Chag HaBanot: The Festival of the Daughters on Rosh Chodesh Tevet

When It Falls and Why

Chanukah begins on 25 Kislev. When Kislev has thirty days, Rosh Chodesh Tevet is observed on two days (30 Kislev and 1 Tevet), the sixth and seventh days of Chanukah; when Kislev has twenty-nine days, Rosh Chodesh is a single day, 1 Tevet, the sixth day of Chanukah. Communities that keep Chag HaBanot generally mark it on 1 Tevet, or across the days of Rosh Chodesh.¹ See our articles on Chanukah and Rosh Chodesh.

Rosh Chodesh has long been regarded as a special day for women. A midrash in Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer teaches that the women of Israel refused to give their earrings for the golden calf, and that Hashem rewarded them with the new moons as their festivals. The Tur cites this as the reason women customarily refrain from certain work on Rosh Chodesh, and the Jerusalem Talmud already speaks of women who refrain from work on that day as keeping a valid custom.² A new moon that falls in the middle of Chanukah, the one festival in which the Talmud explicitly credits women with a share in the miracle, was a natural moment for a festival of daughters.

The Communities and Their Customs

The custom is best documented in Tunisia, above all on the island of Djerba, with evidence also from Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Istanbul and Thessaloniki.³ Its origins are unknown. No early written source institutes it; what we know comes from community memory and twentieth-century ethnography, so it is best described as a family of local customs. Practices recorded include:

• Gifts to daughters. Mothers and fathers gave presents to their daughters, and husbands to their wives and grooms to their brides. In some places these gifts helped build a girl’s dowry.
• Women in the synagogue. On a day when women did not ordinarily approach the Torah scrolls, they came to the synagogue, kissed the Torah scrolls, prayed for their daughters’ health and received blessings from the rabbis.
• Reconciliation. Women who had quarrelled were expected to make peace. Some communities saw this as the heart of the day: a festival of daughters is also a festival of sisters.
• A festive gathering. Women of several generations met to eat, sing and dance, often around the Chanukah lights, with sweets such as bjawia (a confection of nuts and rose water), fried sfenj, almond pastries and dishes of cheese. In some places the girls who had reached bat mitzvah age were presented.
• Songs and blessings. In some communities a piyyut (liturgical poem) was sung before the lighting, and the lights were dedicated to the memory of heroic women, with a Mi Sheberach blessing for the mothers of Israel.

After the great migrations of the mid-twentieth century, many families who had kept the day in North Africa let it lapse in Israel and France. In recent decades there has been a revival: Israeli educators, families of North African descent and women’s groups across the Jewish world have rediscovered it, and gatherings, study sessions and family celebrations have multiplied.⁴

“They Too Were Included in That Miracle”

The deepest halachic root of the day is a short line in the Talmud. Women are generally exempt from positive commandments bound to a fixed time, yet Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi teaches that women are obligated in the Chanukah lights, “for they too were included in that miracle” (she-af hen hayu be-oto ha-nes).⁵ The same principle obligates women to hear the Megillah on Purim and to drink the four cups at the Pesach seder.

The commentators explain the phrase in two ways. Rashi says that the Greek decrees struck women in particular, and that “the miracle was performed by a woman”. Tosafot elsewhere explains that women, like men, were endangered and therefore delivered, and they also mention that the Chanukah miracle came through Yehudit.⁶ Either way, a Jewish woman who kindles the lights does so not as a guest at someone else’s celebration, but as an heir of a deliverance in which women suffered, resisted and triumphed. This is also the source of the widespread custom that women refrain from work while the Chanukah lights burn (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 670:1).

Yehudit: History, Book and Tradition

The Book of Judith

The central figure of Chag HaBanot is Yehudit (Judith). The Book of Judith tells of a pious widow of the town of Bethulia, besieged by the general Holofernes. When the elders resolve to surrender if no help comes within five days, Yehudit rebukes them for putting Hashem to the test, prays, goes out to the enemy camp, wins the general’s confidence, and, when he lies drunk, beheads him with his own sword. The leaderless army flees, and the elder Uzziah blesses her:

O daughter, blessed art thou of the most high God above all the women upon the earth.

The book is not part of the Hebrew Bible; it survives in Greek in the Septuagint and was received as Scripture by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, not by the Jewish community. Its history is famously problematic: it opens with “Nabuchodonosor, who reigned in Nineve” (Judith 1:1), although Nebuchadnezzar ruled Babylon and Nineveh had fallen before his reign, and Bethulia has never been identified. Most scholars read it as an edifying story composed in the Hasmonean period, probably in the second century BCE, which deliberately mixes eras to tell a timeless tale of faith against an arrogant empire.⁷

Yehudit and Chanukah in medieval tradition

How did Yehudit come to Chanukah? In the Middle Ages, Hebrew retellings of her story moved it into the Maccabean era and sometimes made her a daughter of the Hasmonean priestly family. The fourteenth-century compendium Kol Bo tells that Yehudit fed the enemy commander cheese to make him thirsty, gave him wine until he was drunk, and cut off his head, and that this is the reason for the custom of eating cheese dishes on Chanukah. The Ran, in his commentary on the Rif to tractate Shabbat, cites the story in brief.⁸ The Rema brings it into the codified law:

Some say that one should eat cheese on Chanukah, because the miracle was done through the milk that Yehudit fed the enemy.

