The Day of Atonement, which falls tomorrow, is the most solemn day in the Jewish Calendar. On this day the Jew withdraws from the moil and toil of daily life and, freed from the stress of worldly cares, devotes himself to a retrospect of his life in the past year, to self-examination which leads him not only to an acknowledgment of his wrongdoing, but to repentance and to a desire to return to the path of righteousness. The Day is spent in fasting and prayer; fasting, which brings home to the Jews the weakness of the flesh, and with it a contrition of spirit and a realization of man's dependence on Divine help, and prayer, for forgiveness of past sins, and for the strength and Divine help to return to a nobler life, and to an 'at-one-ment' with God and with one's fellow-man.
Rabbi Hertz, who broadcasts on this occasion, is one of the best-known Jews in the whole of that cosmopolitan race. Born in Czecho-Slovakia, he went as a child to New York, worked in South Africa from 1898 to 1911, returned to New York in 1912, and succeeded Dr. Adler as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire in 1913.