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Y3 Birch Class's Jewish festival - Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah is a Jewish New Year festival, which lasts for two days at the end of September. The words ‘Rosh Hashanah’ means ‘the head of the year’.

To recreate the events of the festival, the children firstly thought about the year that they had had and what mistakes they might had made.

In Jerusalem, the Western Wall is one of the last parts of the Holy Temple that is left. When Jewish people visit Jerusalem, they write a note and fold it up and put it in the cracks of the walls. Jewish people believe that God reads the notes and makes them true. In class, children wrote down something they would like to be forgiven for and slotted their prayers into the wall just like the Jewish people do in Jerusalem.

After that, the children made a Shofar out of paper and blew them as part of the festival ritual to mark the start of a ten-day period called the Days of Awe.

At the end of the 'service', the class shared the special meal of apple and honey together as a symbol of the sweet New Year that each Jewish person hopes lies ahead.