LOS ANGELES — Millions of people this week are celebrating Passover. The first night of the eight-day holiday traditionally begins with a Seder, a large dinner filled with prayer, discussion, and songs.  

With Stay at Home orders and social distancing in full effect, families in Southern California had to get creative.

Isa Aron is a retired Jewish education professor, and she needed to quickly master Zoom, PowerPoint, and a host of other online tools to plan a Passover tradition for close to 40 people.

“In a typical year, we would be deep into preparing food, we would be expecting about 20 people in our living room, and of course this year we’re not going to be doing any of that,” Aron said.

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With the help of some friends, she came up with ways to modify the rituals in these challenging times.

“We started to think about how to do a virtual Seder. The typical rituals we would have for Passover are a bunch of foods, like about six or seven that help you experience slavery and freedom,” Aron said. “This year it’s going to be a whole lot more difficult for people to find those foods, so we started to make a list of alternative foods that you could have.”

Simple things like beans and hot sauce replaced more complicated items that might be hard to find or difficult to cook.

Although disappointed they couldn't host in person, there was a silver lining the Aron family discovered in their planning.

“The really nice thing about this was brought up by my husband Bill, who said, ‘Oh, this is the year that my sister who lives in Philadelphia can be at our Seder. And guess what, our nieces and nephews in New Jersey and Texas can be part of it, and our grand-nieces and nephews.’ So that is really a silver lining for this year,” she said.