Rosh Hashanah

🎉 🇮🇱 Israel • September 12, 2026

Days off: 2 days • Falls on Saturday

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Rosh Hashanah — holiday, Israel (September 12, 2026)

Rosh Hashanah Description

The Jewish New Year, a two-day holiday marking the anniversary of creation and beginning of the High Holy Days (Yamim Noraim). Synagogues hold extended services featuring the blowing of the shofar (ram's horn), and the liturgy emphasizes themes of divine judgment, repentance, and renewal. Families gather for festive meals featuring symbolic foods: apples dipped in honey for a sweet year, round challah bread, pomegranates, and fish heads. All government offices, banks, schools, and most businesses close. Greetings of 'Shanah Tovah' are exchanged everywhere. It is one of the most widely observed holidays across Israel's diverse Jewish population.

📜 History & Origins

Rosh Hashanah is described in the Torah as Yom Teruah (the Day of Sounding the Shofar) and was established by rabbinic tradition as the anniversary of the sixth day of creation, when humanity was formed. The Talmud (4th-6th centuries CE) formalized it as the start of the civil calendar and the opening of the Ten Days of Repentance culminating in Yom Kippur. In 2026 it falls on 1-2 Tishrei 5787, and because the Hebrew calendar follows lunar months, the Gregorian date drifts each year between early September and early October.

🎉 How It's Celebrated

The defining ritual is the blowing of the shofar — a ram's horn sounded one hundred times across the two days, its raw cries meant to awaken the soul to reflection. Synagogue services are among the longest of the year, and theTashlich ceremony sees families walk to a flowing body of water to symbolically cast away sins. Festive meals open with apples dipped in honey and round challah loaves studded with raisins, and pomegranates are served because, by legend, they contain 613 seeds matching the biblical commandments.

🍽️ Traditional Foods

Apples dipped in honey head every table as a wish for a sweet year. Round challah bread symbolizes the cycle of the year, and pomegranates, fish heads (a wish to 'be a head, not a tail'), carrots (gezer, echoing the word for 'decree'), and honey cake or teiglach complete the symbolic spread.

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