The Jewish calendar is based on the cycles of the moon and is therefore called a lunar calendar; unlike the civil calendar, which is a solar calendar and is 365.25 days long, the Jewish one is only 354 days long. In order to keep the Jewish holidays in their correct "season" (e.g. making sure that the agricultural holidays don't come in the middle of the winter) and in sync with the solar calendar, seven leap years are included in every 19-year cycle of the Hebrew calendar. A leap year has 384 days. An ordinary Jewish year has 12 months, although a leap year (which occurs 7 times in a 19-year cycle, during the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth years) has 13 months in it. Each month of the Jewish calendar starts on the day of a new moon and lasts either 29 or 30 days.

See a full Jewish Calendar for this year.

Return to Virtual Jerusalem