Rosh Hashana 5787 falls on 11–13 September 2026, and tens of thousands of Breslov Hasidim will travel to the tomb of Rabbi Nachman in Uman for it. This year the festival runs straight into a Shabbat, which turns the whole journey into one hard deadline. Uman148 has driven pilgrims door to door since 2019 — from any airport, border crossing or train station, with Hebrew-speaking drivers and no payment until you ride.
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Rosh Hashana 5787 begins at sundown on Friday 11 September 2026 and ends at nightfall on Sunday 13 September 2026. The two days of the festival, 1 and 2 Tishrei, fall on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September.
The detail that matters for travel is that the first day falls on Shabbat. Friday night and Saturday are Shabbat and Yom Tov at once; Saturday night and Sunday are the second day of the festival. There is no ordinary weekday in between.
It changes the festival itself in one visible way: when the first day of Rosh Hashana falls on Shabbat the shofar is not sounded that day. In 2026 it is sounded on Sunday, the second day, only. It also means the meals for Friday night and all of Saturday have to be ready before candle-lighting on Friday, which concentrates a great deal of preparation into that one afternoon.
The result is a single unbroken stretch of roughly forty-eight hours in which observant travellers will not drive, be driven, handle money or move luggage — from sundown on Friday straight through to nightfall on Sunday. Nothing reopens in the middle of it.
So the deadline is sundown on Friday 11 September, and it is absolute. A border queue that runs four hours longer than expected has no remedy at that point: the journey stops wherever it happens to be. Arriving on the Friday itself is how this trip goes wrong, every year, for someone.
In Uman, candle-lighting on Friday 11 September is around 19:02, with sunset at about 19:21. Everything has to be done by then: arrival, unpacking, the mikveh, a first visit to the tziyun. The festival ends on Sunday evening somewhere after 20:00 — the exact reckoning varies by custom, and half an hour matters when coaches are being scheduled.
Plan to reach Uman on Thursday 10 September. That gives a full day of margin for the border, which is the least predictable part of the route and is at its worst in exactly these days.
Times here are for planning transfers and are approximate: they are calculated for Uman, and candle-lighting and nightfall both follow customs that differ by community. Follow local practice in Uman, and your own rabbi, over anything on this page.
Tens of thousands of men gather at Rabbi Nachman's grave for the two days. In 2025 Ukraine's State Border Guard Service told AFP that more than thirty-five thousand pilgrims entered the country for the festival; a town of about eighty thousand people takes on close to half its population again.
Practically, that means accommodation in Uman is booked far ahead and priced accordingly, the streets around the site are closed to ordinary traffic, and a driver cannot simply pull up at the door. Ask your host where a vehicle can actually reach, and expect the last stretch on foot with your luggage.
Ukrainian airspace has been closed to civil aviation since February 2022, so nobody flies in. Pilgrims fly to a neighbouring country and continue overland — most often through Poland, Moldova or Romania.
From Chișinău the drive is around six to eight hours; from Rzeszów nine to eleven; from Warsaw or Budapest fourteen and up. The border crossing sits on top of that and is the variable: a queue that runs twenty minutes in an ordinary week can run many hours in the days before the festival.
Book the road part early. The two days before Rosh Hashana are the busiest of our year, and by the final week the cars that are left are the ones nobody wanted.