It was a Passover Seder, led by two men with three murders between them. At this ritual meal, the door was not left open for the prophet Elijah, for fear that the guests might flee. All were inmates at Green Haven, the maximum security prison.

One of the Seder's leaders, Yakov Benshimon, 53, who is serving 25 years to life for murder, went through a variant of the traditional holiday preparations. He cleaned his home, though it was a cell, and he did the same with the kosher kitchen, using a blowtorch made available by the warden to sterilize the utensils.

Passover unites Jews all over the world, in widely different circumstances, even those who have been removed from society. On Tuesday night, some of them took their place around the traditional lamb shank and bitter herbs at a horseshoe-shaped table here in Green Haven, with a higher percentage of inmates serving life sentences than in any other state prison, including Attica.

Of the more than 22,000 inmates in New York State maximum security prisons, only 529, or 2.4 percent, are Jewish. But Green Haven, in Dutchess County, is a destination point for many of them -- a sort of Boca behind bars, the joke goes -- because of its standing as the only state prison to offer three hot kosher meals a day.