Hillel at UCLA hosted its first interfaith Passover Seder Monday, bringing together students and administrators to build connections across campus.

The celebration – jointly hosted by the Interfaith Living Learning Community and Dialogue Across Differences at UCLA – featured readings, Jewish prayers and teaching about Passover traditions. Representatives of local elected officials and university administrators attended the seder, including Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Monroe Gordon Jr. and Dean of Students Jasmine JS Rush.

The seder was also sponsored by the University Religious Conference at UCLA and the Council of Chaplains at UCLA.

The event was designed to include reflections from students who were not from Jewish backgrounds, said David Myers, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History and an organizer of the event. The event featured readings by student leaders taken from the writings of a Catholic priest and about Martin Luther King Jr.

“I want to encourage people to engage in thinking about what freedom and redemption, which are the kind of conceptual pillars of Passover, look like and mean to all of us in this moment,” Myers said.

During the event, Myers invited participants to share how their families celebrate religious holidays and to ask questions about Passover Seder traditions. Seder guests used multiple Haggadah books – a Jewish text that outlines the seder order of service – and Myers explained differences in the way Jewish communities celebrate the seder.

Mikayla Weinhouse, a student co-president of Hillel at UCLA, said she hopes the event showed non-Jewish students how open Hillel is to sharing its traditions and invited them to share traditions from their own faith.

“It’s really uncommon to take a minute and take a step back and get to experience somebody else’s culture and their holidays and how they practice their religion,” said Weinhouse, a second-year undeclared life sciences student.

Religious ceremonies can unify different communities of faith because of the similarities of practice between different religious traditions, including historical similarities between Passover and Easter celebrations, said Myers, who also leads Dialogue Across Difference at UCLA – an initiative dedicated to discussing difficult issues without widening tensions .

Celie Fischer , a third-year Arabic and history student, said she decided to attend the event after Myers invited her. She added that as a Christian, she was interested to see some of the similarities Myers alluded to.

“It’s really cool to see all of the different unique traditions that each individual within their religion has and also to see how so many of our traditions have the same ethos and the same ethical convictions behind them,” she said.

Myers said the status of the event as an interfaith Passover celebration – Hillel at UCLA’s first – is particularly important due to ongoing global and campus divisions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. He added that he feels Passover’s message of freedom and liberation could apply both to Israeli captives and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Bella Brannon, a third-year public affairs student, said she appreciated how the event centered on common humanity, despite geopolitical tensions that separate people. Brannon, the editor in chief of the Jewish newsmagazine Ha’Am, said she also appreciated the attendance and support of UCLA administrators at the event to support respectful dialogue.

Overall, Myers said the event aimed to allow people to come together at a difficult time for the campus community.

“Many people feel deeply passionate about what is going on, and we want to create an opportunity and space for people who come from different places to join together in expressing and manifesting hope and dedicating ourselves to activity and action to advance the cause of freedom and redemption,” he said.