This story is about a brother and a sister, Yosef Berger and Tovi Meirovizh, Israeli Jews who decided to spent their holiday, Pesah, in Dubrovnik. They arrived with an Israel tourist agency Tour-Plus to the hotel Rixos, together with about 470 other Jews coming from all around the world. During these days and due to its special guests, hotel and all its personnel are working under a special regime.
″We work in an agency Tour-Plus which organises holidays for Jewish people. Our method is to book a hotel and to re-arrange it according to Jewish rules. We came to Dubrovnik on the 1st of April and we prepared everything for our guests″ explaines Tovi Meirovizh, a mother two.. Her life, same as lives of 469 other guests is governed by customs.
″According to the Holy Bible, 3,000 years ago our people have been kept as slaves in Egypt. God has given us signs, telling us to leave Egypt before he punishes Egyptians. As we prepared to leave the Egypt soil, we left our bread behind. In honour of that day, today we don’t eat bread, pizza nor anything that contains flour and water. We don’t drink either beer nor any other alcoholic beverages. We only drink wine. – said Yosef the father of two children he raised in accordance with the customs. He explained how they spend the feast, Pesah.
– Our meals are very difficult to prepare. That is why we love to celebrate the Pesah somewhere in a hotel. Every year we go to another city. This year we found Rixos and Dubrovnik and we are delighted with it. We booked over 220 rooms for around 470 persons from Israel, America, United Kingdom, Belgium and other countries. All the guests agreed that Croatia and Croatian people are special and very kind. – said Yosef.
Jewish guests brought their food and drinks to Dubrovnik. Around 200 tons of food for ten days in the Pearl of Adriatic. During this time personnel of Rixos served them well with everything they wanted.
– Shabbat lasts from Friday evening to Saturday evening every week. During that time we are not allowed to work, use electricity, telephone or drive a car. Even this is very strange to other people, we are used to that. But this time everything was much easier to handle because people in Rixos helped us. They told us when to turn off the electricity and they authorized one person to operate an elevator for us while we were in that «silent time» – explained Tovi. He added that he only has words of praise for Dubrovnik and its hospitality.
