From The Animated Jewish Year Book

What is Pesach
History
Customs
The Land


What is Pesach
It may still be cold and snowy outside, but everywhere there are signs that spring is on the way. The snow is finally melting and the trees are growing new leaves. Here and there a patch of bright green grass is poking through the snow. Everywhere life is beginning anew. This is the perfect time for a holiday: we even call it Hag Ha’aviv, the Holiday of Spring.




Customs
For hundreds of years, the Jews were slaves in Egypt. They worked very hard and were treated very cruelly, until one day, Moshe came along. Although he was born to a Jewish family, he was raised as an Egyptian prince and knew exactly how to speak to the Pharaoh and his advisers. “Let my people go!” he demanded, but the Egyptians wouldn’t listen. It took ten plagues, before Pharaoh finally begged Moshe to take the Jews out of Egypt. During these plagues, the Jews were spared - God passed over them and punished only the Egyptians. In Hebrew the word for passing over is pasach, and the holiday that celebrates how God passed over the Jews is called Pesach.




History
After four hundred years, the Jews were finally free - another name for Pesach is Zman Heiruteinu, the Time of Our Freedom. After so much suffering, it is no wonder that the Jews were in such a hurry to leave Egypt. They started to prepare dough so that they would have bread to eat on the way, but in their rush to leave they had no time to bake it, so they just carried it on their backs. The bread they finally made from this dough was flat and dry, almost like crackers. Every Pesach, Jews still eat this bread to remind them how their ancestors left Egypt in a hurry. We call the bread matza, and another name for Pesach is Hag Ha’Matzot, the Holiday of Matzot.

Every year at the time the Jews left Egypt, they held a big celebration to remember everything that happened to them. In time, the celebration became very organized. There is a time to tell the story of what happened in Egypt, a time to eat special foods to remind us about what happened, and a time to sing holiday songs about the miracles that occurred or just for fun. In Hebrew the word for organized is seder, and the celebration that Jews have on the first two nights of Pesach (or one night in Israel) is called the seder - and the book we read at the seder is called the Haggadah.




The Land
Forty years after the Jews left Egypt, they finally made it to Israel, the Promised Land. They still celebrated Pesach every spring, but now Pesach became important for another reason. For the many Jews who now worked as farmers, Pesach was the season when their crops first started to bloom. This was the season when they would harvest the first grain, which they would later bring to the Temple in Jerusalem and offer to God.