Custom, Not Law, and Who Actually Wears It

Nothing in Jewish law requires a kittel. It is minhag, custom, recorded in the glosses to the codes as the practice of Ashkenazi communities rather than as an obligation, and the variation between communities is correspondingly wide and entirely legitimate.

In most Ashkenazi practice only married men wear it, so that putting one on for the first time belongs with the wedding. In some communities of German origin every adult male wears one from bar mitzvah. In parts of the Hasidic world only the prayer leader and the rebbe wear it, or the custom attaches to particular occasions rather than to particular people. Sephardi and Mizrahi communities generally do not use it at all, and their Yom Kippur is not less solemn for that. Women do not wear it in traditional practice, and where liberal communities have extended it the extension is recent and locally decided.

The Passover use is the most striking, because it puts the shroud in the middle of the festival of liberation. Explanations offered include the leader's role as a figure of honour, the seder night as another occasion of judgement, and a deliberate holding together of freedom and mortality in one evening. As with most well-established customs, the practice is older and more secure than any of the reasons given for it.