Article written for Carleton University’s J-School in the spring of 2023

[Unpublished]

Merav Luz was in the midst of cooking her Passover staples in preparation for the first night of the holiday. The seder, a special dinner to kickstart the revisiting of the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt, was to take place that same night. As the ongoing ice storm pelted at her windows, Luz carried on stirring her fragrant Maztah ball soup as it sat bubbling on the stove — until her house went dark.

“All I was thinking about was, ‘oh my god, I’m hosting tonight, the guests are on the way and my food is half cooked,’ ” she says. “I think it was around three and everyone was coming for six. So, I was in my final preparation, like, cooking last minute things in the oven and then everything just shut off.”

What did Merav and husband, Chris, do? They resorted to the time of their ancestors.

“I told [our guests] to come. We just had to do the seder in the dark with candlelight,” Merav says, looking back at Chris with an amused expression. “It was nice actually,” Chris chimes in. “It’s always nice to get together — it was just dark.”

Although their home’s electricity eventually resurged after three days, thousands of other households scattered across Montreal were not as lucky, with some still waiting for their power to return. Merav and Chris, who live in Île-Bizard on the West Island of Montreal, were amongst the over one million Hydro-Quebec customers who had lost power starting Wednesday afternoon.

Environment Canada issued a freezing rain warning a day prior, but no one anticipated the level of damage that would ensue. The storm, which began the morning of April 5 and garnered in intensity as the day progressed, showered approximately 40 millimetres of freezing rain until 8 pm that evening, while blowing down over 920 trees and 4,560 broken branches, according to security officials for The City of Montreal. Branches blown down by the storm even left a man in his 60s dead Thursday morning. The individual, who was located west of Montreal in the borough of Les Coteaux, was attempting to clear the tree in his backyard of such broken branches when he was struck.

Though the ice storm was nothing like the story of Exodus, it was clear it had wrecked havoc on Passover plans. Throughout the Montreal Jewish community, the running joke became the entanglement of reality with the story of Passover. According to the 2021 census published by Statistics Canada, 335,295 Canadians identify as Jewish, with approximately one-quarter of those Jews living in Montreal, just behind Toronto as the most populous in Jewish Canadians compared to the rest of the country. The outages had affected a strong demographic within the city’s mosaic of diverse communities in a single day.

“We were making jokes about the 10 punishments, and this was the 11th one,” says Merav.

Passover celebrates the liberation of Jewish slaves from the reins of the Pharaoh, with Moses sent as a messenger of G-d and guide to the land of Israel. Against the Pharaoh’s stubbornness to release the Jews, G-d sends down 10 plagues, eventually pushing the Egyptian ruler to submit to Moses’ request.

Very similarly to the part of the story during which Moses parts the Red Sea for the Jewish people to cross through to Israel, before the Egyptians could reach them, Merav and Chris had to deal with a different large body of water — a flood in their basement.

“We started to clean up after the seder and then we heard like a beep because we have … these water sensors in the basement, and we heard the noise,” explains Merav.

“There was a noise going off and I thought maybe the fridge was opened downstairs,” Chris continues. “I went down there in the basement. It’s all dark … and everything looks good, except when I took my first step onto the basement floor.”

Chris says he felt the four inches of water first, before he could process what had indeed happened. “There was cold. And that’s the shock — first of all, the coldness, and then also the fact that your whole basement’s flooded.”

Île-Bizard is separated by a river from other parts of the Montreal island, making their home prone to a flooding in the case of a storm like this one, says Chris. Additionally, with the ongoing power outage at the time, the couple’s electric pump system could no longer function.

“Usually what they [plumbers] do is they bring up diesel pump. So, a diesel-powered pump that pumps everything up,” he explained. “They were about four hours too late. And everything came up very quickly. Even though I have a sewer backup valve, the pressure was so much, it went right through it.”

In an interview with CTV News, president of the Montreal-based flood and disaster recovery company Renovco, Walter Assi explained the influx of calls they have been receiving due to the number of floodings across the city. “We’ve been getting all sorts of different types of disasters because of what people are doing to try to cope with what’s happening,” he said, “but the biggest number of calls we’ve been getting is sump pump failures due to electricity and then their basements are getting flooded.”

“And now it’s a freaking mess because I have to deal with flooring, I have to cut the drywall, I have to take out insulation.” Merav dryly chuckles as her husband recalls the aftermath of the flooding. “It’s probably going to take maybe a month and a half and is probably about $30,000 worth of damage.”

Not only was there physical damage done to their basement, but Chris recalls some of the personal possessions ruined in the flooding. “I took a video of everything and everything that was floating, like my boots were down there floating around,” he says. “There was a stereo there, books, memorabilia … Yeah, a lot of things.”

While Merav and Chris sat around their Seder table, illuminated by candlelight in the darkness of their home, Rabbi Josh Berkowicz led a public Seder at the synagogue Rohr Chabad in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood, having sent out a mass email Wednesday at 7 pm, inviting anyone who was left without a Seder due to the outages.

“As the holiday was coming in, and cancellations, what was going on, we decided to say, you know, ‘hey, we have also food, we have a few cancellations and we have extra food if anybody wants to come to show up,” he says.

Rabbi Josh says he didn’t want to see this period of time as something negative, but instead, as a time that brought the community together. “it’s not fair to spur an existential crisis unnecessarily because it created a lot of opportunity for people to give, for people to help and for people to be supportive and for people to feel together so everything has a silver lining to it.”

Regarding the comparison to the story of Passover, Rabbi Josh looks back at the hardship the Jewish community has faced for centuries. “Historically there’s a lot worse that has happened in Passover history,” he says, laughing. “Jewish history, you know, this is a very small quantity in comparison to what our ancestors have gone through. So, you know, we had to keep that in perspective.”

Merav describes similar sentiments to the Rabbi regarding individuals within the Jewish community helping one another. “I think people are very generous, very helpful, very caring, and they were just encouraging each other and if they had power, they opened their home for strangers to come and get a hot meal and coffee or charge their phone,” she says. “I think that’s what’s important — to help each other and just be there for each other in times of crisis, in times of need.”