The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Israel holds its ceremonies for the third yahrzeit of Oct. 7 on Monday the fifth — sirens, Har Herzl, the reading of the names. That is also the first morning an American shul can switch on a microphone. Nobody scheduled it that way.

The yahrzeit is the 22nd of Tishrei, and this year that lands on Shabbat, the third. In Israel the 22nd is Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah at once, one day, finished. Out here it’s Shmini Atzeret by itself, and Simchat Torah the next morning. So Israel comes out of yom tov on Saturday night with Sunday clear. We’re still in chag.

Israel doesn’t use that Sunday. When the cabinet set the national memorial day in March 2024 it hit the same problem — the 22nd is a festival, the 23rd is isru chag — so it took the 24th of Tishrei. This year the 24th is Monday the fifth.

Oct. 7, 2023, was the 22nd of Tishrei too. In Israel it was Simchat Torah. Israelis had already danced — Friday night, hours before — so when the sirens went at 6:30 in the morning the joy was behind them, and what came after it was three years of war. Out here the 22nd was Shmini Atzeret, and the dancing was still in front of us. Word came in the way word comes in on yom tov, sideways, from a neighbor who doesn’t keep Shabbat or a brother-in-law who’s a doctor. Then the sun went down, it was Simchat Torah in America, and every community in this country had to decide what to do with a sefer Torah already in its arms.

Some danced. Some put the scrolls down and said Tehillim instead. A lot of places did one hakafah and stopped. Israel was never asked the question.

Three years on, the split runs as two different arguments. Israel’s is about hostages, commissions, the draft, and who has any standing to sit in judgment on the seventh — a fight among people who were all there for it. Ours has been about whether to dance, and it hasn’t let up since. Do we hold the gala this year. Do we put the word Israel on the invitation. Are the kids still doing the parade? Every one of those is the Simchat Torah question in a different coat.

I came to this late enough that both calendars had to be explained to me by an adult, which is not an experience most Jews have. I converted in the spring of 2025 — beit din and mikveh in Atlanta on a Tuesday — so I have no Oct. 7 of my own. File me under Oct. 8 Jew, still learning quite a lot. Somebody had to sit me down and tell me that Shmini Atzeret runs one day in Israel and two out here, and why. Jews in Babylonia couldn’t be sure what day it was in Jerusalem, so the far communities kept two days to cover both answers. The runners stopped coming in the fourth century. We kept the day anyway. A Jew born into this absorbs all of that at eight years old and never looks at it again.

So the extra day is a monument to not being there. We heard late, we danced after, and this year we grieve on Monday.

 The calendar splits almost everything here. It refuses to split Yizkor. Both halves of the Jewish world say it on Shmini Atzeret — the 22nd of Tishrei, Saturday the third. Two days before either of us holds anything, a shul in Talpiot and a shul in Atlanta stand up on one morning and say it together.

Watch for Sunday. It’s the weekend, it feels like the anniversary, and somebody on every committee will suggest it. Sunday the fourth is Simchat Torah morning out here, the one morning of the year that was never for a memorial.

I wear a Magen David that Yaron Bob hammered out of Kassam steel. I stood in his workshop at Moshav Yated, five kilometers from Gaza, and watched him work — rocket steel into art, signed and numbered. Israelis are not asking us to be sad on their behalf. They have that covered.

Say Yizkor on Saturday and mean it. Dance on Sunday. Dance properly, all seven hakafot, because the third year is when a community starts performing its grief instead of feeling it, and a half-hearted hakafah does nobody in Israel the slightest good. Then hold the program on Monday the fifth, while they’re standing at Har Herzl.

So put Monday in the calendar this week, while there’s still somebody to call. From Friday evening to Sunday night you won’t be near a phone. Neither will I. And Monday morning is the program.

Uriel Zehavi is Executive Director of the Mitzpe Institute (mitzpe.org) and writes the daily Israel Brief (israelbrief.com). He is the author of four books, most recently Rooted in Judea: Lives and Law in the Heart of Israel, and is making aliyah to Kiryat Shmona with his husband, Modi.