Today’s question is the following:

Hello, thank you for your help.
I’ like to honor a friend who I met fifty years ago when she had the day off from school for a Jewish Holiday back in 1969. I’d like to do something on that anniversary. I’m just not sure of the date. I remember that it was Autmn and either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur in 1969. Do you know which Jewish holiday would have been observed by a public school, and what that date would have been? Thank you!

I can only answer this based on an educated guess as I have not been in education for many, many years but the only holiday I have ever seen that has always been allowed to take time away from school and work is Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur would have fallen on the 22nd of September in 1969. Researching the question I decided to ask around people I knew and it seems in the United States it is common as well for schools to close on Rosh Hashanah but I have never noticed this in the United Kingdom.

So to answer this question I would go with Yom Kippur simply from my own experience.