The thousands of tourists wandering around every evening on the famous Chaweng Boulevard on the Thai Island of Koh Samui were evidently puzzled at the goings-on in a large three-story office building located at the center of the crowded boulevard. In between the stalls of jeans and T-shirts, the restaurants, the bars, the massage dens and the thousands of street peddlers, there stands the center of the Chabad movement, the likes of which are scattered by the hundreds throughout the world. Since the early evening hours, hundreds of people of all ages, most of them clad in white shirts and wearing a curious piece of cloth on their head, were flocking into the building.
That piece of cloth is a skullcap, called a Kippa, traditionally adorning the heads of Orthodox Jews, and the event they were about to attend was the Passover Seder, the Passover being the most formative of Jewish holidays — the symbol of the Israelites deliverance from slavery to freedom and of the exodus from Egypt and return to the Promised Land. The Passover Seder was celebrated that night in Koh Samui with great pomp and ceremony amid the sweaty, noisy, colorful and enchanting Thai medley that attracts millions of tourists each year to this magnificent land of many islands. The majority of the Israelis who attended the Passover Seder in Koh Samui are not observant Jews; nevertheless, they did not want to miss the event that night, which for every Israeli represents the values of family, unity and freedom.
