Rabbi Ari Schonfld leads night seder for 1,500 eager teens

At 7:45 p.m., Rabbi Ari Schonfeld launches a Zoom meeting from his home office in Passaic, New Jersey. By 7:46, 271 teenaged boys are logged on. Join the meeting at 7:47, and you can actually see the number of participants rise at a dizzying pace: 328, 452, 581. As the clock ticks closer to eight, and Rabbi Schonfeld, the mastermind behind Night Seder America, schmoozes with the boys, the numbers keep rising: 649, 666, 723, 759.

You listen to Rabbi Schonfeld play One Hen Two Ducks, or lead a Zoom version of Simon Says (“Not very well, but everyone has a good time”), or do an impression, or chant in a singsong. It’s nuts and wild and you can’t keep up, you’re breathless with anticipation every time he singles out another boy.

And this is just the warm-up.

All around America, and beyond, homebound boys are clicking on and dialing in and clamoring to join, and it doesn’t stop, the numbers keep changing: 774, 798, 802 — or actually double that number, because this is only one of Rabbi Schonfeld’s two Zoom accounts, and the other is just as busy. You’re overwhelmed as boys continue logging into this nightly seder, a free Gemara shiur and program that’s taken frum middle school boys — close to 1,500 of them — by storm.

He jokes, he teases, he plays Jewish geography, he teaches, and the kids lap it up.

“Do I Know Your Father?”

After Purim, when coronavirus regulations closed all schools in the US, eighth-grade rebbi Rabbi Ari Schonfeld was talking to his colleagues about what they could do with their students while they were all home. There was a plethora of entertainment options for frum kids, but Rabbi Schonfeld, who is also the junior high mashgiach at Yeshiva Beis Hillel of Passaic, was hoping to create a more serious program for bar mitzvah-age boys. He decided to give an online Gemara shiur on Maseches Tamid for three weeks, culminating in a siyum bechoros on Erev Pesach.

It didn’t take much to get Night Seder America off the ground; when Rabbi Schonfeld mentioned the idea that had been germinating in his head to a relative, the response was an offer to help fund it. Rabbi Schonfeld quickly hired someone to design a flyer advertising the program, which he emailed to family, friends, and his contact list from Camp Eeshay, a local camp he runs in the summer.

“I was hoping for 100 boys or so, but somehow the first night we got 300,” Rabbi Schonfeld remembers. That was March 19th, and as time passed and word spread, more boys joined.

The program was pretty packed: every night there was the shiur, a guest speaker, divrei Torah on the Haggadah to prepare the boys for Pesach, and games and raffles. At the siyum on Erev Pesach, Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky delivered a prerecorded mazal tov message to the boys.

The feedback to the program was so positive, Rabbi Schonfeld decided to continue after the siyum with what he calls Night Seder America 2.0.

“The chizuk and the zechus is something I wouldn’t change for the world,” Rabbi Schonfeld says. He’s gotten heartfelt messages from parents whose children have special needs and can’t attend yeshivah and now finally feel a connection to yeshivah bochurim and Torah. He’s gotten emails from single mothers who say that quarantines and lockdowns prevented their sons from interacting with any father figures, until they discovered Night Seder America. He tells about a father who sent him a picture of his son’s Gemara full of notes, commenting, “My son never wrote notes in his Gemara in his life. I woke up this morning at 7:45 and found him downstairs, chazering what you learned last night.”