When 20-year-old rabbinical students Mendel Kastel and Mendel Lipskier arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, on very short notice in April 1989, they knew they had their work cut out for them. But they were ready.

Preparing a large, communal Passover Seder is logistically challenging anywhere, but it’s especially daunting in Kathmandu, Nepal, where a mix of backpackers and professionals from all over Asia and the world have converged every year for the past 30 years for “The World’s Largest Seder.”

The two students, who were attending yeshivah in Australia, had to ensure that all spaces were thoroughly cleaned; utensils and stoves kashered; chametz (grain that has risen) sold or otherwise disposed of; food cooked; matzah and wine provided, and that every last Jew in the area was invited. Doing all that without precedent thousands of miles from the nearest Jewish community in a pre-Internet world, seemed almost impossible.

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Only a few weeks earlier, Israel’s Ambassador to Nepal, Shmuel Moyal, had hung up a sign-in sheet at a popular restaurant announcing a Seder at Israel’s embassy, expecting that 30 or 40 Israelis would attend. But when nearly 90 people signed up just three weeks before Passover, he turned to the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—for help.

“I sent a telegram to Rabbi Schneerson, who I knew from when I was a consul in New York,” Moyal told Chabad.org in 2011. The Rebbe sent word to the ambassador not to worry, that he would send rabbinical students to help.

Upon arriving in Kathmandu, Kastel, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., recalls seeing “cows walking around the streets, and all the water for drinking and cooking had to be boiled.” Getting the word out was even harder. Not only was there no Internet, “but even phone calls had to be scheduled in advance,” Kastel tells Chabad.org. Wanting to reach as many Jews as possible, the rabbinical students and some backpackers began making their own handwritten signs and hanging them up all over the city.

Before coming to Nepal, they hoped that they might be able to add to the 90 guests signed up by the Israeli embassy, and that 150 people might attend the Seder. But word spread quickly, and as the list of people signing up for the Seder on the bottom of big cardboard posters placed around Kathmandu began to overflow, it was apparent that many, many more wanted to come. Before long, it seemed that Jews from all over Asia, tourists and businesspeople alike, were heading to Kathmandu for the event.

Mendel Kastel arrives in Nepal in 1989.

First, they had to find a location for the meal. As there was no space large enough to hold a crowd of more than 100 strong, Kastel and Lipskier found a local establishment whose owner allowed them to host the Seder in its backyard. They bought all of the vegetables at the local market—buying almost everything available there—and then set about kashering the kitchen and building a brick oven in which to cook the food.

“Meanwhile, the expected number of guests kept growing,” recalls Kastel, “and the matzah, kosher wine and gefilte fish making its way from Israel was embargoed” because of a row between India and Nepal. There was another problem: They had no tables.

Advertising the Seder.

But the young rabbis continued to prevail.

The Israeli embassy helped the food shipment get through, and a tractor traveled two hours over mountain passes with a load of card tables, which were too small for Seder tables. A builder constructing a hotel loaned them all the doors to be laid atop the card tables and crates to make the tables larger.

On the Seder night, 500 Jews from far and wide—Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, South America and beyond—gathered in a backyard in Nepal to celebrate a 3,300-year-old ritual in the shadow of the world’s tallest mountains, under the light of a full moon, surrounded by hundreds of Nepalese lining the top of the walls wanting to see what the singing and cheering was all about.