בָּרִאשֹׁן בְּאַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר יוֹם לַחֹדֶשׁ בָּעֶרֶב תֹּאכְלוּ מַצֹּת עַד יוֹם הָאֶחָד וְעֶשְׂרִים לַחֹדֶשׁ בָּעָרֶב׃

In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening you shall eat matzah, until the twenty-first day of the month at evening. (12:18)

Rabbi Yisrael Spira of blessed memory who was known as the Rebbe of Bluzhov, survived a long list of ghettos, concentration camps, and slave labor camps during the Holocaust but lost his entire family.

In one slave labor camp he developed a civil relationship with the commandant. A few weeks before Passover he made a very risky request and asked the commandant for permission to bake Matzah for Passover. He asked for some flour explaining that the prisoners agreed to have the flour subtracted from their daily bread rations. This meant that they were willing to give up from their already meager food portions in order to fulfill the mitzvah of eating Matzah! Miraculously, the commandant agreed. A makeshift oven was built and after a full day of back breaking labor a few Jews baked small portions of Matzah. This went on for several days until the commandant one day stormed in on the operation and smashed the oven in a fit of anger.

There wasn’t enough Matzah to go around for everyone so Rabbi Spira with the other leaders of this group of slave laborers decided that every adult would receive a piece of Matzah. The children under bar and bat mitzvah age would not since they were not obligated by Torah law to eat Matzah on the night of Passover.

There was a woman present who had lost her husband and married sister but managed to hold on to her two sons and two nephews whom she kept alive until after the war.

“The children are our future,” she protested. “They are the ones who will rebuild the Jewish nation. They must receive a piece of Matzah.” Her convincing argument changed the rabbi’s mind and all the children received a piece of Matzah for the Seder night.

This woman understood that those children should not experience the holiday of Pesach from a distance watching the adults eat Matzah. Rather they should experience it up close by eating matzah themselves. Because they would be the future of the Jewish people they had to be imbued with the eternal lesson of the Exodus from Egypt.

In the daily ma’ariv (evening) service we recite, “Who struck with His anger all the first born of Egypt and removed His nation Israel from their midst to eternal freedom.”

The emergence of the Jewish nation from the darkness of slavery meant that this nation exists even under the conditions that would send other nations into extinction. No matter how terrible the situation might be, the Almighty will redeem us as he did our ancestors. We will survive and we will thrive!

Therefore, those children would eat matzah in the darkness of a slave labor camp so that they would carry the lesson of eternal freedom with them as they rebuilt the Jewish nation from the ashes of the Holocaust.

May we merit to see the fulfillment of this lesson with the coming of Moshiach speedily in our days!

Shabbat Shalom!
Yitzchak