Today marks Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year of 5775, and the beginning of the High Holy Days which end with Yom Kippur on Oct. 4.

Cantor Michal Gray-Schaffer, the spiritual leader of the 70 families that make up Congregation B’nai Abraham, 519 N. Main St., said the days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur are called Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, “The 10 Days of Repentance.”

She said this is an intense period of seeking forgiveness characterized by prayers and acts of charity.

This leads to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

“We observe a 25-hour fast and abstain from food or water,” said Gray-Schaffer. “Technically it begins 20 minutes before sunset on the 3rd to an hour after sunset on the 4th.

“It’s fairly common practice on Yom Kippur. Anyone who has been through a bar or bat mitzvah is supposed to do it,” she said.

“However if there is a reason, if you are ill or have to take medications with food or water, you are not permitted to fast because your life comes before the rules.”

Sam Bernstine, the president of the 70-member Temple Hader Israel in New Castle, said its members also fast “but Jewish law also permits people with medical issues to break the fast early if necessary and since we have many senior citizens and elderly congregants, some of them follow this permitted process as well.”

“The congregation as a whole will fast,” said Rabbi Bryna Milkow of Temple Ohav Shalom in Allison Park. “The fasting can aid them in realizing the spiritual side of the holiday.”

The holiday begins with Kol Nidrei, a very famous prayer that is said and sung three times, according to Gray-Schaffer.

“It asks God to relieve us from vows made in the past year under duress,” she said. “It’s poignant because in the past Jews were forced to convert to other religions to live. So, it just kind of recalls to us our history in Spain and Portugal.”

Yom Kippur is so important, Gray-Schaffer said that “even Jews who don’t go to synagogue any other time of the year, they go on Yom Kippur. It’s like Christians and Easter. And you are in synagogue a good portion of the day and fasting.”

She said there is a two-and-a-half hour service the first night of Yom Kippur, a four-hour morning service which in the B’nai Abraham synagogue incorporates the Yizkor or memorial for those that have passed in the last year.

Then in the evening of Oct. 4, Gray-Schaffer said, there is the Neilah service.

“It is the concluding service, but the liturgy for this service is based on the idea that the gates of prayer close at the end of Yom Kippur,” she said.

The fasting can go be hard on a cantor who’s conducting services all day.

“I just do it,” she said. “I know a lot of cantors lose their voices by the end, but I have healthy vocal cords, so that’s never happened to me, knock on wood, but I am just exhausted.”

Milkow said in addition to the evening service Oct. 3, she performs four services and leads a discussion group Oct. 4.

“It’s an incredibly long day for me. I might have a half-hour to sit down for a few minutes,” she said. “Personally, it’s a spiritual day for me as well.”

In addition to fasting, no work is to be done on Yom Kippur. The Torah and all the synagogue covers are white, Gray-Schaffer said.

At the end of Yom Kippur, Gray-Schaffer said it is traditional to break the long fast with bagels and lox, and kugel or noodle pudding.

“We have it at the synagogue, but a lot of people have tradition in the family to have it at home,” she said.

Gray-Schaffer said, “The idea of the High Holy Days including Rosh Hashanah is of repentance and coming to terms with and acknowledging what we did in the past year against God and how we hurt other people.

“Our prayers are two-fold. We ask God for forgiveness and we seek out the person whose feelings we have hurt or whatever and we ask forgiveness,” she said.

“In the liturgy of the service, we pray as a community and we all take on the burden of the community’s sins,” she said.

“The idea is to clean the slate which psychologically is a good idea, not letting anything go beyond a year,” she said.

Yom Kippur leads to Sukkot, the harvest festival celebrated by the B’nai Abraham congregation on Oct. 10.

Three to four days after Yom Kippur, she said, the congregation starts building a sukkah, a shelter built in the fields during the harvest.

Gray-Schaffer said the congregation’s sukkah is up all year, but it is decorated in honor of Sukkot.

She added that on Oct. 17 the congregation will celebrate the Simchat Torah.

“It means the ‘Happiness of the Torah,’ and we take out all the Torahs and we go around the sanctuary seven times. This year we are celebrating our new kosher Torah,” she said.

When a burst water pipe last winter damaged the synagogue’s five Torah scrolls, Carole Stein, a former Pittsburgher living in Boynton Beach, Fla., offered the congregation a new, kosher Torah that had belonged to her late husband, Rabbi Andrew Beck.

“And we are going to be dedicating that Oct. 17,” Gray-Schaffer said.