While most Israelis begin building their sukkot this week, one small community that traces its roots to the ancient Israelites will wait until the end of October.
The Samaritans (Shomronim in Hebrew) celebrate the festivals commanded in the Torah, but not always on the same dates as Jews. Their year begins with the Hebrew month of Nissan in the spring, rather than with the month of Tishrei in the fall. Their priests calculate leap years independently, based on a count beginning with the Israelites’ entry into the Land of Israel under Joshua. In some years, the festivals coincide; in others, as in 2026, they fall almost a month apart.
This year, Samaritan Yom Kippur will fall on Oct. 20, and Sukkot will begin on Oct. 25.
On a recent tour of the Samaritan neighborhood in Holon, JNS met with Shahar Yehoshua, a genial man in his 70s who welcomed visitors into his home and explained the customs of one of the world’s smallest religious communities.
After his military service, Yehoshua worked in a bank for 36 years. Since retiring, he has introduced thousands of visitors to Samaritan life through tours in Holon and on Mount Gerizim, particularly during Sukkot.
Rather than erecting temporary huts outdoors, Samaritan families construct their sukkot inside their homes. A sturdy frame is suspended beneath the ceiling and covered with palm branches, greenery and hundreds of pieces of fruit arranged in elaborate patterns.
The custom of building indoors is generally traced to periods of persecution, when outdoor sukkot were vulnerable to vandalism. Today, families open their homes to the many visitors who come to see their fruit-covered ceilings.
Ancient faith, modern Israelis
Yehoshua was keen to dispel the idea that the Samaritans live apart from contemporary society. They work in the same professions as other Israelis, among them banking and high-tech. Men and women from the Holon community serve in the Israel Defense Forces, and young women dress much like their secular Jewish peers.
The community numbers fewer than 1,000 people, divided roughly equally between Neve Pinchas in Holon and Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim, overlooking Nablus. Kiryat Luza’s residents move between Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking worlds. Once centered in Nablus itself, the community relocated to the mountain during the late 1980s and early 1990s, bringing its members closer to the holiest place in the Samaritan faith. The high priest resides there, and the entire community gathers on the mountain for its annual Passover sacrifice.
Samaritans are descendants of the ancient Israelite tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh and Levi who remained in the land after the Assyrian conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. Scholars continue to debate when Samaritan and Jewish traditions separated, but archaeology confirms that a major Samaritan sanctuary stood on Mount Gerizim by the fifth century BCE. The Hasmonean ruler, John Hyrcanus, destroyed it around 111 BCE. Centuries of revolt, persecution and conversion gradually reduced a once-large population to a small remnant.
Yehoshua has three children. His two sons married Jewish women, while his daughter married a Samaritan. All their children are counted as members of the community.
Yehoshua spoke excitedly of 10 women in the community who are currently pregnant, a remarkable figure for a population of fewer than 1,000.
A synagogue without grandeur
From Yehoshua’s home, the tour continued to the synagogue on the same street where most of the Holon community lives. In accordance with Samaritan custom, visitors removed their shoes before entering.
A blue sign erected by the Society for Preservation of Israel Heritage Sites (SPIHS) in the courtyard records that the community had dwindled to only 105 people by 1910. Decades later, Israel’s second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a scholar of Samaritan heritage, helped establish a permanent neighborhood for Samaritan families scattered across central Israel. He also laid the synagogue’s foundation stone.
Inside is one large, simply furnished, carpeted prayer hall. All worshippers dress entirely in white.
“This way, everyone is equal,” Yehoshua explained. “There is no distinction between the rich and the poor.”
Most worshipers sit on the floor, with only a few chairs for those who need them. There is no separate women’s section, nor is a minyan (quorum) of 10 men required for communal prayer to take place.
The simplicity is deliberate. A place of prayer, Yehoshua said, need not be grand. At the front stands the ark containing the Torah scrolls.
The Samaritans recognize Moses as the only true prophet and the Torah as the sole divinely revealed scripture. Their Torah scrolls and prayer books are written in the Samaritan script, descended from the ancient Hebrew alphabet, and the text is chanted in Samaritan Hebrew.
Until recently, producing a new prayer book meant copying it by hand in the ancient script, a process that could take months. Yehoshua’s son developed an application that allows the prayers to be typed and printed in Samaritan characters.
Unlike Jewish bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, which take place at age 13 for boys and age 12 for girls, the Samaritan ceremony marks not a particular age but the completion of an important achievement: reading the entire Pentateuch. Beginning at the age of four or five, children study with a hakham or priest, learning Samaritan traditions and beliefs and mastering the ancient Hebrew script and distinctive pronunciation. They may complete the process anywhere between the ages of six and 10.
The community particularly reveres the Abisha Scroll on Mount Gerizim, which Samaritan tradition attributes to the great-grandson of Aaron. According to Yehoshua, the scroll is 3,700 years old, although scholars dispute that traditional dating. It nevertheless occupies a central place in Samaritan religious memory.
The community has no rabbis. Religious authority rests with the kohanim (priests), headed by the high priest on Mount Gerizim, who oversee the calendar and life-cycle observances such as circumcision, marriage and death.
A fast while Israel goes to work
This year, Samaritan Yom Kippur falls on an ordinary working day for the rest of Israel. It is an exceptionally rigorous fast for the community. Except for those whose health would be endangered, everyone fasts, from children who have been weaned to the elderly. Much of the day is spent in the synagogue in prolonged communal prayer, prostration, confession and chanting from the Torah.
Occasionally, Yehoshua noted, the Jewish and Samaritan calendars align. They did on Saturday, Oct. 6, 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched the attack that began the Yom Kippur War.
Fewer than 1,000, but growing
With fewer than 1,000 members, finding a partner within the community can be difficult. Generations of marriage within a small number of extended families have increased the community’s risk of inherited disorders, making genetic counseling and screening increasingly important. The community has also permitted some Samaritan men to marry women from outside the faith, including several from Ukraine who agreed to adopt Samaritan religious practices and make their lives within the community.
But Yehoshua rejected the idea that the community’s members can be defined only by those challenges.
“Everyone has his own challenges, just as they do everywhere else in the country,” he said. “For one person, the most important thing is to marry a Samaritan woman, and quickly. Another is in no hurry to marry, even if the woman is not from the community. One wants a right-wing government, and another wants the opposite. We are no different from any other community.”
The ancient script, priesthood and religious calendar set the Samaritans apart. In most other respects, Yehoshua insisted, they are ordinary Israelis with different jobs, opinions and ambitions.
They will simply build their sukkot a month later.
