The Matzo Cover That Made 'Next Year in Jerusalem' More Than a Mantra

Every year at my family’s Passover seder, a special matzo cover decorates our table. To all appearances, this is a standard embroidered matzo cover, like those found in many Jewish homes. But it is anything but ordinary. This cover made its way from Jerusalem to Moscow and back again in the days before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The story of the matzo cover begins in January 1982, with several dozen “Seruvnikim,” activists who wanted to move to Israel during the Soviet period but were refused and sent to prison for their Zionist activity. A group of these individuals, many of them Hebrew teachers, sought to meet my father, Menachem Hacohen. A rabbi and Knesset member from Jerusalem, my father had arrived in Moscow with a delegation of left-wing Israelis, who had been invited by the Soviet government to get a first-hand impression of the regime’s “achievements.”

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