Rosh Hashanah Trivia
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106 free Rosh Hashanah trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, the day tradition says the world was judged and humanity was created, and it comes wrapped in more customs than almost any other holiday. This quiz has 106 questions on all of it: why the shofar is a ram's horn and not an antler, how many blasts a congregation hears in a day, why apples go into honey and challah goes round, what people throw into the river at tashlikh, and what the greetings mean before and after the holiday. The questions run from easy openers (what does the name mean, which month is it, how many days of repentance follow) to genuinely hard ones about the Talmud's four New Years, the calendar rule that keeps the holiday off Wednesdays and Fridays, the legend behind Unetanneh Tokef, the Breslov pilgrimage to Uman, and the year Hank Greenberg hit two home runs on the holiday. It works for a family table, a Hebrew school class, a synagogue quiz night, or anyone curious about the Days of Awe. Every answer has been checked against a source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you answer.
30 of 106 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the name Rosh Hashanah literally mean in Hebrew?
Head of the year
Head of the year. The phrase turns up only once in the Bible, in Ezekiel, where it dates a vision and names no festival; the holiday took the title in rabbinic times.
Q 02By what name does the Torah refer to the festival now called Rosh Hashanah?
Yom Teruah
Yom Teruah. Numbers 29 orders a day of horn blasts and says nothing about a new year; that meaning comes from the rabbis, not from the Torah.
Q 03Rosh Hashanah begins on the first day of which Hebrew month?
Tishrei
Tishrei. The Torah knows the month only by number and the Book of Kings calls it Ethanim; the name used today came back with the exiles from Babylon.
Q 04Rosh Hashanah falls in which month of the Hebrew religious calendar that counts from Nisan?
Seventh
Seventh. The Torah counts its months from spring, so the New Year arrives more than halfway through the count, while the number of the year itself changes in autumn.
Q 05According to tradition, Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of which event?
The creation of Adam and Eve
The creation of Adam and Eve. A midrash runs the day hour by hour: Adam is formed, breaks the one command, stands trial and is pardoned by nightfall, the pattern for a yearly day of judgment.
Q 06Rosh Hashanah opens a period of repentance lasting how many days and ending on Yom Kippur?
Ten
Ten. They are days for seeking out people one has wronged, because the Mishnah holds that Yom Kippur atones for sins against God but not for a wrong done to another person until that person is appeased.
Q 07Which festival follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur later in the same month?
Sukkot
Sukkot. Five days after the fast the mood flips: for a week families take their meals in leaf-roofed huts, in a festival whose own commandment is to rejoice.
Q 08In most communities, how many shofar blasts are sounded in total on each day of Rosh Hashanah?
100
100. The law itself asks for only thirty; the rest built up over the centuries as further sets were added during and after the Mussaf service, and some communities sound 101.
Q 09What happens to the shofar in synagogues when Rosh Hashanah's first day falls on Shabbat?
It is not blown at all
It is not blown at all. The rabbis feared someone would carry the horn through the street to an expert for help, which Shabbat forbids, so the blasts wait for the second day.
Q 10Which shofar sound begins and ends each of the required blast sequences?
Tekiah
Tekiah. The long plain note frames every set, and the very last one of the day, the tekiah gedolah, is drawn out far longer than the rest.
Q 11In the Talmud, the shofar's broken notes are modelled on which human sound?
Weeping
Weeping. The rabbis could not settle whether the Torah's blast meant long groans or short sobs, so both are blown, alone and together, which is how nine notes grew to thirty.
Q 12Maimonides wrote that the shofar's blast carries which message to those who hear it?
Wake up, you sleepers
Wake up, you sleepers. Maimonides granted that the blast is a decree needing no reason, yet heard a hint in it: examine your deeds, repent and remember your Creator.
Q 13The Mishnah bars the horn of which animal from use as a shofar?
Cow
Cow. One reason the Talmud gives is the golden calf: a horn that recalls that sin would be evidence for the prosecution, and an accuser cannot turn advocate.
Q 21The Talmud's advice to eat gourd, leeks and dates at the new year rests on Abaye's belief in what?
Omens
Omens. Abaye reasoned that if a sign carries weight, the year should open with foods that grow fast; later tables turned his list into puns, with a wish for each dish.
