As Jews around the world celebrate the festival of Passover this week, the ironies are painful.

The festival celebrates the pivotal biblical event that followed Pharaoh’s refusal to free his Hebrew slaves. The last and most terrible of the 10 plagues inflicted as punishment upon the Egyptians, the death of the firstborn in every family, passed over the houses of the Hebrews who then left Egypt for freedom and their destiny as a Jewish nation.