Scott Biondo, the community security director of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, wasn’t sure what to expect when he was first asked to purchase all the leavened food belonging to the local Jewish community before Passover.
After having bought the community’s chametz—and sold it back after Passover—for six years, he now understands the central role he plays in helping Jews adhere to the holiday’s complicated requirements.
“This community has been wonderful to me,” Biondo told JNS. “I’ve developed lifelong relationships here. The fact that they trust me with this very important aspect of their faith is incredibly meaningful.”
Biondo also feels a sense of responsibility. “This is a very important practice to the Jewish community, and I always try to be completely prepared and do my part in ensuring that the chametz is properly managed,” he said.
Biondo is one of almost a dozen non-Jews across 11 time zones who purchase leavened food from local Jewish communities through Chabad’s online system, which it has used for 25 years. (Selling chametz to a non-Jew ensures that Jews don’t own the food during the holiday.)
Rabbi Yosef Landa, regional director of Chabad of Greater St. Louis, told JNS that Chabad launched the online chametz sale in the infancy of internet commerce.
“People were starting to bank online, move money and do serious transactions,” he told JNS. “Selling chametz online was actually a much simpler transaction, but it was still new.”
In 2024, 84,629 people across more than 8,000 cities and towns used the Chabad site to sell chametz ahead of Passover.
Landa told JNS that coordinating the international timing of the sales is part of the website’s process. “Chametz has to be sold before the holiday starts, but that time differs across time zones,” he said. “So we set up a network of rabbis around the world, currently 11 different rabbis, who can carry out the sale locally at the right time.”
“I receive authorizations from sellers worldwide,” he said. “Depending on where they live, I either sell on their behalf or authorize another rabbi to do so in their time zone.”
Although the sale takes place online, the transaction is valid both according to Jewish and secular law, according to Landa.
“People sometimes think there’s something fictitious about this—that it’s just ceremonial,” he said. “We wouldn’t settle for that. This is a real, bona fide sale. It has to become the possession of the non-Jew, even though it’s still sitting in your house.”
To ensure the sale is ironclad, Chabad rabbis use a combination of methods like a signed contract, an exchange of money, a handshake and even the handover of keys to where the chametz is stored.
After Passover, the non-Jewish buyer is given the option to keep the goods or sell them back at a small profit.
“It’s a complete and final sale,” Landa said. “After the holiday, we don’t undo it. We make a new transaction to buy it back.”
“We have rabbis from Sydney, Paris, Brazil, Israel, the West Coast, London, and each of them works with a local non-Jew to carry out the sale in their area,” he said. “This is what we’re here for. We’re here to serve and help people do Jewish stuff, even in faraway places.”
