Rosh Hashanah is a very important holiday of Judaism. It is called the official Jewish New Years Day, where Jews look back over the year just past and forward to the new year to come. Jews believe that at this holiday, God decides who shall live or die in the next year, judged by their deeds. Rosh Hashanah this year was on September 4 at sunset and ended at September 6 at nightfall. Next Rosh Hashanah will be on September 24 and 26, 2014.
Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement, is the most holiest day of the year for Jewish people. This is a multiple day holiday, being for 4 days. This year, it was on September 13, 14, 16 and 17. We do not know of next year's dates; the days are based on the New Moon observation. Jewish people traditionally observe this holy day with an approximate 25-hour period of fasting and intensive prayer, often spending most of the day in synagogue services. The central themes of this holiday is of repentance and atonement. According to Jewish tradition, God inscribes each person's fate for the coming year into a book, the Book of Life, on Rosh Hashanah, and waits until Yom Kippur to "seal" the verdict.
Five days after Yom Kippur, there is a week-long festival of booths called Sukkot. On Sukkot, The traditional Jews build a booth where they eat or sleep in! The roof of the booth is covered in green branches from trees and shrubs. The roof is called the sukkah and it is said to be a reminder of the days of when the ancient Israelites lived as they went through the wilderness with Moses as the lead. Before the Romans destroyed the Temple, this festival was the most important Jewish festival.
Hanukkah is a eight-day Jewish holiday celebrating the victory of the Maccabees over the Syrian army of Antiochus Epiphanes (165 B.C.E.). This gave Israel religious freedom. In these 8 days, a menorah is used (seen on the left picture). It has nine branches: one for each night of Hanukkah and one branch used to light the others. Hanukkah is celebrated by lighting one candle (or flame) in the menorah on the first night and adding one candle each night until all eight candles are lit at once. Until recently, it was customary to give children gifts of nuts and Hanukkah gelt (token sums of money). Since Hanukkah comes around the same time as Christmas, modern Jews have started to emulate Christian practice by giving their children more significant gifts -- sometimes even, one gift for each night of the festival.
A major Spring festival is the Pesach, often called the Passover. Passover celebrates the Exodus from Egypt when the Jews were led out of slavery and into freedom. For eight days (seven in Reform Judaism), Jews eat no normal bread but only the flat, unleavened, cracker-like bread called matzah. The Bible tells how, as the Jews made their hasty preparations to leave Egypt, they had no time to prepare bread for their journey. Instead, they placed the dough, which had no time to rise to be baked, on their backs. There, the sun baked it into matzah.