Festivals

Jewish holidays begin in the evening.  Depending on your secular calendar, the day the holiday begins may actually be the evening before the date specified on your calendar.  This is because a "Jewish day" begins and ends at sunset, rather than at midnight.  If you read the story of creation in Genesis Chapter 1, you will notice that it says, "And there was evening, and there was morning, one day" at the end of the first paragraph.  From this, we infer that a day begins with evening, that is, sunset.

The dates of Jewish holidays only seem to change from year to year.  Holidays are celebrated on the same day of the lunar Jewish calendar every year (for example, Chanukah begins each year on the 25th of Kislev), but the Jewish year is not the same length as a solar year on the Gregorian calendar used by most of the western world, so the date shifts on the Gregorian calendar.  For for more information about this, see this explanation of the Jewish calendar.

Here is a nice one-page calendar listing the dates of Jewish holidays with brief descriptions:  http://www.jewishnewhaven.org/pdf/4_year_public_new.pdf.

For more information about Jewish holidays, please see our Jewish links page.

Also check out Temple Beth El's most recent bulletin and our What's New? page for information about how we are celebrating upcoming holidays.