Join our annual First Day Service, with Emanuel Congregation. Emanuel Congregation is located at 5959 N. Sheridan, Chicago, IL. This service will also be livestreamed via Facebook Live.

The Festival of our Freedom, as Passover is known, celebrates the Exodus from Egypt more than 3,000 years ago from Egypt. The main observances of this holiday—the first and second nights -- center around a special home service called the seder (meaning "order"), which includes a festive meal and the from a book called the Haggadah, meaning “telling,” which contains the order of prayers, rituals, readings and songs. The Haggadah also helps us retell the events of the Exodus to that each generation may learn and remember this story that is so central to Jewish life and history. 

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is also marked by the prohibition on eating chametz (food made with leavened grains, including wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt); and the eating of matzah (an unleavened bread made specially for Passover). The eating of unleavened represents that the Jews had to flee Egypt so quickly that the bread being made didn’t have time to rise.