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The holiday of Passover is intended to comemorate the story of the book of Exodus in the Old Testament (or Torah, as it is known to Jews) which contains the crucial elements of the Jewish self-image. This is the one incident as recorded by the Torah in which God went to great lengths in defense of his (supposedly) Chosen People, performing an abundance of miracles. He inflicted ten plagues on the Egyptians and then parted the Red Sea, appeared to Moses on Mt. Sinai in the form of a burning bush, and gave Moses the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone. The Torah does not record any other incident in which God gives any physical object to anyone or is seen by anone in any physical form. God also (supposedly) gave the land of Canaan to the Jews, which they then made into Israel (after slaughtering the Canaanites in accordance with God's command). This is the mythology upon which the Jewish identity is based. Hence, the holiday is important.
Passover is celebrated because Jews are commanded to recount the story to following generations in the Tanach (Jewish Bible).