For Pvt. Joseph A. Joel and his brethren, the parallels must have been obvious. Here they were, soldiers in an unfamiliar land with enemies all around, fighting in part to free enslaved people, when they stopped to observe a religious holiday dedicated to remembering their enslaved ancestors and their own escape to freedom.

Joel was one of about 20 Jewish Union soldiers in the 23rd Ohio Infantry to celebrate a makeshift Passover Seder near what is now Fayetteville, W.Va., on April 3, 1862. More than 160 years later, the approximate site of their celebration has been located and a sign unveiled to honor it, with the support of the nonprofit Civil War Trails and local stakeholders.

"In the grand scheme of history, this event is a footnote," said Joseph Golden of the Temple Beth El congregation in nearby Beckley, W.Va. "But it also gives us a glimpse into the personal involvement of Jewish soldiers fighting for the Union cause."

About 150,000 Jews lived in the United States at the time of the Civil War. Some were Southern enslavers, like Judah P. Benjamin, a U.S. senator from Louisiana who joined the Confederacy. But most lived in the North, and approximately 7,000 Jews served in the Union Army - including these young men from Ohio.

Much of what we know about this Seder comes from Joel, who was between 17 and 19 years old at the time. Four years after their improvised observance, in 1866, he recounted it in a letter to the Jewish Messenger newspaper.

The regiment made its winter camp in backwoods of what was then Virginia — West Virginia had not yet become a state — just outside a village called Fayette, now Fayetteville. The group of Jewish soldiers asked their commanding officer, future president Rutherford B. Hayes, for time off to celebrate Passover, "which he readily acceded to," Joel wrote.

Though in this instance Hayes allowed the men to practice their religion unimpeded, other Jews in the Union army faced unaccommodating and even antisemitic commanders. Another future president, Ulysses S. Grant, issued a general order expelling Jews from the Department of Tennessee; when President Abraham Lincoln found out, he ordered Grant to rescind it.

The 20 young soldiers split up to prepare for the Seder. Some worked on building a log hut, while others searched for the items they would need for a traditional Passover celebration. The matzoh, or unleavened bread, had already been sent to them by a family member in Ohio. For the bitter herbs, which symbolized the bitterness of slavery, they took to the forest and picked some pungent greens that may have been ramps. They got eggs from locals in the village and a lamb from the regiment's sutler, who may also have been Jewish.

While cooking the lamb, they couldn't figure out which was the shank bone, but "Yankee ingenuity prevailed," Joel wrote, and "it was decided to cook the whole and put it on the table, then we could dine off it, and be sure we got the right part."

They couldn't find the needed quantity of wine — four cups each — so they substituted an alcohol they had access to: hard cider.

Another problem arose while looking for ingredients for haroset, a sweet relish often made from apples, nuts and cinnamon. They couldn't find any edible substitutes, but because haroset was supposed to represent the mortar between the stones the enslaved Jews used to build the pyramids in Egypt, they figured a brick would suffice as a reminder.

"I love this story from a Jewish perspective especially because this is a bunch of teenage boys," said Victoria Tolson of Civil War Trails. "They're away from their community, they've never done a Seder before, and they totally mess it up."

The haroset has a practical use in addition to its symbolic meaning, Tolson explained. Because it's eaten after the bitter herbs, the sweetness clears the palate of the herbs' strong taste. When these young men ate the herbs they'd gathered and realized they couldn't rinse their mouths with a brick, they panicked.

"The herb was very bitter and very fiery like Cayenne pepper, and excited our thirst to such a degree that we forgot the law authorizing us to drink only four cups, and . . . we drank up all the cider," Joel wrote with some humor.

Soon, the Passover Seder devolved into something closer to a Purim celebration - meaning they got very drunk. And rather than reading the story of the Jews escaping Egypt, some of them began to act it out.

"Those that drank more freely became excited and one thought he was Moses, another Aaron, and one had the audacity to call himself a Pharaoh. The consequence was a skirmish, with nobody hurt, only Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh had to be carried to the camp, and there left in the arms of Morpheus," Joel wrote.

Using Joel's account and other records from that time, the modern-day group working on the sign was able to determine the approximate location of the celebration, on a hillside just outside town. They even found buttons from the Ohio regiment at the site, Tolson said.

The sign is located at the bottom of the hill on the property of the Love Hope Center for the Arts, a former church converted into a gallery space.

A few months after the Seder celebration, in September 1862, Joel was wounded during the battle of South Mountain in Maryland. After the war, he moved to New York, where he worked as a flag merchant and edited the veterans' newspaper the Grand Army Gazette. He died in 1906.