Free Republic

At Passover, Jews sing this song “Dayenu” (“It would have been enough”): "The song is about being grateful to God for all of the gifts He gave the Jewish people, such as taking them out of slavery, giving them the Torah and Shabbat, and had God only given one of the gifts, it would have still been enough. This is to show much greater appreciation for all of them as a whole. The song appears in the haggadah (the Passover text followed during the Seder service/meal), after the telling of the story of the Exodus and just before the explanation...

Dr. David Neiman explores the historicity of the Biblical accounts of Joseph and the Exodus from Egypt. Joseph rises to the position of "Tzafnat Pa'aneakh" after successfully helping the Pharaoh of Egypt with his economic plans. Under Joseph's guidance all land became the property of Pharaoh. A new Pharaoh comes to power who does not favor the Israelites. They are enslaved and forced to build the storage cities of Pithom and Ramses. These cities were arsenals for the armies of Egypt. Under Seti I and Ramses the II, Egypt was on the warpath. Ramses II was defeated at the battle...

Coins dating from the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire (66 CE-70 CE) were discovered by archeologists during excavations near the southern wall of the Temple Mount on Monday, according to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. The archeological dig, run by Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, uncovered dozens of bronze coins measuring approximately 1.5 cm., as well as numerous fragments of pottery vessels. The vessels, mainly jars and cooking pots, were left behind by Jewish residents who hid in a large cave that measured seven meters by 14 m. The...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis, in his Easter address on Sunday, called for peace in the Holy Land two days after 15 Palestinians were killed on the Israeli-Gaza border, saying the conflict there "does not spare the defenseless". The pope made his appeal in his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica to tens of thousands of people in the flower-bedecked square below where he earlier celebrated a Mass. He also appealed for an end to the "carnage" in Syria, calling for humanitarian aid to be allowed to enter,...

And he said unto them, Be not amazed: you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he is risen; He is not here: behold the place where they laid him. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you. - Mark 16:6+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++And Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die....

By my mother’s reckoning, Lent is over tomorrow at noon, after which we can eat meat, drink, and well, put our Lenten abstentions away for another year. As a family, we observed three hours of silence every Good Friday from noon-3, the traditional time Our Lord and Savior was hung on the Cross. Mom maintained (and enforced) all fasting and abstinence laws from midnight Holy Thursday through Holy Saturday at noon. On Holy Thursday, all Catholic Churches in our town maintained all-night vigils with litanies and novenas. The physically able participated in the traditional Holy Thursday Seven Church Walk, during...

There is breaking news out of Jerusalem that descendants of Moses' brother Aaron, called Kohanim, have just conducted a Passover sacrifice at the foot of the Temple Mount, just yards from where the Jewish Temple once stood. The sacrifice is a groundbreaking moment in modern Israeli history and likely the first time since 68 AD that a Passover sacrifice was conducted in such close proximity to the Temple Mount. Religious Jews have been increasingly eager to build the Third Temple and restart sacrifices, but have been prevented from performing sacrifices in the area in years past by Israeli police...

Religious Jewish factions say they are moving ever closer to the realization of the Third Temple in Jerusalem. The latest evidence of this is police authorization, granted on Sunday, for a Passover sacrificial ceremony to be held just tens of meters from where the Second Temple once stood. Religious groups have been holding public Passover sacrifices, in accordance with the biblical outline, for years. But never before have they been permitted to conduct the ceremony so close to the Temple Mount, which the Muslims claim as their own, even as they deny the holy site holds any religious or historical...

It is kept in the Chapel of the Relics of the Cathedral of Santa Maria de la Asunción de Coria, Spain. The Cathedral of Coria, in Extremadura, Spain, took about 250 years to build. Its history is a long and complex one, and some studies indicate that some of the building elements composing the structure date from the first century.According to the doctoral thesis of Maria del Carmen Sanabria Sierra, writing  under the direction of the renowned art historian Victor Nieto Alcaide, the cathedral may have been the first Christian temple in the entire Iberian Peninsula. A Roman mosaic...

