Which calendar does memory live in?

Today, 9 November, two Jewish days fall on the same date. One is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom of the night of 9 to 10 November 1938. The other is Sigd, the festival of Ethiopian Jews, which always falls on 29 Cheshvan and this year lands on 9 November. They meet only now and then. The last time was 1988, the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the next will be 2045.

The coincidence is not what interests me. What does interest me is that one of them stays put and the other moves. Kristallnacht is remembered by the civil calendar, so it comes back on 9 November every year. Sigd is kept by the Hebrew calendar, so its civil date wanders (last year it was 20 November, next year it will be 29 November). Every memory lives in some calendar, and which one it lives in says something about what the memory is for.

The date of Kristallnacht was not an accident. On the evening of 9 November 1938 the Nazi leadership was gathered in Munich for its annual commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed coup of 1923. News came that Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat shot in Paris two days earlier, had died. Goebbels gave a speech, and the pogrom followed through the night. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nazis destroyed more than 1,400 synagogues and vandalised thousands of Jewish-owned stores and businesses, hundreds of Jewish people died during Kristallnacht and its aftermath, and about 26,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps.

So the night was set by a commemoration, and it was someone else’s. By the Hebrew calendar it was 15 to 16 Cheshvan 5699, but that is not how it is remembered. It is remembered as 9 November, the date it carries in the calendar of the country where it happened.

That calendar keeps a crowded shelf. On 9 November 1918 a German republic was proclaimed. Hitler’s putsch collapsed on 9 November 1923, the republic’s fifth anniversary. On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall opened. When Germany chose a national day after reunification, 9 November was a natural candidate, and it was passed over for 3 October. As the historian Katja Hoyer put it, “The darker aspects of 9 November in German history were regarded as too problematic.” A civil date is shared with everything else that ever happened on it.

Sigd’s date works differently. It is counted. It falls on the fiftieth day, counting from Yom Kippur, the way Shavuot is the fiftieth day counted from Pesach. Its name is Ge’ez for prostration.

In Ethiopia the community fasted and climbed to a high place behind the kessim, the priests, who carried the Orit, the Torah in Ge’ez. They read from it, and from the Book of Nehemiah. The scene in Nehemiah is close to the festival itself. The people gather fasting. They read from the Torah for a quarter of the day, confess and bow down. Then they put a pledge in writing and seal it. After the reading on the mountain, the community came down, broke the fast and celebrated.

Since 2008 Sigd has been an Israeli state holiday, and the central gathering in Jerusalem is now held on the Armon Hanatziv promenade, looking out over the city. It isn’t only in Jerusalem. One year, in Rehovot, I saw a Sigd procession passing under my window.

A day of renewing the covenant belongs fifty days after the day of atonement, wherever the civil calendar happens to put it.

The Shoah as a whole is remembered in both calendars. In 1951 the Knesset set Yom HaShoah on 27 Nisan, a Hebrew date: after the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising at Pesach, and inside the Omer, a traditional season of mourning. In 2005 the United Nations chose 27 January, the day Auschwitz was liberated in 1945. One date places the catastrophe in the Jewish year. The other places it in the world’s.

Neither is wrong. They answer different questions. A civil date tells you when something happened. A Hebrew date tells you what it belongs to.

Kristallnacht kept only the first kind of date. Perhaps that fits. The night was timed by its perpetrators, around their own anniversary, and the date it left behind is a fact about them as much as about the people they attacked.

Today the two calendars agree, and only for part of the day. Ethiopian Israelis are gathering in Jerusalem to fast, read and renew a covenant, on a day their tradition counted from Yom Kippur. By nightfall Sigd is over: in the Hebrew reckoning the evening already belongs to Rosh Chodesh Kislev. This evening is the anniversary of a night whose date was chosen in Munich.

One memory was handed to us by the people who burned the synagogues. The other was kept, counted and carried to Jerusalem by the community that observed it. It is worth noticing, on the one day they share, that only one of them was ours to date.