Passover (Pesach) 2027

The dates

Passover, Pesach in Hebrew, is the festival on which the Jewish people retell their own origin story: a night that turned slaves in Egypt into a free nation. It opens with the Seder, the most widely kept home ritual in the Jewish year, where the Haggadah is read aloud, matzah and bitter herbs are eaten and four cups of wine are drunk. It then runs seven days in Israel and eight in the Diaspora.

Passover is also the first of the three pilgrimage festivals, when families once travelled up to Jerusalem. And in Israel today it is, on top of everything else, the great spring week: the whole country on holiday at the same time, with the kitchen turned upside down.

The festival day by day

From a spring festival to a festival of leaving

The Torah gives this festival several names, and each one preserves a different layer of it. “Chag HaAviv”, the festival of spring, is the farming name; it falls just as the barley ripens. “Chag HaMatzot”, the festival of unleavened bread, is named for the food. And “Pesach” itself names one particular night: the night on which, in the story, the final plague passed over the Israelite houses in Egypt.

While the Temple stood this was a festival of movement. Families travelled to Jerusalem, brought the Passover offering and ate it that night in company. After the Temple was destroyed the table remained without the offering, and the company gathered round it became something else: not a meal at a shrine but an evening of storytelling at home. The Haggadah, assembled over centuries out of Mishnah, midrash and liturgical poetry, is the book that grew out of that shift, and probably the most frequently reprinted Jewish book in the world.

"And you shall tell your child"

Most festivals in the Torah begin with an instruction about what to do. Passover begins with an instruction about what to say: "And you shall explain to your child on that day, 'It is because of what GOD did for me when I went free from Egypt'" ¹. That verse gives the Haggadah its name, “haggadah” simply means "telling", and it gives the Seder its shape: an entire evening built around a child's question and an adult's answer.

Matzah comes from the narrative too, rather than from an abstract rule. The Torah says that those leaving Egypt "baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had taken out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, since they had been driven out of Egypt and could not delay" ². Matzah, in other words, is the bread of people with no time to wait; that is why it carries two opposite meanings at the same table. It is called the bread of affliction, and it is also the bread of getting out.

The Seder night, and the days that follow

The Seder. The word means "order", and it is meant literally: the evening runs through fifteen fixed stages, chanted as a list at the start so everyone knows where they are. Inside them are four cups of wine, matzah, bitter herbs, and one further cup that is poured and left untouched. The children ask why this night is different; the adults answer with the story.

The afikoman. Half a matzah is hidden early in the evening and eaten at the very end. The custom of hiding it from the children, or of letting the children steal it and negotiate a ransom, is why so many people remember Seder night from long before they understood a word of it.

Clearing the chametz. In the weeks beforehand houses are cleaned out thoroughly, and whatever leaven is left is sold or burnt on the morning before the festival. In Israel this has given the language a phrase of its own for a deep spring clean.

Chol HaMoed. After the first day come the intermediate days, neither full festival nor ordinary weekday. In Israel these are the biggest touring days of the year, and every nature reserve is full.

The Song of Songs. It is customary to read the Song of Songs during Passover, a book about love and spring. Few texts in the Jewish year fit their season so neatly.

Mimouna. As the festival ends, families of North African descent hold Mimouna: open houses, sweet tables, thin “moufleta” pancakes and visiting from home to home. In Israel it has grown from a community celebration into a national one.

The night that would not end

Tucked between the familiar paragraphs of the Haggadah is a very short story about five men and one night. "It happened that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon were reclining in Bnei Brak, and they were telling of the exodus from Egypt all that night — until their students came and said to them: Our masters, the time has come for the morning reading of the Shema" ³.

That is the whole story. Five senior scholars who know the material by heart sit and tell it to each other until the sun comes up and someone has to interrupt them. Nothing new was learned that night. They simply could not stop. The Haggadah places this immediately after the line that whoever tells more of the exodus is to be praised, and it is hard to imagine a better illustration.

Not memory: re-enactment

The sentence that sets the character of the whole evening comes from the Mishnah: "In each and every generation a person must view himself as though he personally left Egypt" ⁴.

It is a strange demand when you stop on it. An instruction to remember a historical event is easy enough to follow; an instruction to place yourself inside it is not. But it explains exactly why the Seder is built the way it is: why bitter herbs are eaten rather than described, why people lean back in their chairs the way free citizens once did, and why the questions are given to the children. An evening designed to transmit information would look nothing like this.

It also explains the reach of Passover far outside a religious setting. "From slavery to freedom" is one of the few phrases to have crossed from the Jewish calendar into general speech, and over the last few centuries this particular story has been taken up by liberation movements with no Jewish connection at all, because it is not only about something that happened once, but about what is possible.

Common questions about Passover

When is Passover?

Passover always begins on 15 Nisan, and the Seder is the night that opens it. On the civil calendar it moves between late March and late April, and in some years it straddles two civil months, starting in one and ending in the next. This year it runs 22-29/4/27.

When does Passover begin?

At sunset on 14 Nisan, the eve of the festival. That whole day is given over to preparation, the last leaven is burnt in the morning, and the Seder starts once the festival has come in after dark.

How long does Passover last?

Seven days in Israel, from 15 to 21 Nisan. Eight in the Diaspora, because of the second festival day kept outside Israel. The first and last are full festival days; the days between them are Chol HaMoed.

What is Chol HaMoed Pesach?

The intermediate days between the first and last festival days, five of them in Israel, four in the Diaspora. The festival continues, but most work and travel go on as normal, and in Israel this is the country's main spring holiday week.

Why do Israel and the Diaspora keep different numbers of days?

Outside Israel a second day is added to each festival day, a practice that began when the start of the month was announced by signal fire and messenger and distant communities could not be sure of the date in time. The calendar has been fixed by calculation for many centuries, but the custom was kept.

When is Mimouna?

Mimouna begins as soon as Passover ends. In Israel that is 22 Nisan — 29/4/27; where Passover runs eight days the celebration waits for the extra day and falls on 23 Nisan (30/4/27). Either way it opens in the evening, as soon as the festival goes out and leavened food comes back into the house, and carries on through the following day.

What is Mimouna?

The Moroccan and North African way of marking the end of Passover. Houses are thrown open to whoever knocks, the table carries warm mufleta with milk, honey and flour, and guests move from home to home with the greeting "tirbchu u'tisadu", may you prosper. In Israel the day that follows has become an outdoor holiday of picnics and barbecues.

Passover dates, Hebrew and civil side by side

The table at the top of this page shows Passover as it actually falls: the Hebrew date, the matching civil date and the weekday, for the selected year and for the years after it. You can read off when the Seder night begins, which days are Chol HaMoed, and when the festival ends, in Israel and in the Diaspora, which differ by a day.

Every date is computed from the Hebrew calendar when the page loads, so it stays correct even in the years when Passover runs across two civil months.

• Every festival of the year in one view: the annual holidays calendar
• The full printable calendar: home page
• The seventh day, a festival in its own right: Shvi'i shel Pesach

Related pages

• Printable calendar for April 2027
• The Hebrew month of Nisan 5787
• All the Jewish holidays of 2027
• Printable 2026 Jewish calendar with holidays