Chil­dren’s

ABC Passover Hunt

Til­da Bal­s­ley; Helen Poole, illus.

  • Review
By – July 12, 2016

Let­ters of the Eng­lish alpha­bet are put to use intro­duc­ing Passover con­cepts, such as matzah, wine, Egypt, fiery bush, and slav­ery, in this book for young lis­ten­ers and read­ers. Each of these con­cepts then has a ques­tion asked about it for the read­er to answer; every page has one item or top­ic rep­re­sent­ed in rhymes and illus­tra­tions. Inter­ac­tive and full col­or search­es take place for the sto­ry, foods, sym­bols, and cus­toms of the hol­i­day. Some of the pages show fam­i­ly mem­bers at the seder enjoy­ing the cel­e­bra­tion, while oth­ers show his­tor­i­cal scenes from the Bible sto­ry and Hag­gadah. An exam­ple: The page enti­tled Red Sea has As Jews crossed the Red Sea on dry land, what was Moses hold­ing in his hand?” accom­pa­nied by a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Moses in long flow­ing robe and san­dals, hold­ing both a staff and an umbrel­la. Humor­ous illus­tra­tions add to the text. The last page con­tains an infor­ma­tive para­graph about Passover and also the answer key to all the inter­ac­tive ques­tions. Jew­ish con­tent abounds throughout.

This book is par­tic­u­lar­ly good for chil­dren in preschool and ele­men­tary school who already have some knowl­edge of the Passover story.

Shelly Feit has an M.L.S. and a Sixth-year Spe­cial­ist’s Cer­tifi­cate in infor­ma­tion sci­ence. She is the library direc­tor and media spe­cial­ist at the Mori­ah School in Engle­wood, NJ.

Discussion Questions