Obama takes a Passover tradition kindled on the 2008 campaign trail to heart What began in 2008 as an impromptu dinner thrown by three young aides in the basement of the Sheraton Hotel in Harrisburg, Pa., has become a ritual at the Obama White House. While it gets plenty of public attention - last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wife, Sara, gave the Obamas a silver Passover Seder plate - the annual ceremony remains a private, fairly casual affair largely unchanged from its campaign origins. And in a town where so many of the president's meals - from lunch with the top two members of the House Budget Committee to dinner with a dozen Republican senators - involve a degree of political calculation, this one has few, if any. "The Seder itself is something any Jewish family would easily recognize," said Eric Lesser, who organized the 2008 meal while serving as the Obama campaign's luggage wrangler. Back then, Lesser, videographer Chaudhary and Herbie Ziskend, who did advance work for Obama, hatched a plan to celebrate Passover after spending months on the road. All three hail from the Reform branch of Judaism, says Chaudhary, whose mother is Jewish and father is from India. They're "the outer-borough diaspora of Judaism, as opposed to experts in the Holy Land," he said. For that campaign-era Seder, Lesser's cousin swiped several essentials from the University of Pennsylvania Hillel group (matzoh, Maxwell House Haggadahs and a couple of bottles of Manischewitz wine), which Lesser collected in Philadelphia and drove to Harrisburg. Lesser and his friends didn't expect then-senator Obama to show up. But he did, along with his friends Valerie Jarrett and Eric Whitaker. There were no cameras. This was not announced ahead of time," said Lesser, who had mentioned the event in passing to Obama. Nobody knew this was happening. It's a good story Now, things are different. Obama is the first president to observe Passover in the White House: In his first official visit to Israel as president last week, he spoke about the personal significance this ritual holds for him. And he will also mention it in the official Passover message that the White House will release Monday. "After enjoying Seders with family and friends in Chicago and on the campaign trail, I'm proud to have brought this tradition into the White House," he said Wednesday during a speech in Jerusalem. I did so because I wanted my daughters to experience the Haggadah and the story at the center of Passover that makes this time of year so powerful. As Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said in an interview, it's not surprising Obama would be drawn to the holiday.