This mahzor, as the prayer book for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is known, is the Conservative movement’s first updating in nearly 40 years. Called Lev Shalem, Hebrew for “whole heart,” it hews close to the text’s traditional Hebrew, but adds translations, commentaries and optional readings to adapt the book to modern sensibilities.

Image Text from the revised mahzor, as the prayer book for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is known. Credit... Matthew Cavanaugh for The New York Times

The writing was partly driven by an awareness that Jews who come to synagogue on the High Holy Days may not be as knowledgeable as weekly synagogue-goers and may be more ambivalent about their faith. It also includes transliterations of every widely sung prayer for those who cannot read Hebrew.

“It went a long way toward meeting people where they actually are,” said Rabbi Gordon Tucker of Temple Israel in White Plains, N.Y.

He added, “The richness of the margins in this mahzor spoke to them.”

During Yom Kippur’s Yizkor memorial for dead relatives, which this year falls on Saturday, the new prayer book will for the first time include a prayer for a deceased “partner” an effort to include gay Jews  and also one for “a parent who was hurtful.”

“His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and dismay,” the passage says.

The revised mahzor includes works by modern poets like Yehuda Amichai and at least two by Gentiles Denise Levertov and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Given that the movement has become more egalitarian, ordaining women as rabbis since 1985, the mahzor also includes more language that is gender-neutral and names female Biblical figures like Hannah and Miriam as models of righteous heroism.