Tonight, my family celebrated the first night of Passover with a seder for 12. It was smaller than usual, as four family members were half a world away, in Kazakhstan.

Hopefully, in six weeks or so, they will return with the newest member of our family, a 2-year-old girl.

Which begs the question: Who gets stuck with the four questions at next year's seder?

On a side note, it was the first time my sister led the family seder. She brought in her 21st-century haggadahs, which referenced not only the Jews' suffering in Egypt, but the Holocaust, the plight of Ethiopian Jews, and the civil rights fights of other peoples. One fact I noticed as I was reading a passage about the Holocaust: It was the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

According to the Web site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, "on April 19, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Seven hundred and fifty fighters fought the heavily armed and well-trained Germans. The ghetto fighters were able to hold out for nearly a month, but on May 16, 1943, the revolt ended. The Germans had slowly crushed the resistance. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to concentration camps."

It's just one of the more recent events that makes me all the more thankful that I am able to celebrate Passover with my family.