Passover

 A few things immediately come to mind when you think, "Passover seder": matzah, maror, charoset, four glasses of wine. But in "Seder.Table," a cool, stark and fascinating new photography exhibit at the 92nd Street Y, none of that matters. In fact, the artist, Galia Gur Zeev, while showing several plates, people around them, and a large wooden table, doesn't even show a crumb of food.

 This is the first Passover when Temia and her daughters won't be grinding wheat by hand and baking matzah in special wood-burning ovens, as they did in Yemen. Instead, they'll be tasting their first matzahs sold in a box, celebrating the holiday in their new homes in upstate Rockland County.

Sculptures and mirrors, coffins and sarcophagi lids are some of the artifacts of daily life — and death — that shaped the existence of the Jews in ancient Egypt, the freed slaves that seders around the Jewish world remember at Passover each year.

For many members of the Jewish community, preparation for the holiday begins weeks before Pesach, in shopping and cooking and attending lectures.

Some creative New Yorkers had the chance to prepare this spring a few stops from a No. 2 or 3 subway exit in central Brooklyn.

 So you think your Passover cleaning is tough.

“Before using the kitchen tables, they must undergo a thorough scrubbing, and be rinsed with scalding water. It was customary in England to lay them in fuller’s earth, which is not so well known here; so it would be advisable to have coarse cloths tacked on instead. The cisterns must be cleaned, and a piece of flannel put on the nozzle of the hydrant.”