Topic: Days of the Jewish calendar
Does India have Days of the Jewish calendar?
Not observed here
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.
What is this topic?
Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover and Hanukkah are national holidays nowhere — not even in the United States, home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel, where the holidays for federal employees are fixed by statute at 5 U.S.C. 6103 and contain exactly one religious festival, Christmas. What differs from country to country is what a state offers instead. New York City closes its schools for Yom Kippur; New Jersey obliges every district to excuse a student on any of fourteen Jewish days; Brazil gives every student a statutory right to sit an exam on another date. Taiwan, Japan, China, India and Indonesia carry none of these days at all, and each for a different reason.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.