poisoning by cleaning fluids that were not kept out of the reach of children.

The tourism outlook this Passover is good, though not as good as in past seasons, Despite the renewed tension in the Middle East, most planes arriving at Ben Gurion Airport are filled to near capacity. By the seder night El Al will have brought more than 9000 passengers to Israel on 50 flights.

Hanoch Givton, director general of the Ministry of Tourism, reported that hotels in Tel Aviv and Haifa were 75-80 percent full and in Tiberias the occupancy rate was as high as 85 percent. Jerusalem hotels lagged with a 50 percent occupancy rate, although Givton said it was satisfactory. The King David Hotel, the oldest and most famous of Jerusalem’s top grade hostelries, ran an advertisement in yesterday’s newspapers announcing that “due to the early departure of a press group that accompanied Dr. Kissinger there are still a few rooms available for the seder night and the rest of the holiday.”