IT'S not your average outback meal. For all its fame as the largest town in Central Australia, there are not too many places around Alice Springs offering kosher chicken soup and gefilte fish for dinner. And there's only one where the host is a 22-year-old rabbinical student from Los Angeles. Schneur Schneerson expected he might look out of place when he flew into Alice Springs for the first time in April last year. With his full beard and in traditional Lubavitch garb of dark suit and black fedora, he looked more likely to be found on the sidewalks of New York than roaming around Central Australia. Yet he felt a lot more comfortable than he had expected. "Alice Springs is the type of town [where] you have different characters," he says. "I didn't feel so much out of place." But that was in stark contrast to the trepidation he felt at the task that awaited him. As part of a Jewish outreach program for outback communities, Schneerson and a fellow rabbinical student were sent to the centre ofAustralia to organise a Passover dinner for an unknown number of guests. 'We have a spiritual leader ... and his motto is no Jew will be left behind," says Schneerson of his organisation's involvement in encouraging religious observance across the world. Arriving in a town like Alice with the names of six Jewish locals as potential attendees, an uncertain guest list was just one of several problems Schneerson had to confront Apart from gathering those unknown diners at a location still to be decided (he eventually hired a serviced apartment for the occasion) he also had to wony about the meal. This in itself would have been difficult at most times. Dinner would have to be kosher, everything from the meat to the dishes on which it was served complying with strict Jewish dietary laws. But being Passover, the kosher laws were even more restrictive to mark the eight-day festival. And the nearest kosher outlet was thousands of kilometres away. PASSOVER in Alice Springs. There will be a public seder held in Alice, Mon evening 5 April and Tues 6 April for more info and RSVP call Schneur on 5 or 7- No charge. "If I'd forgotten something from Melbourne, it would have been extremely hard to get in Alice Springs," says Schneerson, who came to town armed with everything from kosher wine to pre-prepared chicken soup. Unfortunately for him, some of the meal — such as the entree of gefilte fish, a traditional minced fish dish — still needed to be prepared on the night "I'm not a cook," Schneerson, still sounding over-whelmed at its mere memory one year on, admits of the culinary task that awaited him. "I've tried to cook, and the only thing I could do was make ice and hot water. Logistically it really scared me." Within days of arriving, he had placed an ad in the local paper advertising the forthcoming Passover meal, or Seder, and four days later had a list of 25 guests. Now he just had to serve dinner. "It was very difficult for me in the beginning" he says. "I guess I took a gamble." Which, with just hours to go until dinner was served, looked as though it might fail. At the last minute, three Jewish women I had met came and saved me. Two hours before, they came and chopped up the salads." Then they and 20 or so others sat down and read from an abbreviated version of a Passover service that has been read around dinner tables for thousands of years. At the table that night were medical staff working with indigenous communities, a Jewish woman from Kings Canyon, a family who live at a truck stop 100km south of Alice Springs and several workers from Pine Gap. "Some of the Jewish people there were so amazed because they had never thought so many Jewish people even lived in Alice Springs," says Schneerson, who later in the year was involved in organising a Jewish spiritual weekend in Alice Springs. Among those who attended that gathering was an Aboriginal artist who lived in a remote community 750km from Alice Springs and who managed to sate his interest in the Torah by buying books on the internet 'He came in carrying an English copy of the Talmud," says an astonished Schneerson, who was expecting the man to attend this year's Passover dinner in Alice. The second time around, Schneerson was a lot more prepared. He and a fellow student flew from Melbourne with all the ready-made ingredients to supply a four-course dinner, from fish and soup to roast meat and fruit And when they arrived, they found a private home promised as this year's venue and a couple of volunteers prepared to help out in the kitchen. For Schneerson, it wasn't exactly IA but he was happy anyway. "I saw how Jewish people could be united even in a place like Alice Springs. I saw I was able to manage it — and it was a very good feeling to bring Passover to so many different people."