So the link between Yehudit and Chanukah is a medieval tradition, not a statement of the Book of Judith or the Talmud, and the historical Judith (if there was one) cannot be placed with confidence in the Maccabean revolt. That is no reason to discard her. Chanukah’s lesson is that faith and courage can overturn the proud, and Yehudit’s story, whether history or parable, teaches the same truth in a woman’s voice. Many communities tell her story at Chag HaBanot, and the Sephardi tale Ma’aseh ha-Ishah ha-Yehudit gave it a popular form.⁹

Other women of Chanukah

• The mother and her seven sons. Second Maccabees 7 tells of a mother who watched her seven sons die rather than transgress the Torah, encouraging each to be faithful, and who died after them. She is unnamed there; the Talmud tells a version set in Roman times (Gittin 57b), Lamentations Rabbah calls her Miriam bat Tanchum, and later Jewish tradition calls her Chanah.¹⁰ Her confession that “the Creator of the world … will also of His own mercy give you breath and life again” (2 Maccabees 7:23) is a witness to the resurrection.
• The mothers of 1 Maccabees. Women “which had caused their children to be circumcised” were put to death with their infants (1 Maccabees 1:60–61).
• The bride of the Hasmonean house. Medieval midrashim, building on the decree against brides that Rashi mentions, tell of a daughter of Matityahu who shamed her brothers into action rather than submit to a decree against brides: a late legend, best told as such.

Women of Courage in the Tanakh

Deborah and Yael. Deborah was a prophetess who “judged Israel at that time” (Judges 4:4), summoned Barak to battle and sang one of the oldest songs in the Bible. Yael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, killed the Canaanite general Sisera in her tent. The parallel with Yehudit is unmistakable, and Deborah blesses Yael in words that echo through later tradition:

Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.

Esther. The Megillah records that Esther “was taken unto king Ahasuerus into his house royal in the tenth month, which is the month Tebeth” (Esther 2:16). Some linked the festival to Esther’s elevation in this month. Her moment came when Mordechai asked, “who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (4:14), and she answered with a fast and a risk of her life. See our article on Purim.

The woman of valor. Proverbs closes with an acrostic poem in praise of the eshet chayil, “a woman of valor” (Proverbs 31:10–31). Chayil means strength, even military might; the woman it praises is a capable, generous, wise and God-fearing builder of her household. Many families sing it on Friday evening:

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. — Proverbs 31:10

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth Hashem, she shall be praised.

Messianic Witness: Daughters in the Story of Redemption

Chanah the prophetess

The Gospel of Luke opens its account of the Messiah with faithful Jewish women: Elisheva (Elizabeth), Miriam (Mary), and an aged widow in the Temple. Chanah (Anna), “a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser”, had been widowed young and “departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day” (Luke 2:36–37). When the infant Yeshua was brought to the Temple, she gave thanks and “spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem” (2:38).

She belongs to the faithful remnant who waited for “the consolation of Israel” (2:25). It is a homiletical observation, not a claim of the text, that the dedicated Temple of Chanukah was the place where an old woman of the tribe of Asher became one of the first to proclaim the Messiah.

When Elisheva greets Miriam with “Blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:42), her words recall the blessings of Yael and Yehudit, and Miriam’s song (1:46–55) echoes that of Chanah the mother of Shmuel (1 Samuel 2:1–10).

Women who followed and served

Luke records that as Yeshua travelled through the towns of the Galilee, the twelve were with him, “and certain women”, including Miriam of Magdala, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, “and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance” (Luke 8:1–3). Women stood at the execution when most of the disciples had fled, and women were the first witnesses of his resurrection (Luke 23:49; 24:1–10).

“Your daughters shall prophesy”

At Shavuot in Jerusalem, Peter explained the outpouring of the Ruach HaKodesh with the words of Joel:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

The prophecy began to be fulfilled in that generation; Philip had “four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy” (Acts 21:9). Read in this light, Chag HaBanot celebrates not only daughters’ past courage but their calling in the redemption still unfolding.

The Prophetic Horizon

Joel’s promise belongs to the last days and to the restoration of Israel:

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out My spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: and also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out My spirit.

Jeremiah, in the chapter of the new covenant, gives a famously difficult verse: “for Hashem hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man” (Jeremiah 31:22). Its meaning is uncertain. Many Jewish interpreters read the “woman” as the “virgin of Israel” (31:21), who in the restoration will turn back and cleave to Hashem, reversing her wandering; some Christian interpreters have read it as a prophecy of the Messiah’s birth. The honest conclusion is that the verse announces a startling reversal in the age of restoration, and that its exact sense remains debated.¹¹ What is clear is the setting: Rachel weeping for her children is comforted (31:15–17), the exiles return, and Hashem writes His Torah on their hearts (31:31–34).

Chag HaBanot falls on a new moon, when the moon begins to grow again from darkness, and tradition links the renewal of the moon to the renewal of Israel. It points to the day when the dead will rise (Daniel 12:2) and the women who were faithful in persecution, from the mother of the seven sons to the women at the empty tomb, will rejoice with all the redeemed in Jerusalem.

Keeping Chag HaBanot

Chag HaBanot is a custom, not an obligation, and its forms vary. Families and communities who wish to mark it might:

1. Light the Chanukah lamp together as women and girls, perhaps dedicating each light to a woman of faith: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Yael, Esther, Yehudit, the mother of the seven sons, Chanah the prophetess.
2. Bless and honor daughters. Give a small gift, speak a blessing over them (“May God make you like Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel and Leah”), and tell them the stories of the women of Israel.
3. Make peace. Use the day to reconcile a quarrel, especially between women in a family or community.
4. Read the texts: Judges 4–5, Esther 4, Proverbs 31, Luke 2:36–38 and Acts 2:17–18.
5. Share a festive table, with cheese dishes for Yehudit and North African sweets, and invite the older women of the community to tell their stories.

Dates are on our calendar.