Days of the Jewish calendar

🇺🇸How does United States mark Days of the Jewish calendar? · Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah opens the Jewish year on 1–2 Tishrei, and it is the pair of days American institutions run into first, because it lands in the opening weeks of the school year. It is not a federal holiday: the public holidays for federal employees are set by statute at 5 U.S.C. 6103, and of the eleven days the Office of Personnel Management publishes for 2026, exactly one is a religious festival — Christmas. Everything real happens below the federal line, and it is not uniform. New York City Public Schools, the largest system in the country, publishes a closure calendar each year; in 2026 Rosh Hashanah fell on Saturday and Sunday, 12–13 September, so no closure was needed and the calendar does not mention it at all. New Jersey works the other way round: its State Board of Education adopts an annual list of religious holidays on which a district must excuse a student whose parent sends a written request, and the 2026–2027 list carries Rosh Hashanah as 11–13 September, the extra day being the eve.

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schools.nyc.gov ↗nj.gov ↗

🇺🇸How does United States mark Days of the Jewish calendar? · Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur, the tenth of Tishrei, is where the gap between the American federal calendar and the local one is easiest to see. Federal offices are open; the day appears nowhere in 5 U.S.C. 6103. But New York City Public Schools shut for it on Monday, 21 September 2026, and the calendar line reads exactly that: "September 21, Monday, Yom Kippur, schools closed." The same calendar closes for Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha and Good Friday. Eleven days into the school year, the whole system stops for a day. For adults at work the instrument is neither a holiday nor a school calendar but Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires an employer of fifteen or more to accommodate an employee's religious observance unless it can show undue hardship. In 2023 the Supreme Court raised that bar in Groff v. DeJoy, holding that showing "more than a de minimis cost" does not suffice: the burden must be substantial in the overall context of the business.

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schools.nyc.gov ↗opm.gov ↗

🇺🇸How does United States mark Days of the Jewish calendar? · Hanukkah

Hanukkah is the Jewish festival Americans are likeliest to name and the one American institutions do least about, because it is not a day of rest in the first place. Eight days from 25 Kislev — 5–12 December in 2026 — and work and school continue right through them. New York City's 2026–2027 school calendar lists no closure for it; the December closure is Winter Recess, 24 December to 1 January, which does not overlap those eight days at all. New Jersey's list does carry Hanukkah as 5–12 December, so a student can be excused, but the festival's obligation falls after dark: one more light kindled each night. That is why the most publicly visible of these days leaves the faintest mark on institutional calendars. Its visibility runs through commerce and through public menorah lightings, not through anybody's day off.

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nj.gov ↗schools.nyc.gov ↗

🇺🇸How does United States mark Days of the Jewish calendar? · Passover (Pesach)

Passover runs eight days outside Israel, beginning on 15 Nisan, and the American answer to it is scheduling rather than closure. The New York City calendar for 2026–2027 has no entry called Passover. It has Spring Recess, 22–30 April 2027, which happens to cover 22–29 April, the eight days of Passover that year. It is a secular block of days that lands where the festival lands. New Jersey names the festival outright: Passover, 22–29 April, sits on the state list of religious holidays permitting student absence, which means a student out on any of those days is recorded as excused, cannot be denied any award or the chance to compete for one because of the absence, has the right to take an alternate test, and must not have the absence appear on a transcript or an employment form. Two neighbouring states, two entirely different instruments: one moves the school year, the other creates a right.

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nj.gov ↗schools.nyc.gov ↗

🇧🇷Does Brazil have Days of the Jewish calendar?

Brazil's national holidays sit in Law No. 662 of 1949, whose first article was rewritten by Law No. 10,607 of 2002: 1 January, 21 April, 1 May, 7 September, 2 November, 15 November and 25 December. The official 2026 calendar published by the Ministry of Management adds Good Friday and Our Lady of Aparecida as national holidays and leaves Carnival and Corpus Christi as ponto facultativo, discretionary days that each body decides for itself. No Jewish date appears anywhere. But Brazil has one piece the other six do not: Law No. 13,796 of 2019 inserted Article 7-A into the Law of Directives and Bases of Education (Law No. 9,394 of 1996), guaranteeing any enrolled student, at any level, public or private, the right on prior and reasoned request to be absent from a test or a class scheduled on a day their religion forbids such activity — and obliging the institution to offer, at no cost, one of two alternatives: a make-up test or class on another date, or a written assignment whose topic, aim and deadline the institution sets. Completing the alternative replaces the original obligation for every purpose, including the attendance record. The law rests on the conscientious objection clause of Article 5, VIII of the Constitution and names no festival at all, so it covers the Sabbath and Yom Kippur alike; it does not apply to military education, and institutions were given two years to adapt.

planalto.gov.br ↗planalto.gov.br ↗

🇨🇳Does China have Days of the Jewish calendar?

