Huffingtonpost:

This week, millions of Jews around the world will celebrate the holiday of Passover, commemorating the Jewish exodus from ancient Egypt. At the start of the holiday, we will gather together with family and friends in homes, synagogues and community centers big and small to hold seders (special Passover meals). And as part of this tradition, we are instructed to tell the story of Passover, of the long march from slavery to freedom, not as something that happened to somebody else more than three millennia ago, but as something that is happening to all of us, right now.

The major Jewish spring festival that commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, lasting seven or eight days.

Despite this instruction, though, all the stories I remember being told at the seders I attended as a child were all stuck firmly in the past tense. Yet even a cursory look through the latest news headlines today will tell us that the themes of Passover remain incredibly relevant to people living all across the world. With minimal effort, it is possible to tell the stories of Passover as though we are witnessing them today, because we are witnessing them today.

Let’s start with the primary theme of the Passover holiday: the escape from bondage. It has been exactly 150 years since Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, and 65 years since the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4 of which bans slavery in all its forms.(1) Yet, the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that nearly 21 million people are subject to slavery or forced labor today, including 11.4 million women and girls and 9.5 million men and boys.(2) Nearly a quarter of those held in slavery today, or 4.5 million people, are victims of forced sexual exploitation.(3) The ILO, through its End Slavery Now! Campaign, along with a wide range of other actors (including governments, non-government organizations, and actual Hollywood actors), continues to work to raise awareness about the global slave trade, putting pressure on the governments and private entities that continue to tolerate or profit from it.

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