This year KKSY celebrates Passover from Saturday night, April 12th until Sunday, April 20th, 2025. Passover (or Pesah in Hebrew) celebrates the ancient exodus of the Jews from Egypt where the monarch or Pharoah had kept them enslaved.  On the first two nights of the holiday, members of the community gather for a seder to relate the liberation as recited in the Haggadah, a compilation of stories and songs at least some of which date back to Talmudic times. The synagogue services on the first and last two days of the holidays also emphasize that the festival memorializes our redemption as a people.

The table at each seder contains a special plate with a roasted shank bone to remember the Passover sacrifices, an egg that depicts the circle of life, bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of enslavement, haroset, a sweet paste often made with dates or apples as a symbol of the mortar the Jews used to build edifices for Pharoah, and karpas or greens to herald the spring season. Each table also has matzah, which is unleavened cracker-like bread. For eight days members of the KKSY community will eat matzah rather than leavened bread because Jews are forbidden from eating leavened wheat, rye, spelt, barley or oats during the Passover festival. When the call came to leave Egypt, the Jews had no time to bake bread. By eating matzah the community memorializes the hurried but joyous flight from enslavement to liberty.

As farmers, the members of KKSY also appreciate that Passover arrives at the time of the barley harvest in ancient Israel.  As with so many Jewish holidays, the celebration combines a transcendent historical event (the exodus) with acknowledgment of the cyclical ebb and flow of the year’s agricultural bounties. It is fitting, therefore, that on the first day of Passover, the service includes a prayer for dew just as the dry season starts in Israel along with prayers of thanksgiving for freedom and liberation as a people.