To the Editor:

The Jewish holiday of Passover is to have the first Seder this Wednesday night. Passover is a holiday of family bonding, ritual, songs, special food, and friendship and love.

This year my wife and I will have a “virtual” Seder using Zoom with our son and his family who live in Westchester, New York. It will be different. The Seder reading is from The Haggadah, which has an order of ritual and prayer.

This year, our family will add a prayer, just before the children who participate in the Seder ask the Four Questions, the “Mah Nishtanah.” We will raise our wine glasses and include a prayer to praise, applaud, and acknowledge all the heroic doctors, nurses, and hospital auxiliaries on duty in hospitals across America who are treating, rendering therapy, support, and healing to thousands of patients afflicted with the coronavirus. These health care providers are putting themselves and their bodies in danger, like the brave heroic Americans who fought and won the battle of Midway, the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, and other battles that kept our country safe and guaranteed our freedoms and our democracy.

These health care providers should be acknowledged with kudos, encomiums, and gratitude. Let us all pray, in our individual houses of worship, that whatever higher power to whom we pray protects and defends these brave, unselfish health care providers and gives them strength and energy to complete and fulfill their mission with success.

In Hebrew there is a salutation, Yasher Koach: May you have strength! And, let us all say Amen! Thank you.

Howard W. Silbersher 
Governors Lane