Let My People … Tweet

Screenshot from last year’s Tweder, featuring a matzah background on Dan Berkal’s Twitter page.

Welcome to the Tweder. Can Twitter and the Passover seder coexist?

Last Passover, Dan Berkal spent the first seder dining with family and friends at the James Hotel in Chicago — chanting the prayers and songs of the Haggadah, sipping the four requisite glasses of wine … and updating his Twitter status.

“Suddenly four children enter the room,” he tweeted at 4:53 p.m. “Nobody seems to like the wise child,” he added a minute later, followed by the 4:55 p.m. announcement: “We tell the wise son, ‘No dessert for you!’”

And at 3:57 p.m. the following seder night, Berkal followed up, “This year we are slaves to Twitter: next year may we be free people.”

Clearly, that wasn’t the case. This year, loyal seder-goers are tweeting back for more.

Berkal, a 31-year-old marketing research consultant, will host his second annual Passover Twitter Seder — dubbed the “Tweder” — next week and hopes to attract many more followers than the approximately 1,500 he says attended last year. In 140 characters or less — the maximum character count on social networking site Twitter — Berkal tweeted each step of the Tweder, targeting an audience of 20- and 30-something diaspora Jews who are unable to attend a seder, regardless of location, age and mobility. During last year’s Tweder, Berkal said he constantly received messages about different elements of the seder, paraphrased them and re-tweeted them to his Twitter followers.

“I was tweeting [during] my seder from a laptop on the table. Everyone at my family was knowledgeable about what was going on,” Berkal told The Jewish Week. “[The Tweder allows us] to add a social element to Judaism to make it more relevant and more positive. It also allows those who can’t go to a seder to have a feeling of being part of a community.”

Berkal’s Tweder is just one of many new innovative approaches to the holiday, where Internet tools aim to connect households around the world through Twitter, video seders and Passover-friendly smartphone applications (see sidebar).

Bradley Dworkin, a 25-year-old film director from Toronto, followed Berkal’s Tweder for the novelty of it. “I chose to follow the Tweder initially out of general curiosity,” said Dworkin, who used to work with Berkal. “I’d seen it appear on some of my friends’ Twitter feeds, and I decided it made sense since I’d be missing my family seder.”  Continue reading…

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