Miles away from home on the 2008 presidential campaign trail, three junior staffers hosted a Passover seder in a nondescript hotel meeting room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Herbie Ziskend, one of the staffers spending his days on the campaign trail, realized that he wasn’t going to have a chance to go home for the holiday. His colleague, Eric Lesser, called a family member and coordinated to have traditional Passover foods, seder plates and Haggadahs sent to the Harrisburg hotel.
“This was a really intense point of the campaign,” Ziskend recalled. “It was actually a kind of low point for the Obama campaign.”
At the time, Hillary Clinton had been making progress, having recently won the Ohio primary and going on to win the Pennsylvania primary election.
“It was like our 40-years-in-the-desert moment on the campaign, and we asked [Barack] Obama if he wanted to come to seder that night,” Ziskend said.
Obama and the staffers had just returned to the hotel from a full-day train tour across Pennsylvania, so the junior staffers weren’t sure that the then-senator would have time to join.
Ziskend was pleasantly surprised when, flanked by Secret Service agents, Obama walked through the door and joined the seder. The junior staffers — Ziskend, Lesser and Arun Chaudhary — were also joined by former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, former Senior Advisor to the President of the United States Valerie Jarrett, former personal aide to the president Reggie Love, Samantha Tubman, Cookie Offerman and the Obamas’ friend from Chicago, Eric Whitaker.
“It was special because you do Passover with your family or adopted family,” said Ziskend, who was 21 years old at the time. “This was our adopted family now.”
He and Lesser had spent their first 11 months out of college on the campaign trail: “It was all we were doing, 18 hours a day, so these became our friends and family.”
The group had a package of matzo, two cans of macaroons and a bottle of Manischewitz.
“We did the seder to look like any other seder you might see across America, with all the traditions: debating each other, arguing, talking over each other, sort of the central Passover experience for so many Jews in America,” Ziskend said.
Other aspects of the seder differed slightly from tradition: After the group ended the meal with a toast to “Next year in Jerusalem,” Obama said, “Next year in the White House.”
“There was no press; … this was just a private thing,” Ziskend said. “We didn’t know we were starting a common tradition. We still had to win the presidency.”
Obama later kept his word; he and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted and attended Passover seder at the White House each year from 2009 to 2016, now up to 20 people including their two daughters. His was the first Passover seder to be conducted by a sitting president in the White House.
“I think he genuinely cared about it,” Ziskend said of Obama. “He saw this as an opportunity to teach his daughters about the story of Passover, the story of the Exodus and reinforcing the themes of freedom and redemption, which were core to the story and also core to the African American experience. For him, it was a chance, as a leader of the country, to lift up this story.”
The nonprofit organization PJ Library further uplifted the story through “Next Year in the White House,” a children’s book written by award-winning author Richard Michelson about the first presidential seder. Published March 4 in partnership with PJ Library, the book explains how the original trio’s “modest” Passover seder meal in the Harrisburg hotel inspired a White House tradition.
“The story of Passover is a story about storytelling and remembering,” Ziskend said. “It allows us to really increase the storytelling if you do it with the most visible person in the whole world. It’s about hope and renewal and thinking about a better tomorrow through bondage to freedom. Those stories were all supportive of the broader themes of the Obama presidency, so it aligns.”
Ziskend, Lesser and Chaudhary wrote a note at the end of the book, which says that there isn’t just one way to be Jewish; people celebrate Passover all around the world. PJ Library will distribute the picture book free of charge to 30,000 Jewish 8-year-olds across the globe in time for Passover.
“I want [young readers] to know about the importance of tradition in our culture,” Ziskend said. “I think it’s important for young kids to see that people from different backgrounds or traditions come together, unified, in the name of freedom, helping people. That’s what this story is about.”
