However, most communities have done the official Omer counts only in Hebrew and have not documented how they spoke about it informally. In these cases, the scholars and native speakers we reached out to have translated the count.

The process of translation from Hebrew came naturally for contemporary languages, such as Jewish French and Jewish Latin American Spanish. For extinct languages, such as Judeo-Provençal and Judeo-Catalan, scholars felt the translation process was more artificial - an act of reconstruction by piecing words together from various written sources.

When chronicling the diversity of Jewish languages, it is important to include signed languages, used by Deaf Jews around the world. Our counter includes three of those: Israeli Sign Language, Jewish American Sign Language, and the endangered Algerian Jewish Sign Language, originally from Ghardaia, Algeria, but now used almost exclusively in Israel.

Because of migration, nationalist language policies, and genocide, a large percentage of the languages in our Omer counter are currently endangered. For example, Judeo-Esfahani, Judeo-Kermani, and Lishan Didan are spoken primarily by elderly Jews who moved from Iran to Israel and the United States and have not passed their languages on to their children. Including these languages here helps to raise awareness about them while there’s still time to learn from native speakers.

We hope you find the multilingual Omer counter as enriching as we do, and we encourage you to share it with others. Counts were posted daily on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and archived on our website. We also posted daily short videos on YouTube and TikTok. Check out the full poster of all 49 days of the Omer below and at our RedBubble shop too, and check out the article about our work at the JTA. Happy counting!