Celebrating Passover with a Passover Meal Hosted by a Jewish Christian Group in Toronto

I love living in Toronto!

Toronto is the most diverse metropolitan city in North America.

We have immigrants from from every corner of the world. While I was teaching in a middle school a decade ago,students from my school with about seven hundred students came from more than seventy countries. If we feel like eating cuisine from any part of the world, we can almost find it in one of the numerous ethnic restaurants in the city.

We celebrated Passover with a a Passover meal in Toronto recently.

Last Saturday, we celebrated a Passover meal at a local Christian church hosted by a group of Jewish Christians. The event started at 1pm. There were about 100 people attending.

|Our first time singing in Hebrew!

Before the meal started, there was a lot of singing and we sang in both English and Hebrew. I loved it!
I always love Hebrew music. Though I could not understand a word of Hebrew, I enjoy the tune and spirit of the songs.

A message was shared by Gideon who grew up in Israel and became a Christian . We started going to his bible study group on Friday mornings and are learning a lot from him about the historical background of the bible and Jewish customs.


At this Passover celebration, Gideon explained everything in detail what the Jewish people did in the past.

I learned three interesting things from this Passover meal:

The Passover meal table

1. The women in the Jewish home prepared for the Passover celebration a month in advance. They cleaned the house making sure that they got rid of everything to do with leaven. .After the women finished cleaning, the man of the house would take 3 things with him  looking for leaven ( a symbol of sin),  a candle to help him look for the  tiniest amount of leaven, a feather to clean it off and a towel to hold it. Then he would throw the towel into a fire and burn it ( getting rid of sin).

The Seder plates on our table

2. The symbolism of each food on the Seder plate containing the following items:

The food on the Seder plate - full of symbolism

a. A piece of parsley, green representing life
b. Lettuce - representing the root of life is bitter
c. Horseradish - a bitter herb represents the hard labour.
d.Apple and honey -something sweet representing hope
e. Unleavened bread - Israelite leaving in a hurry without enough time to finish baking the bread

Children are involved at the Passover meal

f. Egg - Represents the temple sacrifices which are no longer offered.





3. The active involvement of children at the Passover meal- I really liked that part when the child in the Jewish family asks a number of questions at the meal regarding the food and why they eat them.

After that, the man would tear up the unleavened bread into pieces and hide them in the house. When the child finds the bread, he/ she gets a prize.

A delicious dessert table

After the Seder plate, we continued with the entrees composed of chicken, roast beef, veal, potatoes, vegetables and salad followed by a fantastic dessert table.

It was an enjoyable cultural and enlightening experience.
We enjoy learning about other cultures and tasting different ethnic food. We were grateful we had this opportunity of experiencing a genuine Passover meal without leaving Canada!

R.T.
At my very first Passover Meal
Toronto