China's Measures on Public Holidays for Festivals and Commemorative Days (State Council Order No. 795, fourth revision of 2024, in force from 1 January 2025) lists in Article 2 seven festivals on which all citizens are off, thirteen days in total, and in Article 3 four days on which only some citizens are off. No religious festival appears in either. The article that matters is the fourth: festivals customary to ethnic minorities shall have their holiday dates fixed by the local people's government of the area where that minority lives in compact community, according to that minority's own custom. That is the single route by which a non-majority calendar can enter the holiday system, and its test is ethnicity and territory rather than religion, so the Jewish calendar has no entrance to try. Religious bodies travel a different road entirely: Article 7 of the Regulations on Religious Affairs (State Council Order No. 686) requires a religious organisation to register its establishment, alteration and dissolution under the rules governing social organisations. Two separate roads — and the one that leads to a day off never asks about faith.

gov.cn ↗gov.cn ↗

🇮🇩Does Indonesia have Days of the Jewish calendar?

On 29 January 2024 Indonesia consolidated its public holidays, previously scattered across four older decrees, into Presidential Decree No. 8 of 2024: sixteen days in all. Those sixteen days carry five religious calendars. Islam has Isra Mi'raj, two days of Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, the Islamic New Year and the Prophet's birthday; Christianity has the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ and Christmas; Hinduism has Nyepi, the Saka new year; Buddhism has Vesak; Confucianism has the lunar new year. Not one day belongs to the Jewish calendar. What is worth noticing is that the decree already contains machinery for announcing a religious calendar year by year: the dates of the Islamic New Year, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are set annually by the minister responsible for religious affairs. The machinery has been there all along. It has simply never been opened for this calendar.

setkab.go.id ↗

🇮🇳Does India have Days of the Jewish calendar?

Holidays for India's central government offices come in two tiers, published each year on the recommendation of the Central Government Employees Welfare Co-ordination Committee. The first is the compulsory gazetted list — seventeen days in 2026, on which offices simply close: Holi, Id-ul-Fitr, Mahavir Jayanti, Good Friday, Budha Purnima, Id-ul-Zuha, Muharram, Ratha Yatra, Milad-un-Nabi, Maha Navami, Dussehra, Diwali, Guru Nanak's Birthday and Christmas among them. The second is the restricted list, twenty-nine days in 2026, from which an employee picks a few for themselves. That second tier reaches a long way down: Parsi New Year's Day, Nauraj, on 15 August; Hazrat Ali's birthday; Guru Ravi Das's birthday; Easter Sunday; Christmas Eve. Neither tier contains a single day of the Jewish calendar. The community is nonetheless present in the official record: the Magen David Synagogue in Byculla, Mumbai, built in the mid-nineteenth century by the Baghdadi Jewish merchant David Sassoon, has an entry with the Ministry of Tourism, which notes that Hanukkah, Passover and Yom Kippur are kept there.

cag.gov.in ↗incredibleindia.gov.in ↗

🇯🇵Does Japan have Days of the Jewish calendar?

Japan's Act on National Holidays (Act No. 178 of 1948) lists sixteen holidays in Article 2, and not one of them is a religious festival — not merely no Jewish day, but no day of any faith. Even the two that look ceremonial are written in secular terms: the Vernal Equinox Day is defined as praising nature and cherishing living things, the Autumnal Equinox Day as honouring ancestors and remembering the dead. Article 3 makes every national holiday a day off and, when one falls on a Sunday, moves the day off to the nearest following day that is not itself a holiday. So the absence of the Jewish calendar from this statute is not a Jewish exclusion; the statute simply does not deal in religion at all. Japan puts religion on a different footing entirely: incorporation under the Religious Corporations Act (Act No. 126 of 1951). Recognising that a religion exists and giving it a day off have been separate machinery from the start.

laws.e-gov.go.jp ↗laws.e-gov.go.jp ↗

🇹🇼Does Taiwan have Days of the Jewish calendar?

Taiwan's Act on Commemorative Days and Holidays lists twenty commemorative days, nine folk festivals and twenty-eight further named days, and not one of them belongs to the Jewish calendar — nor, for that matter, to the Islamic one. The only religious festivals the Act names at all are Taoism Day (1st day of the 1st lunar month) and the Buddha's Birthday (8th day of the 4th lunar month), and neither carries a day off; the statute says so bluntly: festivals other than those listed in the first paragraph carry no holiday. Exactly one provision hands a calendar back to the community that keeps it — the annual rites of the indigenous peoples, whose dates are announced by the Council of Indigenous Peoples after consulting each people's customs and its communities, with three days of leave that indigenous employees choose for themselves. That channel is ethnic, not religious, so a Jewish community cannot enter through it. In Taiwan these days are arranged by the community in Taipei and never reach the state calendar.

law.moj.gov.tw ↗