An animal horn sounded on Rosh Hashana and other occasions.
A shofar is an animal horn (usually that of a ram, although other animals may be used, except cows) sounded on Rosh Hashana and other occasions, such as at the end of Yom Kippur, festivities such as Israeli Independence Day and Jerusalem Day, and during wartime.
There are various laws concerning the making of a shofar and the proper ways to play it. Typically, there are three types of blasts that are sounded:
- Tekiah (תקיעה) is a single long blast of the shofar.
- Shevarim (שברים) is composed of three connected short sounds.
- Teruah (תרועה) - in most Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions, this is a string of many short-lived, broken blasts made by the tongue (e.g. tut-tut-tut-tut, etc.). In the Yemenite, Tunisian and Babylonian Jewish communities as well as many Western Ashkenazi communities, it is a single long, reverberating blast.
At certain times, extended versions of the Tekiah (Tekiah Gedolah) and the Teruah (Teruah Gedolah) are used by different communities.
