The White House Seder started in a Pennsylvania basement — its legacy lives on

By Olivia Haynie
March 31, 2025

When three Jewish Obama campaign staffers hosted an impromptu Seder, they didn’t realize they’d be setting the groundwork for the first White House Seder in American history.

Far from home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during the 2008 campaign season, Eric Lesser, Herbie Ziskend and Arun Chaudhary decided to mark the first night of Passover in their hotel’s basement – the only space they could find at the last minute big enough to host the members of the campaign. Lesser, the campaign’s ground logistics coordinator, asked a cousin at the University of Pennsylvania to acquire Maxwell Haggadahs, Manischewitz, macaroons, and matzah from the Hillel.

When Obama said he’d attend, the staffers assumed the senator was just being polite.

“It wasn’t until we heard the Beatlemania screams in the hall that it was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute,’” Chaudhary, the campaign’s videographer, told me. “Then Secret Service popped in, opened up the soup tureen, and it was like, ‘All right, all right, Obama’s coming.’”

An enthusiastic participant, Obama insisted on doing a thorough reading of the Haggadah. At one point, he asked Lesser if this was how his family did the Seder.

“I kind of sheepishly said, ‘Well, honestly, sir, we’re eating by this point,’” Lesser told me. “‘We’ve never gotten this far.’”

At the end of the Haggadah, Obama added his own line after “Next year in Jerusalem.”

“He raised his glass and he said, ‘Next year in the White House,’” Lesser said. “And we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, right.’”

But the next year, while Lesser was working as the assistant to senior advisor David Axelrod, Obama poked his head into Lesser’s office to start plans for the first White House Seder.

The tradition lasted every year of Obama’s two terms and quickly developed a reputation; a number of prominent Jews, including Elie Wiesel, tried to get an invite over the years but the Seder was restricted to the original group of staffers.

The 2008 Seder in Harrisburg coincided with what Ziskend, an advance staffer, described as “the 40 years in the desert part of the campaign,” when Obama was fighting poor polling numbers in Pennsylvania.

“We were in Pennsylvania on this bus tour and train tour across the state, but we knew we were heading towards a big defeat,” Ziskend explained. “[The Seder] actually allowed for us to pause and reflect and for Senator Obama to take a break from the busy, tough, grueling nature of the campaign.”

Weeks later, he lost the state’s primary to Hillary Clinton by a significant margin. Having that Seder during such a rough time created a unique bond among the group.

Even though the guest list was exclusive, the impact was far ranging. Lesser recalled the White House receiving a letter from a Jewish American veteran who had held a makeshift Seder in the midst of war.

“He kind of said in the letter how he would never have imagined he went from a Seder on the front in the trenches of Europe in World War II to now seeing a president doing it in the White House in the U.S.,” Lesser said.

The White House Seders also included a traditional afikoman hunt and Obama’s daughters had a secret weapon the first year: watchful Secret Service members to point them in the right direction.

Lesser’s longtime friend Harold Grinspoon, and founder of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, had the idea to turn the story into a children’s book, Next Year in the White House, written by author and poet Richard Michelson and published this year. Among HGF’s programs is PJ Library, which distributes free Jewish children’s books to families every month. According to Chaudhary, the story of the White House Seders provides a powerful message to children, particularly Jewish ones.

“The non-Jewish president of the United States, saw you, took who you are and what you do seriously, and even incorporated that practice into his life to learn something from it,” he remarked.

The Exodus story is an important part of Black liturgy and it appears fitting that the first White House Seder was held under the nation’s first Black president. One of the Seder’s regular participants was Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend of the Obamas and prominent Black physician, who had been with the campaign in 2008. He proposed reading the Emancipation Proclamation at the conclusion of the Haggadah.

“Everyone took turns reading a paragraph,” Lesser said. “And it was an intentional way to tie the stories together, the ancient biblical story of the Jewish Exodus with the modern African-American story of civil rights and redemption from slavery.”

“These were some of the most honest, free-ranging discussions you will have ever heard about racial politics, about being Jewish in America, about being Black in America, about both those things mixing, not mixing,” Chaudhary said of the Seders.

In 2017, a group of Trump administration staffers held a Seder, albeit without the president. That was the last time a Seder was held at the White House, although former second gentleman Doug Emhoff held one at the vice president’s residence in 2022.

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