Heartfelt wishes from JHE for a joyous and meaningful Pesach (with Seders full of delicious food and lively stories and conversation).
Freedom — and the striving for freedom — is the theme of the holiday. We wish you freedom — freedom of thought, freedom of ideas, freedom of spirit, freedom of fellowship, freedom from want…. the bitter fight for freedom ongoing in Ukraine will surely be in our thoughts…
The Seder meal, with its symbolic foods arranged on a special plate, is guided by the Haggadah, whose wealth of ancient texts and songs retell the story of the Biblical Exodus from Egypt.
There are many Haggadot to choose from, many of them beautifully illustrated — at our Seder table we often use a variety to emphasize the choice. Here’s a display of several in the little Jewish museum in Pitigliano, Italy.
Here’s an hour-long Zoom presentation about the New Venice Haggadah, an arts project by Beit Venezia that resulted in a Haggadah illustrated by contemporary artists published in 2021.
Here’s two pages from a German-Hebrew Haggadah in the Freudental Geniza
And here below you can follow the Seder — page by page — in a medieval Haggadah from Catalonia.