Q 22Many Ashkenazi Jews avoid which food at Rosh Hashanah because the letters of its Hebrew name add up to 'sin'?
Nuts
Nuts. Read as numbers, the letters of egoz, a nut, come to the same total as the word for sin; the old codes add a plainer reason, that nuts raise phlegm and get in the way of the day's prayers.
Q 23What is the Yiddish name of the honey cake traditionally baked for Rosh Hashanah?
Lekach
Lekach. The honey is the point: like the apple dipped in it at the start of the meal, the cake is an edible wish that the coming year will be sweet.
Q 14A traditional Yemeni shofar is made from the long spiralling horn of which animal?
Kudu
Kudu. Makers in Yemen and Aden left the African antelope's horn in its natural twist, while the ram's horn used in Europe is softened and reshaped.
Q 15Why can a deer's antler never be used as a shofar?
It is solid bone, not hollow
It is solid bone, not hollow. A true horn is a sheath of keratin, the stuff of fingernails, over a bony core that pulls out to leave a tube; an antler has nothing to remove.
Q 16In the Temple on Rosh Hashanah, the gold-tipped shofar was flanked by two of which instrument?
Trumpets
Trumpets. The pair gave a short blast while the ibex-horn shofar held a long one, because the day's commandment belongs to the shofar; on public fast days the roles were reversed.
Q 17Which rabbi famously sounded the shofar at the Western Wall when Israeli troops reached it in 1967?
Shlomo Goren
Shlomo Goren. The army's chief chaplain arrived with a Torah scroll in his arms and a shofar at his lips, and the news moved Naomi Shemer to add a verse to her song Jerusalem of Gold.
Q 18Which fruit is eaten at Rosh Hashanah with the wish that one's merits be as many as its seeds?
Pomegranate
Pomegranate. Folklore gives the fruit 613 seeds, one for each commandment in the Torah, and many families save it for the second night as the season's first taste of a new fruit.
Q 19Carrots are eaten on Rosh Hashanah partly because the Yiddish word for carrot also means what?
Increase
Increase. Mer is Yiddish for both 'carrot' and 'more', so a plate of them asks that one's merits multiply; cut into rounds they also stand in for gold coins.
Q 20At a Rosh Hashanah seder, each symbolic food comes with a wish opening with which words?
Yehi ratzon
Yehi ratzon. The words mean 'may it be your will', and most of the foods are picked for a pun: the Aramaic for leek sounds like 'cut off', so the wish over it is that enemies be cut off.
Q 24The tashlikh ritual takes its name from which prophet's verse about casting sins into the sea?
Micah
Micah. His verse promises that God will hurl every sin into the depths, and its Hebrew verb, tashlikh, 'you will cast', became the name of the whole ceremony.
Q 25Whose prayer for a child is read from the Prophets on the first day of Rosh Hashanah?
Hannah
Hannah. She prayed so quietly, lips moving without a sound, that the priest Eli took her for a drunk; the Talmud says it was on this day that her plea was answered.
Q 26What do many people throw into the water at tashlikh, even though a number of rabbis say it is forbidden?
Pieces of bread
Pieces of bread. One objection is legal, that feeding wild creatures is barred on a holiday, and the earliest account of the ritual already forbids tossing crumbs to the fish.
Q 27Tashlikh is first described in the 1400s by the Maharil, the leading rabbi of which country's Jews?
Germany
Germany. Jacob Moelin, known as the Maharil, ruled on how his communities prayed and sang; a pupil wrote his customs down, and they became the foundation of Ashkenazi custom.
Q 28Tashlikh is normally done on Rosh Hashanah, but it may be performed as late as which day?
Hoshana Rabbah
Hoshana Rabbah. Tradition treats that day, three weeks into the year, as the moment the verdict is finally sent out, so latecomers have until then to find a riverbank.
Q 29Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the daily prayer's phrase 'the holy God' becomes 'the holy' what?
King
King. The Talmud orders the change for these days alone, to stress God's sovereignty; one sage argued that the usual wording would still do, and the ruling went against him.
Q 30In the Book of Nehemiah, which scribe reads the Torah aloud to all Jerusalem on the day now kept as Rosh Hashanah?
Ezra
Ezra. He read from first light to midday, and when the crowd wept at what they heard they were told to stop: go home, eat rich food, drink something sweet and send portions to those with nothing.