By Ron Kampeas

(JTA) – Doug Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris’s Jewish husband, hosted the White House’s first-ever online Passover seder on Thursday, two nights before the holiday formally begins.

“We are gathered today for the first Passover celebration of the Biden Harris administration, and I’m excited to join you as the first-ever second gentleman, married to the first woman to serve as Vice President of the United States,” Emhoff said. “And as the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president.”

Emhoff recalled attending his grandmother’s seders in Brooklyn and waxed nostalgic over her brisket and “delightfully gelatinous gefilte fish.”

Emhoff, who was joined in hosting by Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR congregation in Los Angeles, focused on the biblical women who are often overlooked in retellings of the Passover story. “We should also talk about the women who’ve earned their own chapters in the history books, then and now the often neglected women in the Passover story, including the midwives who saved Moses, the mother who nursed him, the Egyptian princess who spared him the pain of slavery, the sister, a prophet in her own right, who watched over him, and ultimately led the Israelites in a song of liberation,” Emhoff said, likening them to the first responders, teachers and others who continued to work throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Emhoff drew his remarks in part from a National Council of Jewish Women supplement to the Haggadah, “The Five Women of the Exodus.”

President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, and Vice President Kamala Harris, made an appearance. “We can close the Seder by adapting a familiar refrain: Not only next year in Jerusalem. But next year in person.”

Jewish staffers led portions of the seder, including Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, who recalled her Holocaust survivor grandparents. “I think of my grandparents, and I think of the lessons of their lives, the fear and the pain and the gift of freedom. They taught us to never forget it,” she said.

Jonathan Cedarbaum, the legal adviser to the National Security Council, held up a frayed Haggadah. “This Haggadah was used by my grandfather, Lou Goldman, my mother’s father when he led seders in Brooklyn, New York…” he said. “Its spine is fraying a little bit, its pages are marked, not only with his little jottings, but also with wine spills from decades past. And so to me, those stains are not imperfections. They are messages reaching across the generations conveying just as powerfully as the words of …one of [the Haggadah’s] central messages, that each generation let’s tell the next about a very ancient struggle for freedom.”

Main Photo: Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff participate in a virtual White House seder, March 25, 2021. (Screen shot)