VIDEO. What is the Jewish holiday of Passover?

“If there is Easter in Christianity, it is because there was Passover”says Haïm Korsia, chief rabbi of France. It is celebrated around the same time as Easter, at the beginning of spring. Its meaning is more or less the same and concerns liberation. In Judaism, this period commemorates the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, freed from slavery by Moïse.

Unleavened bread, lamb and bitter herbs

In Hebrew, Egypt means “Mitzrayim” which means “narrow” Or “confinement”. In this sense, this remembrance and not just the commemoration of the exodus from Egypt, implies, according to Haïm Korsia that “it is not a question of telling us ‘3500 years ago, our ancestors came out of Egypt’, but “since they managed to come out of Egypt, which was unthinkable at the time, we, today Today, we must be able to get out of all our confinements”. This holiday, which lasts eight and seven days in Israel, commits to a “hypersensitivity of the suffering of all those who undergo confinements in the world”.

Passover begins with a meal: the seder. It is a ritual in which we find two components: unleavened bread, which has not had time to rise and which signifies the bread of misery that their ancestors consumed. The second element corresponds to bitter herbs, to recall the bitterness of slavery. The seder is marked by the reading of the Haggadah, a text that recounts the exodus from Egypt and the journey of the Hebrews in the Sinai desert. The following four days are considered intermediate days, until the seventh day, which recalls the exit from Egypt.