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CANADIAN  JEWISH  REVIEW
APRIL 8. 1949
/
THE GREATEST OF PASSOVERS
By Epkrain\ F. Einhorn, Assistant Rabbi Of Goel Tzedec Synagogue, Toronto
'In every single generation each individual is hound to regard himself as if he personally had gone forth from Egypt."       ,
Thus runs the dictum in the Mishnah, read by Jews for many centuries in the Hagadah on Seder night. In this manner has the Jewish people commemorated for thousands of years the day of its Exodus from the House of Bondage. The great event of the first Passover, the deliverance of our ancestors from physical pressure, material suffering, social degradation and mental degeneration, left such a deep impression on the Jewish people that at all times � even in times of the gravest persecution, the soul of every Jew was filled with joy and respect at the arrival of the Feast.
Throughout all the atrocities of enslavement and despotism, of inquisition, forced conversion and massacre, the Jewish people carried in its heart the yearning for freedom and gave this craving so strong, powerful and enduring an expression that in our own days men and women were inspired to fight heroically and give up their most treasured possession, life itself, for the realization of that glor-
ious ideal.
Never has historical understanding reached such a height or identification of the individual with the community been so simple at any time or any place as on the Passover. I know no> historical incident so capable of instilling abhorrence of servitude and love of freedom as the story of the enslavement in and the departure from Egypt; and I know of no other ancient memory so entirely a symbol of our present and future as that embodied in the words "in memory of our departure from Egypt." What a deep feeling of freedom must have been rooted in the heart of a people, that created in the very spring of its life such a great concept and transmitted it from generation to generation t
Throughout the centuries of their stay in the Holy Land they kept the "memory" fresh in their minds with the symbols of poverty and servitude decorating their Seder tables. The unleavened bread and the bitter herbs reproduced in their, hearts feelings of sorrow and sympathy for those whose lives had been made bitter "with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" These sym-
bols also made them value and appreciate their own freedom all the more, and the scenes which accompanied their defense of Jerusalem against the Babylonians and Romans testify to that burning patriotism that was a flame in their hearts.
The loss of their national centre did not by any means mark the end of the special significance of the Festival in Jewish history. It became, however, more and more somber in4ts associations/For hundreds of years it was somewhat ironical in the fate of our ancestors that the Feast coincided with the gravest persecutions. It was precisely with the Passover that maltreatment reached its climax, year after year. 4t-ft time when the liberation of nature caused us to celebrate the liberation of our people, the spring marked the liberation of our enemies from the immobilization of the winter.
Jewish people were suspected of the darkest of all crimes � that <jf using Christian blood in the manufacture of unleavened bread and from the 12th Century downwards, it served as a starting-point of a long succession of massacres which darkened the joys of the Festival.
In mediaeval Germany, in the Spain of the Inquisition, in Czarist Russia, and Hitler's satellite States, the Seder celebration was disturbed by the insertion of an armed mob plundering, killing, and dragging off to unknown destinations countless numbers of people. The bitter tragedies of Troyea (1288), of Prague (1898), of Lisbon (1506), of Kishiney (1903), and of Warsaw (1943) are only a very few typical examples of that terrible series of Passover massacres, in which millions of Jews have met their deaths.
But the eternal message of hope, revived in the Jewish breast all the more ardently by the festival of freedom, saved our martyred people from despair even in its darkest hours. And there have not been any darker hours and more tragic periods in the history of any people then those which followed the rise of Hitler to power in Germany. Vast, ancient, and flourishing communities in Europe were plunged into the depths of despair, and their cries of agony were uttered in the knowledge and certainty of. ultimate redemption.
The ancient memory of Passover gave them super-human courage
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