Pesach

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is the first of the year's pilgrim festivals . It is also the Festival when Jews remember the Exodus from Egypt. The festival lasts eight days, and on the first and second nights, family meals are held at which the story of Exodus is recounted. The meal is called the Seder, which means 'order' in Hebrew, because there is a specific order to it. During Pesach, Jews do not eat leavened bread in commemoration of the fact that the Israelites had to leave Egypt so quickly that they did not have time for their bread to rise. Instead they eat unleavened bread called Matzah.

One of the works in the Ben Uri collection shows the Ten Plagues with which God punished the Egyptians for not allowing the Israelites their freedom.

TEN PLAGUES (FROM THE PASSOVER PORTFOLIO) by Shlomo Katz (b. 1937)
Serigraph
Presented by Jacob Adler 1988
(173K)
Katz was born in 1937 in Lodz, Poland, and emigrated to Israel at the end of the Second World War in 1945. He lived for many years on Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek. He studied in Paris, and his work has been exhibited in the USA and in Canada. This is from a series of prints showing scenes from the life of Moses and of celebrations of the Festival.

The plagues were as follows:

  1. The waters of the Nile turned to blood
  2. Frogs
  3. Lice
  4. Wild Beasts Darkness,
  5. Cattle Disease
  6. Boils
  7. Hail and Fire
  8. Locusts
  9. Three Days of Darkness
  10. Death of the Firstborn of all Egyptian Men and Animals.
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