Aaron at Beit T'Shuvah

This year's seder will resonate with meaning for Aaron (not his real name), a recovering gambling and drug addict in his 20's. "It will remind me of the slave I have been to my addictions, and how easily I can become one again," he says.

Aaron, a yeshiva student raised in a Modern Orthodox home, was smoking pot every day by the time he was 15. At 18, he chanced to win $13,000 in the lottery. "I proceeded to spend most of it on cocaine," he recalls. His gambling addiction was off and running.

During a recent interview, Aaron, now a resident at Gateways Beit T'Shuvah, the halfway house for recovering Jewish addicts in Los Angeles, described the lowest moments of his life as an addict. There was the time he sold "anything that wasn't nailed down" in his parents' home to play the card tables at the all-night casino in Commerce. His folks were on vacation, he says, and Aaron didn't bother to pick them up at the airport. "When they got home, they found the pawn slips on the table and a letter saying they would never have to see me again,'" he says.

While working at a restaurant, Aaron stole from the cash register and the pushke (donation box); while working as a bookkeeper, he wrote $20,000 in fraudulent checks and was convicted on theft charges in the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, he continued gambling and eventually he was spending all night at the casino, sleeping only an hour before going in to work the next day. Often, he had to beg for bus fare to make the ride home in the early morning; ultimately, he lost his car, girlfriend and apartment. For a time, he slept on a bus bench.

Only at his lowest point did he admit he was an addict; he finally moved into Beit T'Shuvah, a beneficiary agency of The Jewish Federation, in January. Gambling, he realized, was as mind-altering as drugs; a means for him to escape the pain caused by feelings of emptiness and loneliness.

Over the past few weeks at Beit T'Shuvah, as Aaron has been studying the book of Exodus in his daily Torah class, he has strongly identified with the powerful story of the Jews fleeing Egypt. "We talk about freedom from bondage -- bondage being our addictions," he says. "When you're an addict, you serve your addiction as your master. But I feel that while I have been rescued, I am not yet free. To not gamble or use drugs is easy. To stay sober is hard."

Russian émigrés Anna and Leonid Starobykhovskaya

Anna Starobykhovskaya

"Passover is a holiday for freedom and I will feel more free on this day," says Anna Starobykhovskaya, 27, a Russian émigré who arrived in Los Angeles with her husband, Leonid, six months ago. "I will think about what happened to me when I came to this country and why I chose to come here."

Starobykhovskaya, in a way, is fulfilling her late father's dream. Two decades ago, he twice applied for permission to come to America and was twice denied. Unable to receive proper medical care for his advancing illnesses, he died young, she says.

Starobykhovskaya applied to emigrate in 1994, but for her the decision was difficult. After all, she had a good job teaching elementary school, a comfortable apartment in Moscow, a dacha (country home), a car and plenty of friends. But when she discovered she was pregnant last year, her vision suddenly cleared. All at once, the simmering anti-Semitism and tenuous politics of post-Communist Russia seemed ominous, forbidding. "I wanted to give life to my baby in a free country," she says.

Yet when Starobykhovskaya arrived in Los Angeles with Leonid, 34, on Sept. 4, 1999, she felt like a stranger in a strange land. She remembers her first glimpse of the one-bedroom apartment her uncle had rented her in North Hollywood: bleak, white walls and a bare mattress on the floor. The heat, the language, the food was foreign to Starobykhovskaya, who received a rude shock while watching the TV news not long thereafter. The television screen flashed an image of a demolished Moscow apartment building, the target of a terrorist bombing. The building, she realized with a start, was located across the street from her mother's flat. "I was terrified," recalls Starobykhovskaya, who began to hemorrhage from the stress.

When the bleeding threatened her pregnancy, another shock was in store for the Russian: a paperwork error meant that she had no medical insurance for three months. The emergency room bill was $1,500, an impossible fee for the new émigrés.

Then came the first of many blessings Starobykhovskaya was to encounter in her new country. Jewish Family Service, a beneficiary agency of The Jewish Federation, helped the couple pay the emergency room bill; Starobykhovskaya's mother emigrated to Los Angeles two months ago, and Jewish Vocational Service, a beneficiary agency of the Federation, recently helped Leonid secure a decent driving job. The part-time position pays $800 per month -- not a lot considering that the couple's rent is $700 per month. "But we can see opportunities," Starobykhovskaya says, in her quiet but fiercely determined manner. "In this country, if you want it, you can do it."

To that end, Starobykhovskaya, who will celebrate Passover at her aunt's home this year, is diligently studying English and ultimately hopes to pass the exam that will allow her to teach in the public schools. She is cramming for her driver's test, which she will attempt this week. And recently, she and Leonid celebrated the bris of their infant son, who is named after Starobykhovskaya's late father, Efim; the boy is fulfilling his grandfather's dream of life in a new country.

Starobykhovskaya gazed at the baby, who was contentedly sleeping in his hand-me-down crib. "He's an American citizen," she said, proudly. "He is a free man."

Rabbi Edward and Margie Zerin

Rabbi Edward Zerin

"This whole year has been an Egypt experience," says Rabbi Edward Zerin, who has found himself wandering in a wilderness as vast as the one traversed by the Biblical Israelites.

His journey began with an ominous telephone call from a sheriff's deputy on Dec. 22, 1998. "Your wife has had an accident," the deputy said. "You'd better come to the hospital."

Zerin, who will be 80 next month, wasn't initially alarmed. His wife, Marjory, an experienced horseback rider, often trekked into the Santa Monica mountains with her chestnut-colored mare, Fancy. But on that day, Fancy had fallen, and Margie had hit her head hard on the ground. When Zerin arrived at the emergency room, he found her ashen-faced, immobile, unconscious. Margie was brain-damaged, the doctors said. "They made no promises," the rabbi recalls. "All they were concerned about was keeping her alive."

Previously, the couple had been "close, so happily close," Zerin, an accomplished author and psychotherapist, told The Journal. Engaged just nine days after they met in 1946, husband and wife together founded a family therapy clinic and traveled the world lecturing about their model of stress management.

For six weeks after her accident, Margie languished in a coma. Zerin, always at her side, never lost hope. "She was in the ICU when I saw her first movement," he says. "She wiggled her left big toe, and I almost screamed with excitement."

But the first Passover came and went with Margie still in the hospital, and Zerin struggled with HMO officials he felt were as concerned with bottom-line economics as Pharaoh. When the insurance money dwindled, he struggled to find the money to pay for 'round-the-clock home nursing care for Margie, who was still "incontinent and unable to get out of bed on her own," Zerin recalls.

What hurt the most was the loss of his wife, of the Margie he had known and loved. "What I've most cried about is not so much her physical disabilities," he says. "I can push a wheelchair, but it's much harder to cope with the lack of companionship."

Yet as Passover approaches this year, Zerin is experiencing a new hope. During the past three weeks, Margie has displayed almost miraculous improvement, advances that have surprised even her doctors. She has begun transferring herself from her bed to her wheelchair; she reads and speaks on the telephone and has had some "beautiful conversations" with her husband.

"I'm so grateful that I can see a light at the end of the tunnel," Zerin says. "My biggest fear is that Margie will have to go into a nursing home, and I know she would just give up and die there within a year. But when I see all her improvements I think that she may never need to be placed in an institution. As long as Margie is at home, I'm convinced she'll continue to grow."