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Passover's Enduring Message of Freedom

(Wall Street Journal) Ruth R. Wisse - On Monday, Jewish homes around the world will hold a Passover Seder - an orchestrated meal that commemorates the liberation of their people from enslavement in Egypt and celebrates the civilization that emerged from that breakout into independence. In the summer of 1940, my parents executed our flight from a fate worse than slavery at the hands of the Soviets and the Nazis who took turns subjugating the Romanian city we escaped, Czernowitz. Every year, we include in our family reading of the Haggadah a postwar insert circulated by the Canadian Jewish Congress honoring both those who perished at the hands of the Nazis and those who went down fighting: "On the first day of Passover the remnants in the Ghetto of Warsaw rose up against the adversary, even as in the days of Judah the Maccabee...and they brought redemption to the name of Israel through all the world." The traditional Passover Seder concludes with the pledge, "Next year in Jerusalem." The writer is a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard.
2013-03-22 00:00:00
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