On Passover, the holiday commemorating the Israelites' exodus from Egypt, Jews are traditionally forbidden to eat bread. The unleavened bread they eat instead, in memory of the hastily prepared matzot that their forefathers took with them during the flight from Egypt, has come to symbolize the holiday itself. In the days of the Second Temple, the paschal sacrifice was consumed at a festive "seder" meal in memory of the command to the Israelites in Egypt to mark their doorposts with the blood of the sacrificial lamb, so that the plague of the firstborn would "pass over" them. Passover is thus a national holiday of redemption, on which the entire Jewish people celebrates the memory of its deliverance from bondage.
On Easter, Christians commemorate the resurrection of Jesus. According to tradition, on Passover night, the eve of his crucifixion, Jesus dined with his disciples, and during this "last supper" he blessed the bread and commanded the others to partake of it. With the development and institutionalization of Christian ritual, the Last Supper became the high point of the Mass ceremony. During these ceremonies, which recreate the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, worshipers receive consecrated bread.
The bread becomes a symbol of the flesh of Jesus, who, by sacrificing himself, became the true paschal sacrifice. By partaking of the holy bread, worshipers are believed to attain salvation.
Both religions thus seek to imprint on the minds of the faithful the memory of salvation - through the consumption of matzot or holy bread - but their conceptions of it are highly different: in Judaism, the formative event is the deliverance of the people from bondage in Egypt, an act of national salvation that prefigures the Coming of the Messiah, whereas in Christianity it is a personal deliverance through the Son of God, who was incarnated as a man and sacrificed on the Cross.
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