A Hebrew name taken from Passover, the Jewish festival of deliverance.
Pesach is the Hebrew name for Passover, the most observed holiday in the Jewish calendar, commemorating the Israelites' liberation from slavery in Egypt as recounted in the Book of Exodus. The word derives from the Hebrew root pasach, meaning 'to pass over' or 'to spare,' referring to God passing over the homes of the Israelites marked with lamb's blood during the tenth plague in Egypt. As a given name, Pesach has been traditionally bestowed upon Jewish children born during the Passover holiday — a practice of temporal naming that connects a person's identity to a sacred moment in the liturgical year.
The name belongs to an ancient category of Hebrew names tied directly to the Jewish festival calendar, alongside Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot, though Pesach became by far the most common as a given name, reflecting Passover's central place in Jewish religious life and collective memory. The Seder, the ritual meal that opens the holiday, is one of the most widely practiced Jewish observances globally, making the themes of Pesach — freedom, memory, redemption, and covenant — among the most culturally resonant in Jewish civilization. To carry the name is to embody a living reminder of liberation.
In Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi communities, Pesach was common enough to generate the affectionate diminutive Pesachke. The name fell from widespread use in the twentieth century as Western Jewish communities increasingly favored secular or dual-register names, but it has seen modest revival in Orthodox and traditionally observant communities as part of a broader reclamation of classical Hebrew names. Its directness — naming a person after the holiday itself rather than a figure associated with it — gives Pesach a rare, elemental quality.