Everything You Need to Know About Rosh Hashanah

What Is Rosh Hashanah?

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, observed on the first and second days of Tishrei in the Hebrew calendar. The name translates literally as "head of the year," and the holiday marks the beginning of the High Holy Days — a ten-day period of reflection and repentance that culminates in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In 2024, Rosh Hashanah falls on October 2–4; in 2025, it begins September 22. Understanding the timing matters for employers and HR teams who need to plan around religious observances that fall on different dates each year on the Gregorian calendar.

The holiday is one of the most significant in the Jewish calendar, observed by Jewish communities around the world regardless of level of religious practice. For many Jewish employees, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the holiest days of the year — comparable in weight to Christmas or Easter for Christian employees. Workplaces that treat these dates with the same consideration they give to other major religious holidays demonstrate a commitment to inclusion that is both legally required and culturally meaningful.

The Religious and Cultural Significance of the Holiday

Rosh Hashanah is described in Jewish tradition as the anniversary of the world's creation and the day on which God reviews the deeds of humanity, inscribing each person in the Book of Life. The holiday is marked by synagogue attendance, the sounding of the shofar (a ram's horn), festive meals, and customs like dipping apple slices in honey to symbolize hopes for a sweet new year. Round challah bread, pomegranates, and fish are also traditional foods associated with the holiday's themes of renewal and abundance.

Unlike many secular new year celebrations, Rosh Hashanah is not primarily a party holiday. It is a time of serious reflection — an accounting of the past year's actions, an intention to repair relationships damaged over the year, and a renewal of commitments for the year ahead. The concept of teshuvah (return or repentance) is central: the High Holy Days are explicitly a time for looking honestly at failures and taking responsibility for them. For leaders and managers, this framework of honest self-assessment and renewal maps directly onto practices that make organizations stronger.

What Employees Who Observe Rosh Hashanah Need

Employees who observe Rosh Hashanah will typically need the first two days of the holiday off from work. Many observant Jews also attend evening synagogue services the night before, meaning time off may begin the evening prior to the holiday's start. Yom Kippur, which follows ten days later, involves a full fast and is similarly observed as a day completely away from work. HR leaders planning around these dates should build in advance awareness so that scheduling, project deadlines, and coverage can be arranged without last-minute complications.

Religious accommodations for observant employees are not optional courtesies — they are legal requirements. Ensuring compliance with labor laws around religious accommodation means understanding what "reasonable accommodation" requires under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation, what constitutes an "undue hardship" for an employer, and how to document accommodation requests fairly across the workforce. Most requests for time off on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur fall well within the standard of reasonable accommodation for organizations of ordinary size.

How Managers Can Support Jewish Employees During the High Holy Days

The single most important thing a manager can do is make it easy for employees to request time off without feeling like they are causing a problem. Jewish employees who anticipate friction or judgment around religious observance often simply work through the holiday rather than face that discomfort — which is not genuine inclusion, only surface-level accommodation. Creating an environment where religious observance is treated with the same naturalness as any other time-off request requires managers who have thought about this in advance, not just responded to it reactively.

Practical steps include: acknowledging the holiday proactively with affected employees in advance, avoiding scheduling critical meetings or deadlines on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur dates, and treating these dates as you would any other major religious holiday in your workforce. Organizations that use AI-powered employee time tracking and scheduling tools can set up automated reminders and flag religious observance dates ahead of planning cycles, reducing the friction for both employees and managers.

It is also worth noting that Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown, not at midnight. Employees who need to leave early on the day the holiday begins should be accommodated. For those managing remote teams across time zones, this requires some coordination — but it is the same coordination any holiday observance requires and is well within normal operational planning.

Leadership Themes That Rosh Hashanah Offers to Any Organization

Even for leaders and employees who do not observe Rosh Hashanah, the holiday's themes offer a valuable frame for organizational reflection. The concept of an honest accounting of the past year — what went well, what failed, and what relationships need repair — is precisely what high-performing teams do in structured retrospectives. The emphasis on teshuvah, on taking responsibility and committing to change, is what distinguishes organizations that grow from those that repeat the same mistakes year after year.

The High Holy Days model something that business culture often resists: structured, calendared time for honest self-assessment rather than perpetual forward motion. The strongest organizations make space for this kind of reflection, whether through formal retrospectives, leadership off-sites, or one-on-one conversations between managers and their teams. The beginning of a new year — whether that falls in January, September, or at any other point in an organization's planning cycle — is a natural time to ask the questions Rosh Hashanah asks: What commitments did we make and fail to keep? What do we need to repair? What do we want to do differently in the year ahead? Workforce management solutions that support structured goal-setting and performance review cycles make this kind of intentional reflection easier to operationalize across an organization.

Building a More Inclusive Workplace Calendar

Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to look at the broader question of how well your organization's calendar reflects the diversity of your workforce. Most corporate calendars are built around Christian holidays — Christmas and Easter receive automatic recognition in most Western workplaces, while holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr, Diwali, or Lunar New Year require employees to use PTO or formally request accommodation. This asymmetry is worth examining directly.

Growing businesses that are actively building diverse teams often find that adjusting the official holiday calendar — or offering floating holidays that allow employees to observe the dates meaningful to them — is both a practical solution and a meaningful signal of inclusion. It also reduces the administrative burden on HR when accommodation requests don't have to go through a formal process for holidays that already have widespread recognition. Modern HR and ERP systems support configurable holiday calendars that can be personalized by employee or team, making this shift more operationally straightforward than it may appear.

Rosh Hashanah, like any significant religious and cultural observance in your workforce, is a reminder that your employees bring their full lives to work — including the traditions, communities, and practices that give their lives meaning. Organizations that recognize this and build systems and cultures that support it don't just avoid legal liability. They build the kind of workplace where people with choices choose to stay.

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