Sukkot for 2025 (5786) begins at sundown on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025, and ends the evening of Monday, Oct. 13, 2025.

Five days after the solemnity of Yom Kippur and the end of the High Holy Days, we celebrate Sukkot, one of the three great festivals (chaggim) of the Jewish year. We erect a hut or booth (sukkah)—a flimsy structure with at least three sides, whose roof is made out of thatch or branches, providing shade and protection from the sun, but also open enough to see stars at night.

Wise constructs several sukkot on campus each year. Decorated by our students and community, with one dedicated to refugees, these structures host services, gatherings, and events throughout the week-long celebration, such as Tot Shabbat, Shabbat services, and more!

About Sukkot

Though it has its ancient origins in the fall harvest festival, with the booths representing the huts farmers lived in during the last hectic days before the winter rains, Bible reinterpreted the festival, imbuing it with an additional later of meaning. The sukkot came to represent the huts the Israelites erected during their wandering in the desert after the revelation at Sinai.

For one week, meals are eaten in the structure, and in a welcoming ceremony— called ushpizin—ancestors are symbolically invited to join us at our table. In commemoration of the bounty of the Holy Land, we hold and shake the lulav (made of four plants: palm, myrtle, and willow) and etrog (a citron) in the four cardinal directions.

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