Passover in 140 Characters

Jewish Rabbis and educators tweet "The Exodus"

By sundown, Moses and the Jews should be celebrating freedom and tweeting 140 characters at a time.

That's how the story of "The Exodus" is playing out on Twitter as a group of Jewish Rabbis and educators tweet one of the world's oldest tales in the 21st century.

"We started 14 days ago, and we've been re-telling the story every single day except for Saturdays," said Rabbi Heidi Cohen of the Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana in an interview on NBCLA's NewsRaw.

The idea came from Dallas-area Rabbi Oren J. Hayon, who saw the story of the passion tweeted in 2009.

"(Hayon) thought, what a great opportunity to tweet the exodus," said Cohen. "We are reaching out to all sorts of people."

Cohen said the number of followers jumped from 200 to 1,400 in a matter of days.

"We noticed that social media is where we finding our congregants, as well as Jews from all over the world, and people that really want to experience the exodus in a whole new way," Cohen said.

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The new way is 140 characters at a time, which can make it tough for some passages of the story. But creative writing, proper abbreviations and good organization helped.

"Rabbi Hayon assigned all of us our different characters. He wrote up a full script and which day to tweet. That way the story would flow," said Cohen.

It's working. "Tweet the Exodus" is getting plenty of reaction from media and followers. Plus, Cohen gets plenty of retweets.

"We are getting a lot of people saying, 'Wow, you should see this,'" said Cohen. "This is so cool."

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