The Kaddish
Also called Mourner's Kaddish, Kaddish Yatom.
An Aramaic praise of God's name that marks the joints of every Jewish service, and that mourners recite.
The Kaddish is a doxology in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and it praises and magnifies God's name. It appears several times in every service, where its function is structural: it closes one section and opens the next.
Its best-known form is the Mourner's Kaddish, and the fact most often noted about it is that it contains no reference to death at all. Mourners recite it through the mourning period, traditionally eleven months for a parent, and then on each yahrzeit, the anniversary of the death.
It requires a minyan, the quorum of ten, which makes saying it a communal act by design: a mourner cannot say it alone. Who may recite it, and for how long, differs between movements and communities.
Why the words are not here
It is in Singer's prayer book, whose 1904 seventh edition lists the Mourner's Kaddish in its contents, and that volume is public domain. Two things keep it off the page. The Aramaic cannot be read from the scan, whose text layer was produced as English, so the facing page came out as noise and survives only as an image. And it is said only with a quorum of ten, which is the kind of condition on saying a prayer that this site leaves to a reviewer. Every modern siddur edition is in copyright.
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 15 October 2026. Dates come from this page’s own revision history, not from the last time the site was deployed.