Hebrew Calendar
Tishrei 5787

The calendar at the top of this page is the current Hebrew month, and below it there is a page of its own for every month of the Hebrew year. Here the Hebrew month leads: it opens on Rosh Chodesh and closes on the 29th or the 30th, the large numerals in each cell are its days, and the civil date rides along beneath them in small print.

It looks like an ordinary calendar, but it rests on something else. A civil month is a unit fixed by decision, and could just as easily have been fixed differently. A Hebrew month is the cycle of a body in the sky. You can walk outside at night and see roughly which day of it you are standing in.

The Hebrew month on paper

The calendar here is built to be printed, not just read on screen. Every Hebrew month, in every year, gets a page of its own: the 1st of the month at the top, the 29th or 30th at the bottom, and each day along the way carrying the civil date underneath it in small print, so the two can be read together at a glance. Shabbat and the festivals are already coloured in, so there is nothing to mark by hand, and the cells themselves are large enough to hold a note, a shift, or a short journal entry.

Printing is one button, above the calendar. It prints only the month itself — no navigation, no search box, no text like this — so the page that comes out is a clean grid, ready for the wall or a binder. Portrait or landscape is a choice, whichever suits the wall or the notebook better.

Every month of the Hebrew year, from Tishrei to Elul, sits below this calendar — one click moves from month to month without hunting for it again. The same works backward and forward in time: last year and next year are built the same way, so a month that has already passed and a month still to come can both be printed here.

• The same days, ordered by the civil month: monthly calendar
• Every festival of the year in one table: Jewish holidays 2026
• The full printable calendar: printable 2026 Jewish calendar with holidays

The Hebrew month against the civil month

A solar year runs about 365¼ days. A lunar month runs about 29½, and twelve of those come to only 354, eleven days short. Every calendar in the world has had to decide what to do about that gap: a purely lunar calendar ignores it and drifts through all the seasons, and a purely solar one pins the seasons down and gives up on the moon.

The Hebrew calendar refused to choose. Its months are lunar, and its year is pulled back into line with the sun by a thirteenth month, added seven times in every nineteen years, so that Passover stays in the spring.

The result is plain on the page: a Hebrew month almost always spreads across two civil months. Elul starts in August and finishes in September; Nisan opens in March and closes in April. This format shows the Hebrew month whole, and anyone looking for a whole civil month will find it on the monthly calendar, the very same days, sorted differently.

How a Hebrew month is built, and what happens on Rosh Chodesh

The length of the month comes from the moon, and it does not come out whole: the received figure is twenty-nine days, twelve hours and a further 793 parts of an hour. A day cannot be cut in half, so every Hebrew month is either twenty-nine days (*chaser*, deficient) or thirty (*maleh*, full), and the calendar alternates between them to keep pace with the cycle.

That is also the answer to the most common question about the Hebrew month: why Rosh Chodesh sometimes lasts one day and sometimes two. When the outgoing month was full, its thirtieth day already counts as Rosh Chodesh, and the next day, the 1st of the new month, is Rosh Chodesh as well. When the outgoing month was deficient, Rosh Chodesh is a single day. None of this has anything to do with the second festival day kept in the diaspora. Two months were deliberately left flexible, Cheshvan and Kislev, which lets the year balance itself without disturbing any other month.

In a leap year the extra month goes in ahead of Adar: Adar I of thirty days, then Adar II of twenty-nine. Adar II is the Adar that counts: it carries Purim, and a boy born in the Adar of an ordinary year becomes bar mitzvah in it.

Rosh Chodesh itself is the calendar's small day. On the Shabbat before it the coming month is blessed in the synagogue and the day it will fall on is announced; on the day itself the half Hallel is said and the Musaf prayer is added. There is also a long-standing custom that women do not work on it, and the Shulchan Arukh settles the matter in one line: "Rosh Chodesh is permitted in the performance of labor, and the women who have the custom not to perform labor on it — that is a good custom" ¹.

Common questions

How many months are in the Hebrew year?
Twelve in an ordinary year and thirteen in a leap year, which adds Adar I ahead of Adar II. The list below follows whichever year you are in.

Where does the list start?
With Tishrei, the head of the year for counting years; not with Nisan, which is the head of the months for counting months.

Can I print it?
Yes. The button above the calendar prints the month to a single page, without the navigation and without this text.

When the month depended on two witnesses

Today you glance at a calendar. Two thousand years ago the month did not begin until the court in Jerusalem said it had, and the court did not say so until people arrived and reported seeing the crescent.

A large courtyard in Jerusalem was set aside for those witnesses, called Beit Ya'zek. They gathered there, they were examined there, and, in the detail that gives the whole system away, they were given great feasts there, to get them into the habit of coming. Without a steady stream of witnesses willing to make the journey, the calendar stopped.

The examination opened by asking exactly how the moon had been seen: before the sun or after it, how high it stood, which way it tilted. The judges knew the answers in advance, and the questions were a trap: an astronomically impossible answer disqualified a witness on the spot. When the testimony held: "The head of the court says: It is sanctified. And all the people respond after him: It is sanctified; it is sanctified" ².

Then the news had to travel. Beacons went up on the mountaintops: long cedar poles, reeds, oil-wood and tow of flax, bound with cord and set alight. Whoever raised the torch waved it up and down until he saw his opposite number doing the same on the next peak, from the Mount of Olives all the way to Beit Baltin, "until he would see the entire Diaspora before him alight like one large bonfire" ³. One piece of news, one night, Jerusalem to Babylonia.

The system ended in sabotage. The Cutheans began confusing the signal on the mountains, and the Sages replaced the fires with messengers of flesh and blood. A messenger is a good deal slower than light, and he did not always reach the distant communities before the festival. Out of that doubt came the second festival day kept in the diaspora. In the end, when no permanent court was left in the Land of Israel to sanctify months, the reckoning passed from sighting to calculation. The calendar has been computed in advance ever since, which is why you can print a Hebrew month here for any year you like.

Where the month names came from

In the Torah the months have no names. They are numbered: the first month, the second month, with Nisan as the first. A few older seasonal names survive in the early prophetic books, Aviv and Ziv and Eitanim and Bul, and then they too disappear from the text.

Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, Elul, Tishrei, Cheshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat and Adar are Babylonian names. The Jerusalem Talmud says so plainly, in the name of Rabbi Chanina: "the names of the months ascended with them from Babylonia" ⁴. The exiles brought them home, and since then there have been no others. There is something nicely inverted about that: the names that sound most traditional today are precisely what was carried back from exile.

The kerchief of Rabbi Meir of Premishlan

The moon has a blessing of its own, said outdoors, facing the moon itself, and the window for saying it closes before the month runs out. Hasidim tell this story, by word of mouth, about Rabbi Meir of Premishlan.

On one of the last nights on which the blessing could still be said, the sky was closed over completely. His hasidim stood in the courtyard hoping a wind would come and break the cover. None came.

Rabbi Meir came out to them and put a question. How did Israel bless the moon in the wilderness, when the clouds of glory closed around them on every side? He answered it himself: Moses would take out a kerchief and wave it at the sky, and the cloud would draw back and leave an opening.

As he was telling it, Rabbi Meir drew a kerchief from his pocket and waved it upwards.

The clouds opened.