Author: Gidon Ariel

Published Date: August 01, 2016

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Linda wrote:

When is Yom Kippur in 2016? My calendar on the wall shows October 12. My pamphlet on Jewish Feasts shows October 12.

However, on the website: TorahCalendar.com shows September 10.

I had a similar problem this year with Passover being in April.

Where can I find a true Hebrew calendar like Israel uses?

Thanks for writing Linda!
The Jewish calendar is a very complex calculation topic.
Western people are familiar with the Gregorian calendar, which is a sun-based calendar. It runs 365 days, which is the time it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
However, this does not take another celestial occurrence into consideration: the moon’s rotation around the Earth.
The Muslim calendar does; it is a lunar calendar, comprised of 12 cycles of the moon going around the Earth. These cycles are called months (notice how that word is related to the word moon?) and lasts 354 days.

However, each of these calendars is lacking as it does not take the other system into consideration at all! That is why Gregorian calendar months have nothing to do with the moon, and lunar years disregard the sun and its seasons. (For example, the famous Muslim month of Ramadan “creeps” backwards in the year, and can fall out in any season).

The Jewish calendar solves both of these problems, and is a Solar-Lunar calendar. It must be both, as we are commanded to sanctify the moon-months, and also make sure that the holiday of Passover falls out in the Springtime.

So we add a full month every few years to the calendar, to counter the creeping of the days.

It is not simple to calculate when to add that leap-month; and there are many other rules that come into play as well.

The website that you looked at is a Christian one, perhaps Messianic, and is not interested in the calendar currently followed by the Jewish People.

A better website resource to use is http://www.hebcal.com/. Here is a link that I use, that will take you directly to this year’s calendar.

I also encourage you to learn more about the Jewish calendar if you like on Wikipedia, and especially this article of a great resource called Jewfaq: http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm

h, PS: Yom Kippur this year is Wednesday, October 12, 2016:-) It starts the evening before, at sundown on Tuesday.

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