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
Same obstacle as the other liturgical texts here. The Aramaic and its facing English appear in Singer's 1890 prayer book, which is public domain, but that volume has not been transcribed. 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 people look for this
The moments this prayer is associated with. Each page carries cited guidance on how different traditions meet that moment.
Where it belongs
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.