Celebrate your Jewish birthday!

A Jewish birthday calculator is available online at www.chabad.org/calendar/birthday.asp.

The secular calendar year has a 365-day year (366 days in leap-years), in keeping with the annual solar cycle. The Jewish calendar is based on the lunar cycle, resulting in a twelve-month year of approximately 354 days, with an additional month added every two or three years to keep the Jewish year aligned with the solar seasons. This means that a particular date on the Jewish calendar will coincide with different secular dates on different years. In fact, your Jewish birthday will fall on or within a day or two of secular birthday only once in 19 years!

Yes. On the Jewish calendar, the calendar day begins at nightfall and ends the following nightfall. So anyone born between nightfall and midnight will have his or her Jewish birthday one day later than someone born before nightfall on the same secular date.

The Torah commands to “Love your fellow as yourself” (Leviticus 18:19), and the great Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva proclaimed this “a great principal of the Torah.” So while a birthday is a time for introspection and self-assessment, also this intensely personal occasion should be utilized to engage with others and share the specialty of the day with them.