HaMakom yenachem etchem
Also called HaMakom yenachem etchem b'toch sh'ar avelei Tzion v'Yerushalayim, Hamakom yenachem, May the Omnipresent comfort you.
The sentence said to a mourner, in the house of mourning and at the graveside: may the Omnipresent comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. It is what a visitor says rather than what the bereaved say, and in many communities it is the only thing said, because the custom is that the mourner speaks first.
It is said on leaving, not on arriving, and it is the visitor's line rather than the mourner's. The custom that governs the whole visit is that the mourner opens the conversation: a visitor who walks in and starts talking has taken something from the person they came for. So the sentence tends to arrive at the end, often as the only thing said aloud in the room.
The Omnipresent is a translation of HaMakom, literally the Place, a name for God used here rather than any of the others. Commentators have long read the choice as the point of the sentence: the mourner is being told that God is present in the room they are sitting in, which is the one claim a comforter can make without explaining the death.
Among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem sets this death beside a much older grief and puts the bereaved in company rather than alone. Many communities have adjusted the wording in recent generations, to address one mourner rather than several, or to say it in English, and the forms differ between them.
What matters most about the phrase is not in the words at all. A visitor who says nothing, sits down, and stays is doing the thing correctly. The sentence exists so that a person who cannot find words is not required to find any.
Why the words are not here
No public-domain edition of it has been found, and this was searched rather than assumed. The 1904 seventh edition of Singer's prayer book, which is the public-domain siddur this site already uses, does not contain it under any of its English openings: it has a prayer asking consolation for mourners in the burial service, and the Tisha B'Av insertion naming the mourners of Zion, and neither is this sentence. The digitised texts that do carry it are a prayer book published in 2017, which is in copyright, and a 1928 Lemberg volume whose rights the holding library does not state. The words themselves are old and nobody owns them; what is missing is an edition this site can name and a second witness to check it against.
Every text on this site names the edition it came from and was checked against it twice. A prayer nobody can cite an edition for does not get printed here, however well known it is. The verification record lists what was held back and why, and how rights are established explains the test.
What we do hold
When is this prayer said?
The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.
Which tradition is this prayer from?
This page describes a prayer and, where we hold one, prints a named edition of it. It does not tell you whether to say it, or when. That judgment belongs to someone credentialed in the tradition, and nobody has signed anything here.
Content last changed 20 September 2026. Dates come from this page’s own revision history, not from the last time the site was deployed.