Jewish student leaders at Tufts University “are working intensely” to combat a surprise boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) resolution initiated by an anti-Israel group for a vote days before Passover, the campus chaplain told The Algemeiner on Friday. “Yesterday, without any forewarning, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) put forward this resolution, to be voted on by the [Tufts Community Union (TCU)] student senate this Sunday night,” said the campus Hillel’s executive director, Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, who also serves as a research professor in the department of music and the Judaic studies program. “The Hillel Jewish community is deeply disturbed...

And why is Orthodox Easter on a different date than Catholic Easter? Easter Sunday, the greatest liturgical feast of the year, has been celebrated on various days throughout the Church’s 2,000 year history and the scheduling has provided more than its share of controversy.From the very beginning of the Church the feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord was celebrated in relation with the Jewish feast of Passover. Since the events of Christ’s Passion and resurrection occurred in that context, Christians have always felt that they should celebrate his resurrection in the same way, rather than a fixed date...

A group of Jewish families that included elderly people, pregnant women and children were taken off an EasyJet passenger plane in Barcelona waiting to depart for Paris, according to a report on the European Jewish Press. One of the passengers, a Holocaust survivor, said the behavior of police who came to take the travelers off the flight was similar to that of the German Nazi SS police during World War II. The families were removed after the plane had been sitting on the tarmac for more than two hours, waiting for departure. Many of the Jewish men were wearing kippahs,...

PMThe Passover meal marks beginning of the week-long "Feast of Unleavened Bread". Israel was commanded to eat unleavened bread, matzo bread with no yeast (hametz) in it, for a whole week. So Jewish people in Israel have been crunching their way through multiple square sheets of matzo bread and looking wistfully at the closed bakery sections for a while now. But what does it mean? The most obvious answer is a reminder of the swift exodus from Egypt, when there was no time for the bread to rise. But there is one small problem with that explanation... Timely instructions God...

Sunday, April 24, 2016 From Slavery to Freedom Posted by Daniel Greenfield As another Passover begins, the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" resound briefly and then fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem. Some of us are already there now. But will that make us free? Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again...

As a Latina who married into a Jewish family, I've long lobbied my in-laws to include beans and rice on the Passover menu. The holiday is a time when Jews avoid leavened foods in commemoration of their biblical exodus from Egypt — when they had to flee so fast, they couldn't even let the bread rise. But beans and rice aren't leavened, I've argued, so why not include them in the Seder meal? The answer I've long gotten from my mother-in-law: tradition. You see, like many American Jews, my mother-in-law is of European ancestry, or Ashkenazi. And by tradition, Ashkenazi...

Filmed on location in Israel, Myles and Katharine demonstrate and explain the origin and significance of Passover while providing insight for Believers in Yeshua.

Barack Obama sent out his final Passover greeting as US president on Friday, recalling his 2009 tradition-making seder — the first ever at the White House, and drawing a parallel between the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt and the battle for civil rights across the globe. “Mah nishtana halailah hazeh?,” the president wrote, quoting the Four Questions asked during the Jewish service on the first night of Passover. The Hebrew phrase means: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The president continued: “For Michelle and me, this Passover is different from all other Passovers because it...

As Jesus (Yeshua - YAHWAH IS Salvation/Deliverance) the Messiah entered into Jerusalem for the Passover of the Lord - which had been rendered useless and reduced to a mere traditional religious lifeless skeleton of a feast, renamed the Passover of the Jews (Lev. 23, Matt. 23: 13-15, John 2:13, 5:1, 13:1), all the air was abuzz with the news of Jesus of Nazareth (Matt. 21:8-11, Luke 19:37-40)! As it were, Jesus had absolutely dominated the “news cycle” of His day for 3 ½ years! Jesus would have been constantly talked about in all of the newspapers and on all of...

President Barack Obama will host a Passover seder this year, but not on either of the nights it is required according to Jewish custom. A spokeswoman told JTA that Obama will host the seder next week following his return from travel overseas. Obama will be in Saudi Arabia on the first and second nights of Passover, Friday and Saturday, attending a regional cooperation summit.

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