Both Easter and Passover are among the most important holidays on religious calendars. The dates of these celebrations change each year depending on the lunar-based Hebrew calendar. Sometimes the dates coincide.
Passover begins on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan, usually in March or April. This year, it runs from April 12 to April 23rd. It’s celebrated for eight days and nights throughout the world, except in Israel, where it’s a seven-day holiday. In the Bible, the seven-day holiday is known as Chag HaMatzot, the feast of unleavened bread.
Passover, also called Pesach, is a celebration of freedom. After hundreds of years of slavery, Moses intervened with Pharoh, interpreting his dreams and convincing him to free the Israelites. They fled Egypt and eventually reached Israel. The holiday gets its name from a story in the book of Exodus. As part of the plagues rained on Egypt before the Israelites were freed, God took the Egyptians’ firstborn sons but passed over the houses of the Jews which were marked.
Family and friends gather after nightfall on the first and second nights of Passover for the high point of the festival observance, the Seder. The seders begin each year by saying, “Kol Dichfin! Let all who are hungry come and eat!”
During the Seder, which means “order” in Hebrew, the experience of the Exodus is told in story, song, prayer, and the tasting of symbolic foods. The Seder meals include four cups of wine, eating matzah and bitter herbs, and retelling the story of the Exodus.
Well-known Passover foods are maror (bitter herbs) and matzah (unleavened bread), which is a reminder of the haste with which the enslaved people left Egypt because they did not even have time for the bread to rise.
For the duration of Passover, no leavened or fermented food or drink is eaten, including cake, cookies, cereal, pasta, and most alcoholic beverages.
A traditional Passover meal also includes gefilte fish and matzo ball soup for starters. Among observant Jews, religious prohibitions against working on the Sabbath, included cooking, mixing, kneading, and even removing bones from fish. Gefilte (stuffed) fish was a meal born of necessity. Carp was deboned, ground, seasoned, mixed with bread and a binder and stuffed into the fish skin to be poached in broth for serving cold on the Sabbath as gefilte fish.
A classic dinner dish is beef brisket.