For Passover, an interactive map brings the haggadah down to earth |
JTA — In 2024, as Alon Gildoni and his brother-in-law, Ron Milo, prepared for Passover in Israel, they asked themselves a puzzling question: Where did the events described in the haggadah actually take place?
But what started as a casual curiosity, including a rough sketch on the back of an envelope of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, quickly took on a life of its own. With the pair drawing inspiration from the storytelling of Gildoni’s late father, Zvika Gildoni, they sought to bring the ancient narrative to life by mapping the Passover story onto real-world locations.
In the years since posing the question, Milo, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Gildoni, a product management expert originally from Israel based in the Netherlands, have combined research, archeological experts and modern mapping technology to create “Haggadah on the Map.”
The free interactive website and printable PDF, Gildoni told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, gives families an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the Passover story by showing children where, by their estimation, the Red Sea parted and Mount Sinai stands.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the inspiration for creating the map?
Alon Gildoni: I have a brother-in-law who is a Weizmann Institute professor, and he deals a lot with numbers and biology, and he’s very kind of data driven. And a couple of years back, he came to me and said, “You know, I’m super curious about places that are mentioned in the haggadah. Where exactly are they? What was the route? What was going on?”
One thing led to the other, and we started just with a Google Map, just trying to position things on the map, and before we knew it, we realized that there’s some merit to it, and it can actually be interesting, coupled with the fact that we felt that many people, youngsters, but not only, may feel a bit detached during the seder.
They’re not necessarily understanding the text in full and definitely not the context. And we thought that this can be a very cool way to connect them back to our shared roots.
And how did you go about creating the map?
There were two massive challenges. One is to try to kind of dig up locations in the haggadah. Some are quite trivial, you know: We went out of Egypt. But some are more challenging, right? Such as, let’s say, the covenant of Abraham, that happened somewhere, so trying to dig that up, that was one........