April 6, 2015, Updated March 22, 2018

technion

Passover ingenuity is rife in Israel, as university students try to outdo one another with the most creative demonstration of tradition updated.

Mechanical engineering and architecture students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology created a Rube Goldberg-type machine to tell the story of Passover in a deliberately over-engineered and creative way. From the first cup of wine to the burning bush, through the plagues and to the Seder plate, this contraption is pure fun. It was even linked on the Official Rube Goldberg website.

The film was made in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in The Sydney & Shirley Gendel and Emanuel Friedberg Family Creative Design Student Laboratory, a project of the American Technion Society’s Cleveland Chapter.

Technion students first turned to the Rube Goldberg idea back in 2012 for a Hanukkah candle-lighting contraption.

Social media has responded positively to this newest Technion masterpiece. But a debate has arisen over whether it trumps the 2013 Passover domino chain from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

A BGU mathematics student’s 50,000-strong domino chain featuring pyramids, the BGU flame logo, the parting of the Red Sea, and the tumbling of pyramids, holds the Israeli record for the biggest domino chain.

Aish HaTorah Jewish outreach organization, which comes up with highly creative videos every year, did not disappoint with this year’s version of Passover Funk, a take on the Bruno Mars-Mark Ronson hit song, Uptown Funk:

Of course, the Israeli Aish HaTorah crew was not the only group to parody the song. The Six13 Jewish a cappella group from the US released a version to YouTube as well.

And then there are the videos of behind-the-scenes making of matzah. Ynet News sent a cameraman to the historic bakery in Kfar Chabad, the world’s largest producer of handmade matzah, to film the frenzied kneading, rolling, punching and baking process.

The bakery’s shmurah (“guarded”) matzah – made from specially supervised grain from the time it was harvested to the time it comes out of the oven – is made in less than 18 minutes.

Matzah from a factory is usually square, whether it’s regular or shmurah, but handmade shmurah matzah is round. While there are numerous handmade bakeries rolling out shmurah matzah, the Kfar Chabad brand is sent around the world.

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