When does Hanukkah begin in 2012?

I made this cd with pianist Aviva Enoch in September 2010 - you can buy "I Can't Complain" from Skylark Productions -

Here's a free mp3 sample, click: Zing, Brider, Zing - Jane Peppler and Aviva Enoch!

There's a companion songbook, with quite a few extra songs for more fun: The I Can't Complain Yiddish Songbook at Amazon's Createspace.

If you don't read Yiddish, you can visit our site, Yiddish Music in North Carolina, and see what the dog and chickens are saying.

The Hebrew calendar is a lunar, but also a solar, calendar. It is not for us mere mortals to know how it's set up. We just buy a calendar or ask our rabbi or look it up in the internet. But if you're really smart, or a glutton for punishment, here you go:

The Jewish calendar is a lunisolar calendar, or "fixed lunar year," based on twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days, with an intercalary lunar month added seven times every nineteen years (once every two to three years) to synchronize the twelve lunar cycles with the slightly longer solar year.

Each Jewish lunar month starts with the new moon. Although originally the new lunar crescent had to be observed and certified by witnesses, the timing of the new moon is now determined mathematically.

Concurrently there is a weekly cycle of seven days, mirroring the seven-day period of the Book of Genesis in which the world is created. The names for the days of the week, like those in the Creation story, are simply the day number within the week, with Shabbat being the seventh day.

The Jewish day always runs from sunset to the next sunset; the formal adjustments used to specify a standard time and time zones are not relevant to the Jewish calendar.

The twelve regular months are: Nisan (30 days), Iyar (29 days), Sivan (30 days), Tammuz (29 days), Av (30 days), Elul (29 days), Tishrei (30 days), Cheshvan (29 or 30 days), Kislev (29 or 30 days), Tevet (29 days), Shevat (30 days), and Adar (29 days). In the leap years an additional month, Adar I (30 days) is added after Shevat, and the regular Adar is referred to as "Adar II".

The first month of the festival year is Nisan. 15 Nisan is the start of the festival of Pesach, corresponding to the full moon of Nisan. Pesach is a spring festival associated with the barley harvest,[3] so the leap-month mentioned above is intercalated periodically to keep this festival in the northern hemisphere's spring season. Since the adoption of a fixed calendar, intercalations in the Hebrew calendar have been at fixed points in a 19-year cycle. Prior to this, the intercalation was determined empirically:

The year may be intercalated on three grounds: 'aviv [i.e.the ripeness of barley], fruits of trees, and the equinox. On two of these grounds it should be intercalated, but not on one of them alone.[4]

The Bible designates Nisan, which it calls Aviv (Exodus 13:4), as the first month of the year (Exodus 12:2). At the same time, the season of the fall Festival of Booths (Sukkoth), is called "the end of the year" (Exodus 23:16). The Sabbatical year in which the land was to lie fallow, necessarily began at the time the winter barley and winter wheat would have been sown, in the fall. The Gezer calendar, an Israelite or Canaanite inscription ca. 900 BCE, also begins in the fall.

Modern practice follows the scheme described in the Mishnah: Rosh Hashanah, which means "the head of the year", and is celebrated in the month of Tishrei, is "the new year for years." This is when the numbered year changes, and most Jews today view Tishrei as the de facto beginning of the year. The 15th of Shevat, the New Year of the Trees, has become a popular minor holiday in recent decades.

Hebrew date converter

At that site, you plug in the date from the regular calendar and the site will give you the date as it would appear in the Hebrew calendar.