NEW YORK
: At dawn on Wednesday, some devout Jews around the world began observing a ritual that comes around only once every 28 years.

The Birkat Hachamah, or Blessing of the Sun, marks the moment, according to some rabbinical scholars, when the sun returns to the spot in the sky it occupied during creation.

In hundreds of places, from Israel and Italy to New Zealand
and Kyrgyzstan, observant Jews planned to rise before dawn for outdoor prayers and dancing.

In New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, Rabbi Chaim Dovrat said it was a “re-staging of the heavens as they were at the beginning of time.” Dovrat led the rare blessing at the city’s Webb Street Synagogue at 7:45 a.m. local time, about an hour after sunrise.

It was a “special celebration” as New Zealand’s 7,500 Jews were the first in the world to give the blessing, he said.

In Greenwich, Connecticut, Jen Sonenklare said she is taking her children to a beach ceremony in their pajamas.

“This is the first time I’ve ever heard of this holiday,” said Sonenklare, whose husband is Catholic. “If you want to give your kids a religious identity, this’ll give them something fun to remember.”

In Manhattan, a rabbi was to lead a gathering at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) near the United Nations. Another group was to pray on the deck of a 17th-story penthouse near ground zero, the site of the demolished World Trade Center. A Birkat Hachamah ceremony in 1981 was held on the 107th-story observation deck of the World Trade Center’s South Tower, and the rabbi is dedicating Wednesday’s blessing to the memory of those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Organizers of a ceremony on the boardwalk in Long Beach, New York, on Long Island, said they would distribute sunglasses to worshippers. But they might go unused; the forecast was for a cloudy morning.

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement scheduled live Webcasts from seven locations as the sun moves across the Earth, starting at 8 a.m. local time in Christchurch, New Zealand, followed by events in Brisbane, Australia; Jerusalem; London; New York; Colorado Springs, Colo.; and Honolulu.

In Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt, Germany, some of about 3,500 Jews in the town _ mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union _ were to mark Birkat Hachamah in front of their synagogue.
“For some, it’ll be the first time _ and the last time,” said Rabbi Menachem M. Gurewitz of the elderly members of his congregation.

Devout Jews emphasize that they are not worshipping the sun, but rather paying homage to God. “The blessing is an affirmation of God, not as creator, but as the power that keeps the universe in existence,” said Rabbi J. David Bleich, an expert on the holiday who wrote a book on the subject. “God didn’t just create the universe, then go on an eternal sabbatical. He’s like a generator of electricity: If it doesn’t keep on working, the lights go out.”

The relatively obscure tradition holds that on Wednesday, the sun will be where it was on the fourth day of creation. It takes 28 years for the sun to reach that same position again on the same day of the week at the same hour.

An especially colorful ceremony was reported by The New York Times in 1897, when a rabbi was arrested for presiding over the ritual as hundreds of Jews assembled without a permit in a city park. He and another rabbi tried to explain what they were doing to a police officer.

“The attempt of a foreign citizen to explain to an American Irishman an astronomical situation and a tradition of the Talmud was a dismal failure,” the Times reported, adding that the officer, wondering “whether some new infection of lunacy had broken out … seized the rabbi by the neck and took him to Essex Market Police Court.”