Yom Kippur 2026 ended Monday night, closing the Ten Days of Repentance

The holiest day in the Jewish year began at sundown on Sunday, September 20 and ended at nightfall on Monday, September 21. It is observed with a fast of roughly 25 hours.

September 22, 2026 at 8:30 PM Pacific · By the Gospel Desk, Gospel News Access

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year, began at sundown on Sunday, September 20, 2026 and ended at nightfall on Monday, September 21.

The day closes the Ten Days of Repentance, the period that opened with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which this year began at sundown on Friday, September 11 and ran through the evening of Sunday, September 13. Together Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are known as the High Holy Days, and the days between them are also called the Days of Awe.

Yom Kippur is observed with a fast of roughly 25 hours — no food and no drink from before sundown until after nightfall the following day — and with extended prayer in synagogue. The themes of the day are repentance, atonement and forgiveness: the turning of a person toward God and toward the people they have wronged. The observance is set out in the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus 16 and Leviticus 23, which appoint the tenth day of the seventh month as a day of atonement and of self-denial.

Because the Jewish calendar is lunisolar, the date moves against the civil calendar each year. In the Hebrew reckoning the day that has just passed was Yom Kippur of the year 5787.

A note for our readers on why this is in a gospel newspaper: Yom Kippur is a Jewish holy day, kept by the Jewish community, and Gospel News Access reports it as what it is rather than as a borrowed occasion. Christian readers may recognise the Day of Atonement as the image the New Testament letter to the Hebrews reaches for when it writes about a single sacrifice and a high priest entering the holy place. That is a point about two texts and the relationship between them. It is not a claim about how anyone observed this week, and it is not an invitation to treat someone else's holy day as a figure of speech.

Gospel News Access has not reported that any gospel artist, church or denomination marked Yom Kippur 2026, because we have not sourced such an observance. Where we can source one, we will report it and name it.

Sources for the dates and the practices in this report: Hebcal's Jewish calendar, Chabad.org, Reform Judaism and the Jewish Virtual Library entries for Yom Kippur 5787.