aeiou.now

Topic: Days of the Jewish calendar

Does Taiwan have Days of the Jewish calendar?

Not observed here

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.

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.