23/4/00

Kosher birds

    While you were hunting down the last atoms of hametz, Rabbi Avshalom Katzir was just starting his Pessah cleaning. When you finally put down the shmatte, impressed with yourself for having scoured an entire home, Katzir got going. His task: Pessah-cleaning the El Al fleet.
    In a frenzied 19-hour period at Ben-Gurion Airport, from 4 p.m. Tuesday to 11 a.m. Wednesday, 31 El Al birds were blitz-shpritzed with oven spray and sucked out with vacuum cleaners. Of course, it wasn't as simple as all that: the planes were scattered all over the world.
    "It's like a carwash," said Katzir, the airline's rabbi, as he sped off to the next incoming flight. His crew of yeshiva volunteers swooped on each plane as they arrived from Amsterdam or Bangkok or New York. They did their thing and the koshered planes were off again for Bombay or Madrid or Hong Kong. 
    A lickety-split operation like this -- scheduling each plane's arrival at timely intervals -- is complicated enough, but at the last minute they ran into a hitch: a wildcat strike of airport refuelers forced some of the flights to be diverted for tanking up before arriving at Lod. Catastrophe? Nah. El Al Spokesman Nachman Kleiman barely shrugged. The mission, he assured, will be accomplished. "But we have to cut down on ground-time. The cleaning will have to be done faster."
    (Far more critical is that the strikers nearly prevented two newspapermen from reporting this vital story. Accompanied by Steve Lipman of the New York Jewish Week, I had to zigzag through a convoy of crawling refueling trucks snarling traffic on the way to the airport.)

A 737 touched down. Katzir's yeshiva boys grabbed their pails, cloths and Easy Off Heavy Duty Oven Cleaner. Close behind was Kleiman, driving his two journalists to witness the operation. But we got lost. This was Kleiman's airport and he got lost!
    It was the kookiest ride I've ever experienced. Traffic on the tarmac includes an array of bizarre vehicles, mobile staircases, and not a few inching aircraft. Only the aircraft have undisputed right-of-way. Without signs and traffic lights sticking out of the pavement, the rules of the road here are apparently intuitive. 
    Kleiman pulled up to one plane. "I think this is the aircraft we want," he mumbled. He checked its "name" on the side. "No, not EAE, that's not it. Where the heck did my plane disappear to? I swear to God I lost a plane."
    Lipman: "Is it a 747?"
    Kleiman: "No, we're looking for a 737, it's a smaller one.
    Lipman: "Oh, I've lost one of those, many times. Just last week I lost a 737."
    Kleiman: "Where did it go? I saw it going in this direction, I can't understand where it is. I see a plane, maybe ... nah. I thought he said it was EAE."
    So he stopped and asked someone, just like anyone would do when lost in the city. "Did you see a bunch of yeshiva guys getting on a plane? We're lost." The passerby shrugged. 
    Lipman: "What a scream. How often do you get lost in an airport?!"
    Kleiman: "Y'know, they may have gone to the other side of the airport." He called Katzir. "Where are you?"
    Katzir: "Where are you?"
    "Which plane are the boys doing?"
    "EKA."
    "Aha! EKA! We're on our way." We zigzagged through more weird traffic to the other side of the airport where, as Kleiman suspected, EKA was parked. "That little sucker was hiding from us," he explained lamely, and then shouted out his window at the truant aircraft: "You thought I wouldn't find you, huh?"
    It was all perfectly understandable: his airplane was parked behind a bigger Ukrainian plane, blocking our view, which can happen to anyone.

EKA came in from BUD (airport parlance for Budapest) an hour late, was cleaned, refueled and loaded up again, then took off for KBP (Kiev) fully Passoverized.
    The yeshiva boys, organized into three shifts of four, waited for the next flight. Their supervisor, Asher Krimolovsky, shouted into his walkie-talkie above the deafening din of immense turbo engines: "Ofer, you hear me? We just finished EKA, take the crew to EBS, then EAB. Check what's with ELC. Over."
    His crews are responsible only for the ovens. The regular cleaning staff does the passenger area, extra-meticulously for Pessah, but in fact, except for where the food is prepared, the planes are not strictly kosher-l'Pessah. Traditional rituals, such as the ceremonial search for the last crumb with feather and candle, are not done. Katzir said that even the most steadfast of haredim accept this.
     One of the planes (it could have been EBI or EAA, I can't be sure, they all look the same to me) was heading for Nairobi with a gift of -- what else? -- matza. "We're sending about 50 pounds," Kleiman explained. "There's a black community in Uganda, about 500 people, claiming to be Jews. They had a  famine there, and they couldn't grow the wheat to make their own matzot."
    Another of Kleiman's big toys couldn't make it home in time for Pessah, so it was cleaned in Newark, the only one of El Al's fleet of 32 that got scrubbed down abroad.
    EBS came in from BRU (Brussels), and even before all 167 passengers were off, the Lod Squad was on with their vacuum cleaners, and the yeshiva volunteers with their Easy Off.
    What a shambles. There were I don't know how many tons of hametzdik garbage strewn about, and there was a nauseating stench of leavened food. (It's a smell you only notice this time of year.)
    In the kitchen, the ovens were opened and dozens of still-warm bread rolls tumbled out.
    "Y'see?" Katzir said triumphantly.
    I saw.
    Not two hours later, EBS was airborne again for MAD(rid). But if any of its 123 passengers gave a silent prayer for the competence of the crew, it was most probably for the pilots, and not the cleaners.