Israel
Israel defines its holidays in the Hours of Work and Rest Law rather than in a standalone holidays act. The list is entirely Hebrew, every entry runs sunset to sunset, and eleven of them are statutory days of rest. Christmas and Easter are national days in practice but are not on that list.
The statutory calendar
Eleven entries qualify as days of rest. Rosh Hashanah and Simchat Torah each take two days, and everything else takes one:
- Rosh Hashanah - 1 and 2 Tishrei
- Yom Kippur - 10 Tishrei (added 2019)
- Sukkot - first day, 15 Tishrei
- Simchat Torah - 22 and 23 Tishrei
- Hanukkah - 25 Kislev to 2 or 3 Tevet
- Purim - 14 Adar
- Passover - 15 and 16 Nisan
- Yom HaAtzmaut - Independence Day, 5 Iyar
- Shavuot - 6 Sivan
- Tisha B'Av - 9 Av, fast day
- Memorial Day - 4 Iyar (added 2019)
Days of rest versus statutory holidays
The law separates two categories that English-language sources routinely merge. Eleven entries are days of rest (yom menuchet), which carry the full prohibition on paid work. Three further entries - Hoshana Rabbah, Shaarei Torah and Hetzniot, the intermediate days of Sukkot - are statutory holidays but not days of rest, so employers may schedule work on them. Adding those three gives the figure of fourteen that many sources quote. The 2019 amendment is what moved Yom Kippur and Memorial Day into the days-of-rest category; Yom Kippur had been a statutory holiday without that protection since 2003.
Sunset to sunset
Every entry above begins at sunset on its stated date and ends at sunset the following day. The practical consequence is that a holiday landing immediately before Shabbat removes two consecutive days of work, which is the recurring labour-dispute pattern around Simchat Torah and the final days of Hanukkah. The calendar also follows the Hebrew lunar-solar cycle, so dates drift roughly eleven days earlier each year against the Gregorian calendar, with periodic leap corrections.
Where it is contested
The calendar is contested on three separate axes, and they are worth separating because they get conflated. The first is Haredi non-participation. Haredi parties have argued for decades that Yom Kippur should not be enforced at all, since observant Jews treat work on it as forbidden by Torah rather than by statute. The 2013 amendment that added Yom Kippur as a day of rest was opposed on those grounds, and municipal enforcement against kosher shops still generates recurring litigation. The second is language: Israel has no official Arabic or Russian calendar, which critics argue disadvantages public employees whose non-Jewish holidays fall on working days. The third is the recurring political contest over whether Memorial Day should be a day of rest at all, repeatedly debated since 2019.
Christian and Muslim days in practice
Christianity and Islam both have recognised national days in Israel, and neither is a statutory day of rest under the Hours of Work and Rest Law. Christmas and Epiphany are accompanied by state ceremonies and are widely observed by Arab and foreign Christian communities. Easter has the unusual status of a statutory holiday for municipal employees specifically. Islamic dates such as Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are recognised for Muslim employees and follow local moon sighting rather than the Umm al-Qura tables.