An Online Version of the Deep-Freeze for Passover

Forget the Lottery. The biggest windfall in the country this Passover season might well be coming to an otherwise anonymous man named Glade who works at a Jewish funeral monument company in St. Louis.

Last Passover, Glade became the proud owner of tens of thousands of closets and cabinets full of bread, fancy pasta and alcohol from Jews around North America. He was the gentile who took official ownership of the leavened bread products that those Jews sold for the holiday via Chabad.org, the Web site run by the Brooklyn-based Lubavitcher branch of Hasidic Judiasm.

The Web site puts a modern spin on a tradition that is centuries old. In accordance with their beliefs, Orthodox Jews must not possess even a crumb of leavened bread — known in Hebrew as chametz — for the duration of Passover. But to save them from having to throw the prohibited products away, rabbinic authorities long ago came up with a solution.

Jews can put all the chametz they own in a closet, cabinet or room, and assign a rabbi power of attorney over the space and its contents. The rabbi then sells the chametz to a gentile, and leases the gentile the space in which it is stored. At the end of the eight-day holiday, the rabbi buys it all back for the original owners.

Traditionally, a local rabbi would make the sale, but since Chabad started an online version of the service out of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about a decade ago, an ever growing number of Jews– 56,843 last year– have pointed and clicked to give power of attorney over their chametz to Rabbi Yosef Landa, a Chabad rabbi in St. Louis.

Rabbi Landa is among thousands of rabbis dispatched by the Brooklyn-based Chabad movement to work around the world encouraging Jews to uphold Jewish traditions. He is also the rabbinic point person for local chametz sales among St. Louis’s 50,000-member Jewish community. And he appoints rabbis in Russia, Thailand, Britain and elsewhere to handle online requests for the sale of chametz from those regions.

“Suddenly this has become the hub for the world’s chametz sales,” Rabbi Landa said on Tuesday. “It’s an interesting thing for everybody. It’s unifying.”

Rabbi Landa’s main job is to find a gentile willing to take ownership over the virtual world’s chametz, and sell it by the morning of the first Passover Seder meal. Often, he says, he has turned to Glade.

He does not know much about Glade personally. He first said that Glade was a handyman at a synagogue, then after speaking with him, said he worked at a Jewish monument company. He told City Room that Glade was not interested in being interviewed about his role as perhaps the largest owner of Jewish chametz in the world.

But Glade’s personal status — beyond the fact that he is not a Jew and is willing to participate — is not that critical, Rabbi Landa said. The transaction itself is simple. Glade signs a document, makes a down payment of, say $50, and the chametz is legally transferred to him. After the holiday, Rabbi Landa buys the chametz back for $100. “He is very happy to have me buy it back from him, especially for the profit,” Rabbi Landa said.

Along with a chametz power of attorney form for people to fill out, the Web site asks people to list what time zone they will be in on the morning of the first Seder, so that Chabad can make the transaction on time. One man in Azerbaijan, for example, wrote in to say that he was concerned because the closest time zone listed was in Sydney, Australia. A Chabad representative wrote back to assure him it would be done correctly, according to an e-mail exchange provided by the organization.

The number of people selling their chametz through the site has grown by about 15 to 20 percent each year, said Rabbi Motti Seligson, Chabad’s spokesperson in New York. Some are Jews without access to rabbis; others find it convenient. It is free, though Chabad does ask for donations.

While the online process raised some eyebrows at first, leading halachic, or Jewish legal, authorities, “have ruled that online authorizations are acceptable for the purpose of selling chametz,” the Web site states. But though Chabad wants to make the tradition widely available, the Web site includes a reminder that the old-fashioned way remains better.

“The customary way is for rabbis to do this is in person,” said Rabbi Landa. And for the purposes of building community and connection, “we think there is some value in having it done that way.”